Wednesday October 27, 2021
A life he spent fighting and winning against polio, bone cancer and sexism.
The month of October is known as National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) to educate the public about the problems people with disabilities face in finding, obtaining and maintaining employment. This month, Nelson Mullins is proud to celebrate the many and varied contributions and stories of American workers with disabilities.
Retired Georgia Judge Carol Hunstein faced many obstacles in her life and legal career, starting with polio, but dealing with them directly, overcoming numerous physical challenges and old-school sexism to create a stellar legal career Making and serving as role models for young lawyers face their own challenges. Hunstein was born in Miami and survived polio and later bone cancer. After graduating from high school, she married and had a baby, but the marriage didn’t last. Then, as a single mother, her bone cancer returned. This time she cost her leg and almost her life at the young age of 24. By chance she met a man in her doctor’s office who was running a professional rehabilitation program for the hospital. He asked her if she would like to go to college and she said yes. He told her that she qualified for a program where the State of Florida would pay her tuition and books, and give her $ 20 a week for expenses. As a single mother, she supported herself and her son on the $ 20 a week and attended Miami-Dade Junior College and then Florida Atlantic University. She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. Such students are often referred to as “first generation students” because they face unique barriers while attending college, including financial problems, and studies show that 89% of first generation students eventually drop out.
Hunstein then attended Stetson University College of Law in the Tampa Bay area, where she was one of only six women in her law school class of 65 students, and she earned her JD in 1976. She married and moved in with a law school classmate and had two other children. She soon found out that law firms where they lived in DeKalb County (part of Atlanta is in DeKalb County) had absolutely no interest in hiring a lawyer, even for title research. So she hung up her clapboard and practiced solitary law for eight years, mostly in criminal defense and civil litigation.
After eight years of solo practice and increasing tiredness of being called a “little lady” by judges who called their male opponents “advisors”, Hunstein decided to run as a candidate for a higher court judge himself. She ran up against four men and made it to the runoff election. During this three-week runoff election, Hunstein first began to use the slogan: “This time this woman”. She was elected the first female judge on DeKalb County’s Superior Court and later became the first woman to be elected President of the Georgia Council of Superior Court Judges.
In 1992, Governor Zell Miller appointed Hunstein to the Georgia Supreme Court, making it only the second woman to sit on court. She was re-elected for this seat four times by the voters of Georgia. The worst of these campaigns came in 2006 when she faced a male candidate supported by a non-state group of companies seeking comprehensive crime reforms in Georgia for the benefit of the economy, a tactic that has been successful in other states. The outside group spent nearly $ 2 million to sell them off. Georgia attorneys backed her as a fair judge, however, and her campaign raised $ 1.38 million, more than double the amount ever raised for a Georgia Supreme Court candidate before voters.
In 2009, she was unanimously elected Chief Justice to replace the Court’s first female Chief Justice, Leah Ward Sears. Typically of her humility, Hunstein took a three-month hiatus as Chief Justice to allow Presiding Justice George Carley to serve as Chief Justice before retiring. Her tenure as Chief Justice ended in 2013, and she resumed her role as Associate Justice and retired in late 2018 after serving the citizens of Georgia for 34 years. Her resolute determination in the face of multiple challenges – from polio and the loss of a leg to cancer, studying law as a single mom with limited financial resources, fighting old-school sexism in legal practice, and overcoming the attempt to replace it with an external one , well-funded group of companies – made Justice Hunstein a great role model for many attorneys who have dealt with disabilities and prejudice in their own careers.
Copyright © 2021 Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLPNational Law Review, Volume XI, Number 300
