YWCA Women of Excellence: Justice Carol A. Beier
What inspires you?
I am inspired by many people and things, but professionally I have always been especially inspired by my fellow women lawyers.
The women who came before me faced and vanquished daunting gender-based barriers on their way through law school and into practice in a wide variety of settings. The women who were my classmates and my co-counsel and opposing counsel and, eventually, my colleagues on the bench have inspired me every day not only by their technical mastery but also by their refusal to accept that the law is a mistress so jealous that her practitioners cannot be fully participating family and community members. And, finally, the women who have come and are coming after me into the profession inspire me with their natural understanding that warm support of each other is indispensable and their shared, unequivocal expectation that equality must undergird the application of our rule of law. I am so awed by and so proud of all of these women and so grateful to call many of them my friends.
What advice do you have for others?
Say "yes" when something needs doing. Your cheerful and capable accomplishment of even small, not-very-glamorous tasks will be the building blocks of a successful career and a fulfilling life.
What is the greatest lesson you have learned on your journey?
I am still learning every day, and it is difficult to pick a single lesson as the greatest.
Today, as my professional retirement looms, I would say the lesson I am concerned with is: "It ain't over 'til it's over." More formally but no more evocatively stated, retirement is not the end. I still have something to offer in service to the common good.
Martin Luther King defined our challenge: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
If recent events have demonstrated anything, they have demonstrated that all of us need to remember our human connection and our tandem responsibility to hasten and broaden that arc of the moral universe, to encourage it around its bend toward justice for as long as we are able.
What does your vision for our community look like?
Ideally, our community will achieve -- and help other communities to achieve -- a greater level of equal opportunity and mutual support and reflexive kindness than we have so far been able to achieve. I believe that all people of good will share this vision. It is far from mine alone. We sometimes differ on the best paths to the goal, but even the most deeply felt differences do not make us true adversaries; they make us human.
What does "Equal - Powerful - Unstoppable" mean to you?
I think these three words characterize the vision for our community on which the last question focused. They also seem to me to identify a kind of progression. Equality is necessary for true maximization of power; power is the engine of progress; progress becomes unstoppable only if equality and the power that follows from it are realized. These three words also succinctly summarize the mission of the YWCA, ever a beacon in pursuit of the challenge Dr. King defined.
