This year’s Fordham Law Women Symposium featured a special final panel: a conversation between the original founders of Fordham Law Women and the Black Law Students Association and the student groups’ current leadership. Both groups are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, and the panel focused on the progress made since their founding and the work still left to do to bring equity to the legal profession.
The March 7 panel included alumnae Olivia Valentine ’74, the founder of BLSA, and Betty Santangelo ’74, the founder of Fordham Law Women. Valentine now works as a mediator and arbitrator, and previously worked as an attorney for the Federal Aviation Administration. Santangelo is of counsel at Schulte Roth & Zabel, where she was a partner for 25 years, focusing on white collar criminal defense and securities enforcement.
The women were in conversation with present day student leaders of the organizations they founded: Fordham Law Women President Katharine Keane ’23 and BLSA President Afrika Owes ’24.
After attending women-only institutions for college and high school, Santangelo remembered being surprised to see just a handful of other women in her Fordham Law class of 1974. “It just shocked me, knowing all the women I knew that were so smart,” she said. “Where were they? And how was it that we were the only ones that were there?”
She bonded quickly with the other women in her class, and together they decided “that a woman’s perspective was needed.” They established Fordham Law Women soon after.
Valentine, who joined the panel virtually, shared a similar story on the origins of BLSA. “We were infused with the spirit of the times,” she said, adding that BLSA “was not created in a vacuum” and was influenced by the women’s movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Power movement.
“It was felt that it was not our role to just be lawyers,” said Valentine. “We shouldn’t just pick up our diploma and go and practice. Those of us who were women felt like we had a responsibility to the women’s movement, we had a responsibility to the Black movement, and we also had a responsibility to ourselves.”
The Fordham Law Women’s annual symposium gathers leading experts and practitioners from multiple disciplines to discuss the state of the legal profession for women. Other panels during the day-long event featured discussions of reproductive rights following the repeal of Roe v. Wade and changes in defamation law in the post-Me Too era.
