Credo: Golden Gate Law Dean-elect Drucilla Ramey

Golden Gate Law School Dean-elect Drucilla Ramey says that justice in the abstract is blind, but that in practice, the laws themselves may give a significant advantage that’s not in the absolute sense fair at all. (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner)

SAN FRANCISCO — Drucilla Ramey, the dean-elect of Golden Gate Law School is the former executive director of the National Association of Women Judges in New York and was the executive director and general counsel for the San Francisco Bar Association from 1985 to 2002. She tells us about her desire to make life better for others, how her gender has affected her career, and how justice is impacted by money, politicians and special interests.

What is the best lesson you’ve ever learned? The best one I ever learned really came from my parents, and that is how easy it is to reach out and help another person and really make someone’s life better, for anyone who has even got a small modicum of power or status.

What is the best lesson you’ve ever taught? To try to remember that everybody’s experience is unique, and it is essential to try to fit in someone else’s shoe, to understand what their experience has taught them to feel, and react based on an effort to understand that.

What is the hardest lesson you’ve ever learned? That life would go on after my mother died. When I was younger, I really thought I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it, but one does.

How has gender affected your career path? My mother was a feminist, medical school professor, who had come from poverty herself. So I was always raised with the idea that women were supposed to have very successful careers. I was very different than most women of my generation in that way. She also raised me with the idea that there was absolutely nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted to. And my father felt exactly the same way. [Also] when I was ready to go to law school in 1968, it was the first year men could not get a deferment for graduate school work from the draft and the result was a lot of schools, including my own, Yale, suddenly admitted much larger numbers of women [at] the same time because they thought the class would be depleted by the draft.

What is one of the best decisions you’ve ever made? To not get married young. Although I wouldn’t necessarily call it a decision, it just kind of happened that way. But I think unconsciously I, over and over again, made that decision.

Is justice truly blind? Justice in the abstract is truly blind, but justice in reality, in any judicial system, is heavily dependent on financial resources, on the particular way a system is set up, on the allocation or misallocation of resources generally among the population. So obviously, a country like the United States, if you can afford a good lawyer you are infinitely better off than someone who can’t, no matter how well-meaning a judge is. Because a judge can only go so far; a judge can’t go out and find facts that are not presented before them.

Is practicing or defending law about finding what’s just, or navigating loopholes in the legal system? Obviously you have a responsibility to your client to represent them to the best of your ability within the confines of the law. Laws are made by legislators and very powerful lobbying groups, and very powerful interests have a lot to do with what happens in the legislature. So the laws themselves may give a significant advantage that’s not in the absolute sense fair at all.