Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849-1934), was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and died in Los Angeles, California. Foltz was the first woman to be a lawyer on the Pacific Coast (California, 1878). She kept extensive career scrapbooks, wrote many letters and was in the process of writing her autobiography when she died.
Articles on Clara Shortridge Foltz
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Alma Mater: Clara Foltz and Hastings College of the Law, 21 Hastings Women’s Law Journal 99 (2010)
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Inventing the Public Defender, 43 American Criminal Law Review 1267 (2006)
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Pioneer Attorney’s Feminism Ennobled Her Legal Efforts, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Volume 115, No. 27, February 8, 2002, p. 6
- Barbara Allen Babcock, A Real Revolution, University of Kansas Law Review, Volume 49, No. 4, p. 719 – 731 (May 2001).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Women Defenders in the West, 1 University of Nevada Law Journal 1 (Spring 2001).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, 150th Anniversary of the Supreme Court, 22 Official California Reports 4th 1275 – 79 (2000).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Feminist Lawyers [Book Review], 50 Stanford Law Review 1689 (1998).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, ‘Contracted’ Biographies and Other Obstacles to ‘Truth’: Commentary, 70 New York University Law Review 707 (1995).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Clara Shortridge Foltz: ‘First Woman’, 28 Valparaiso University Law Review 1231 (Summer 1994).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, She Blazed the Trail: Clara Foltz Opened a Major Door for Women in 1878, When She Became the First Female Member of the State Bar, Los Angeles Daily Journal S16 (October 7, 1993).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Remarks on the Occasion of the Publication of Called from Within: Early Women Lawyers of Hawaii [March 12, 1993], 16 Biography 3 (1993). Writing biography has its distinctly autobiographical moments — as Professor Babcock found from being on a short list of Attorney General nominees.
- Barbara Allen Babcock, A Place in the Palladium: Women’s Rights and Jury Service, 61 University of Cincinnati Law Review 1139 (1993).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Western Women Lawyers, 45 Stanford Law Review 2179 (1993). “The life I take as my example is that of the first woman to be a lawyer among all the states of the Ninth Circuit — the Portia of the Pacific — Clara Shortridge Foltz.”
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-Maker, 66 Indiana Law Journal 849 (1991). This is a book length article, with a detailed table of contents, note on documentation and numerous, rich footnotes.
- Barbara Allen Babcock, Reconstructing the Person: The Case of Clara Shortridge Foltz, 12 Biography 1 (1989).
- Barbara Allen Babcock, A Pioneering Woman Lawyer, The National Law Journal, April 25, 2011
Biographical Encyclopedia Entries:
- Clara Foltz Entry: Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law
- Clara Foltz Entry: American National Biography—volume 8
Other articles on Clara Shortridge Foltz:
- Clara Foltz, San Francisco, Cal. 1 The Law Student’s Helper 263 (October 1893).
- Mrs. Clara Shortridge Foltz, A Woman Of The Century Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in all Walks of Life, edited by Frances E. Willard, Mary A. Livermore Charles Wells Moulton (1893).