"Mary Dunlap Led From the Start"

The Boalt alumnus, feminist attorney and Equal Rights Advocates founder dies after a life of breaking rules.

By John Roemer
San Francisco Daily Journal
Thursday January 23, 2003

In 1989, Mary C. Dunlap, fighting for tenure for professor Eleanor Swift, went directly from a Boalt Hall rally for the popular law school teacher to a negotiating session with the university's lawyers.

Dunlap, who was 54 when she died Friday of pancreatic cancer and for whom a memorial service is pending, confronted opposing counsel wearing a button that colleagues say not only defined her client's demand but also summed up a lifetime of feminist and gay civil rights advocacy.

"Bring Swift Justice," it read.

Indeed, the professor got her tenured post just a year after filing a grievance-blinding speed in academia. Built into the settlement agreement was a tenure review provision that ended discriminatory treatment of female faculty at Boalt, according to Dunlap's co-counsel, Charlotte Fishman of San Francisco.

"She had a broad, inclusive vision of the world," Fishman said Wednesday. "She was the world's best legal colleague. She brought an antic presence and a sense of theater to a wide range of glass-ceiling cases."

John Crew, a San Francisco lawyer who knew her well, marveled at Dunlap's smart volubility.

"She was incredibly bright, and you got the impression her brain was in a different gear, a different speed," he said. "She was the civil rights equivalent of Robin Williams."

A painful past set Dunlap on her course. She was abused as a child, she told the Daily Journal in a 2001 interview, and the experience influenced her career choice.

"I came from a family that caused me to be particularly attuned to the suffering of other people," she said. "Among other things, I learned a tireless commitment to justice, from the perspective of someone who survived injustice."

Swift agreed that Dunlap was passionate about furthering the aims of social justice.

"She was an extremely creative legal strategist deeply committed to clients as people, not just as legal problems," Swift recalled Wednesday. "She cared very much about the ethics of her role."

At her death, Dunlap was director of the Office of Citizen Complaints, the city's independent police watchdog agency. She was an out lesbian who had twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, taught at Bay Area law schools and was a founder of the pioneer feminist law firm Equal Rights Advocates. That San Francisco nonprofit organization litigates gender discrimination, family and sexual harassment cases on behalf of female clients.

One of her cases before the high court was an unsuccessful bid for a sports group's right to use the term "Gay Olympics." San Francisco Arts & Athletics Inc. v. U.S. Olympic Committee, 483 U.S. 522 (1987).

After 20 years of practicing and teaching, Dunlap switched gears, retreating to a serene studio to paint watercolors of landscapes and animals. She wrote an unpublished memoir, "Fighting Words, Mending Words." She spent time with her partner, non-practicing attorney Maureen Mason, an Internet consultant.

In her last months Dunlap wrote a final chapter entitled "Everything I Know About Cancer I Learned From My Dog," Mason said Wednesday, referring to the couple's Gordon setter, Eureka.

"She meant when to fight, when to let go, things like that," Mason added. Now friends are asking her to edit the work for publication. "I'd so much rather have Mary than her book," Mason said.

In 1996, the mayor called.

Willie Brown's controversial appointment put Dunlap in charge of the OCC. Former prosecutors or law enforcement brass traditionally had held the job of investigating public claims of police misconduct.

Putting a brash, politically outspoken civil rights lawyer in charge was a risk, according to Crew, a veteran police practices specialist formerly with the American Civil Liberties Union.

"She took an enormous amount of fire from those who did not want the OCC to succeed," he said. "She had the personal strength to put up with that for seven years, and it was the best test you could want of her commitment to justice."

Dunlap was uncompromising.

"Am I a committed advocate of overcoming police misconduct?" she said in the Daily Journal interview. "I hope so. Some might say that's a political statement. So if the complaint is that the OCC director should never have a voice or an expression or assert a position about a policing matter, then that person wants vanilla ice cream. They'll have to get it somewhere else."

To clear a backlog of tough cases, Dunlap hired as a senior trial attorney Diane Chin, currently the executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action.

Chin said that Dunlap's background with nonprofits helped her reemphasize the OCC's public service component.

"When we'd review the hard cases, her analysis would include a large measure of fairness," Chin said. "She saw the perspective of the complainant and she understood the complexities of police culture. She walked the line."

Dunlap summed up the stresses of the job with characteristic asperity.

The OCC, she wrote in a 2000 essay, "is regularly attacked by numerous police union representatives, civilian critics, political intermeddlers, embarrassed or vindictive officers, and an array of journalists, for moving too slowly, moving too quickly, not completing investigations rapidly enough, not being thorough enough, not being progressive enough, being too progressive, sustaining cases, not sustaining cases, and so on.

"What is most important is to keep basic principles foremost, and forego popularity or efforts to please others; if we are unimpeachably fair, doggedly thorough, and enthusiastically open and responsive to valid, good faith criticism and self-examination, then the rest be damned."

Dunlap had practice in facing down critics, including Chief Justice Warren Burger. At 28, she argued her first case before the high court, representing Sonja Berg, a pregnant teacher from Pinole who disputed an order to begin maternity leave earlier than she wished.

"Sonja Berg was the sole support of her family," Dunlap began her oral argument, which Burger at once interrupted.

"Does that make any difference in this case?" he demanded.

Recalled Dunlap: "I looked at him and said, 'Mr. Chief Justice, it made a great difference to Mrs. Berg.' He didn't ask me any questions after that." Berg v. Richmond Unified School District, 434 U.S. 158 (1977).

The case was on remand to the trial court when Congress amended the law to prohibit compulsory maternity leave.

Nancy Davis, a longtime friend who is to be sworn in today as a San Francisco Superior Court Judge, recalled how she and Dunlap brought feminism to Boalt Hall in 1969 when they were students.

"There were still statutes that required spaces in public buildings for women to lie down when they were indisposed on a monthly basis," Davis said Wednesday. "We considered it a silly, protectionist rule. We wanted an office for our new Boalt Hall Women's Association, but we were told there was no space for us. So, with the help of a custodian named Andy, Mary and liberated the women's room, put in a phone and institutionalized the place."

While still at Boalt, Dunlap, Davis and Wendy W. Williams planned the formation of Equal Rights Advocates. Williams now is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. They were joined by a fourth founding member, Joan Messing Graff, currently president of the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco.

"They came to me and said they wanted to start a women's rights law firm," said former Boalt dean Herma Hill Kay, who was their faculty advisor. "They were very active. They wrote pamphlets about how women should come to law school and got them passed out all around the country. They got me to teach a course on sex discrimination that became a casebook.

"There's no question they were among the first wave of feminist lawyers, those who wanted to use the law to improve the status of women."

Dunlap was raised in Napa County in a family of lawyers who practiced at Coombs & Dunlap of Napa.

W. Scott Snowden, currently the presiding judge of the Napa County Superior count, was Dunlap's classmate at Boalt Hall and remained an admirer.

"She was brilliant," he said Wednesday. "She had an incisive intelligence. I can see her still, standing there, taking on Boalt professors, intellectually head-to-head with all of them. I was said she didn't stay here, but she had a greater destiny. It was clear she was on a skyrocket to the top."