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Tilting at Windmills? Judge Justine Wise Polier and a History of Justice and Education in New York City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jennifer de Forest*
Affiliation:
Judge Justine Wise Polier, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Extract

Judge Justine Wise Polier

In 1935 Justine Wise Polier (1903–87), an intense young labor lawyer serving on New York City's Committee on Unemployment Relief, was pressuring Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to expand the city's welfare benefits. Thinking he would mollify her, La Guardia promoted Polier to the bench of the city's children's court, making her the first woman to rise above the position of magistrate in New York State.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 History of Education Society 

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References

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74 As of 2004, in all states except Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Mexico, and New York a juvenile judge could opt to waive jurisdiction of a case and send it to the criminal courts. See Guarino-Ghezzi, Susan and Loughran, Edward J., Balancing Juvenile Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 107109.Google Scholar

75 Streib, Victor L., Death Penalty for Juveniles (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 9.Google Scholar

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77 See Podair's The Strike that Changed New York and Perlstein's Justice, Justice for detailed accounts the way parents rejected expert-controlled education.Google Scholar

78 See the introduction to Poller's, Juvenile Justice in Double Jeopardy. Google Scholar

79 See, for example, Barry Feld's Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

80 Polier, , Juvenile Justice in Double Jeopardy, xii.Google Scholar

81 Ibid., xiv.Google Scholar

82 Ibid.,xiv.Google Scholar

83 Data are drawn from the report “Young Adults in Jail or Prison,” Child Trends available online at www.childtrendsdatabank.org.Google Scholar