Profile -- Week 3
Gabrielle Kirk McDonald
 Gabrielle Kirk McDonald's distinguished career
has spanned the globe. She has served as a civil rights lawyer,
a law professor, a federal judge, and the president for the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In all these roles
McDonald has shown a passion for justice and has used the rule
of law to combat injustice. As she has explained, "I believe in
the rule of law not just intellectually. It's visceral for me.
It's in my heart and soul…it's what protects people from anarchy."
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1942, McDonald was raised in Manhattan
and Teaneck, New Jersey. She attended Boston University (1959-1961)
and Hunter College (1961-1963), and then, without the benefit
of an undergraduate degree, enrolled in Howard University School
of Law, where she finished first in the class of 1966. She applied
only to Howard because she wanted to go to the law school that
had been the cradle of the civil rights movement. As she has said,
"I never wanted to be a lawyer; I wanted to be a civil rights
lawyer."
On graduating, McDonald began her career as a staff lawyer for
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She worked in Alabama,
Mississippi, Georgia and Texas to assist litigants and local lawyers
with school desegregation, housing, and voting rights cases. She
also worked on some of the first employment discrimination cases
under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From 1969 to 1979 she was in private practice in Houston, where
she specialized in employment discrimination cases. One of her
frequent opponents in court, a management-side defense lawyer,
said of her, "She must be the best in the South, if not better."
In 1979, McDonald was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to
serve on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of
Texas. She was the first African American to be appointed in Texas
and just the third African-American woman federal judge in the
United States. While on the bench she presided over a major case
in which Vietnamese fishermen sued to protect their rights against
the harassment of the Ku Klux Klan. Ignoring death threats, her
decision supported the fishermen's suit and led to the closing
of KKK paramilitary camps.
McDonald resigned from the court in 1988 to resume private practice
and the teaching of law. During her earlier years in private practice
she had taught law, primarily at Thurgood Marshall School of Law
at Texas Southern University, and also at the University of Texas
School of Law in Austin and at St. Mary's School of Law in San
Antonio. After leaving the bench, she resumed her career at Thurgood
Marshall and St. Mary's.
In 1993, McDonald agreed to stand as the U.S. candidate for a
judgeship on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia. The U.N. General Assembly considered 22 candidates
for 11 positions. McDonald received the highest number of votes,
becoming the sole American on the court and one of only two women.
The mission of the tribunal was to seek justice for victims of
ethnic and religious persecution, especially in Croatia and Bosnia.
Judge McDonald presided over the first full war crimes trial of
the tribunal, which was the first one conducted since Nuremberg
after World War II. The work of the court helped create a body
of law that could be the legal foundation for other war crimes
tribunals. In McDonald's view, her work on the tribunal was ultimately
about healing. "Without justice," she has said, "there can be
no lasting peace."
In May 1997, McDonald was re-elected for a second term on the
tribunal, and in November of that year was nominated and endorsed
by the judges on the court as its president and presiding judge
for the next two years. When she left the court at the expiration
of her term, it had become a fully functioning institution that
had developed what is essentially a code of international criminal
procedure. After leaving the court, McDonald became Special Counsel
to the Chairman on Human Rights for the international mining firm
of Freeport-McMorRan Copper & Gold, Inc.
When McDonald entered law school, there were only 142 African-American
women lawyers in the entire United States. Through her illustrious
career as a lawyer, teacher, and judge, she has inspired countless
young people to follow in the paths she has blazed. McDonald has
received numerous honorary degrees from institutions such as Georgetown
University, the University of Notre Dame, and Amherst College.
She has also received the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement
Award from the American Bar Association.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright summed up McDonald's
remarkable career when presenting her with the Leadership Award
from the Central Eastern European Law Initiative: Gabrielle Kirk
McDonald, she said, "…was one of the pioneer civil rights litigators
in our country. And she has since become a pioneer justice of
international war crimes law…. I am confident that she will continue
to be a voice for justice wherever she goes."
Photo Usage:
Permission to use the above photo was granted by the ABA Journal;
photo credit: Chip Williams.
Black History Month 2003
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