20 - The Occupation of Women Emigrés: Women Lawyers in the United States

Summary

The immigration of professionals from Nazi Germany has become a major field of research in the past ten years. It is perplexing, however, to see that the legal profession, until recently, remained by and large ignored. This is all the more astonishing given the role lawyers played in public life in Germany as well as in the United States. The majority of higher civil service positions in Germany were then, and still are, occupied by people with legal training. The role of lawyers in American public life has attained almost mystical dimensions. Between 2,000 and 4,000 lawyers from Central Europe took refuge in the Unites States, of whom approximately 10 percent managed to return to their original profession. There is a number of examples of jurists who had started promising careers in their home country and who achieved considerable fame in their country of exile, among them Otto Kahn-Freund in England and Chaim Cohn in Israel. Unmatched in numbers and achievement were refugee lawyers in the United States with names like Albert Ehrenzweig Jr., Rudolf Schlesinger, Max Rheinstein, Arthur Nussbaum, and Stefan Riesenfeld to name only a few of so many who left a lasting impact on the American legal sphere.