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Content provided by the American Bar Association Division for Public Education. Visit the Division for Public Education's website to learn more about the law and its role in society (www.abanet.org/publiced). For more profiles of pioneers in the legal profession, visit the Division for Public Education's Raising the Bar: Pioneers in the Legal Profession website at www.abanet.org/publiced/raisingthebar.html.

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."

(Originally published in 2003)