I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, but my mother grew up in Maine.
She was living in Bangor and was commuting to the University of Maine to go to school,
and she experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism.
She finally went to her father and said, “I’d like to transfer to NYU and finish up there.”
And she did.
And she told me when I was little, and we were talking about how she came to New York,
that she had never realized there were so many Jews in the world, and although I grew
up in a community that was very mixed in Brooklyn and felt no anti-Semitism and felt that we
all mingled together and learned together and grew up together.
One of the things I have learned over the years is that these things can be very fragile
and that we have to guard them very carefully.
(V/O) - Ms. Tobias attended James Madison High School, a Brooklyn public school that boasts such
(V/O) other notable graduates as Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Bernie Sanders.
(V/O) She then went to Brooklyn College and Columbia University, where she earned a Master’s
(V/O) Degree in English and American Literature.
(V/O) In 1977, married with children, Poritz received her Juris Doctor degree from The University
(V/O) of Pennsylvania Law School.
(V/O) She began her law career at the age of 40 with the Division of Law.
I found myself moving from section to section and learning; I loved learning new law.
I loved learning what the public issues were.
I ended up reviewing appellate briefs at one point and finally became Director of the Division
of Law, which is the civil division of the Attorney General’s Office.
(V/O) In 1989, Poritz was asked to serve as General Counsel for Governor Kean during his last
(V/O) year in office.
He is, in my view, what we need in people who work for government, who care about government,
who run for office in government.
(Poritz) He cared about public policy; he cared about people who were less fortunate then he.
And so that turned out to be a remarkable year for me, to be able to learn from someone
like that and to understand what it really meant to serve people in a high political
position.
(V/O) In 1994, Poritz became New Jersey’s first female Attorney General for Governor Christine
(V/O) Todd Whitman, and in 1996, she was nominated by Whitman to serve as Chief Justice of the
(V/O) New Jersey Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Poritz was the first woman Chief Justice, so she was a trailblazer.
She was very much aware of having women in leadership roles.
(Feinberg) She appointed women to leadership positions, myself included.
(Feinberg) And that continued during her whole tenure and, I think, even today.
(Weinberg) Justice Poritz was a woman ahead of her time.
By prodding, helping New Jersey to really be a leader in the establishment of drug courts,
(Weinberg) which enable people who are brought in on various kinds of drug charges - that if they
(Weinberg )go into treatment successfully, that they can avoid criminal prosecution.
So it kind of shows that her experience on the judicial side of things helped us change
the landscape for the people who appear on the other side of the bar.
I knew her before I was appointed to the court in 1999, and I knew that she was a beloved
figure in the attorney general’s office.
And my impression of her as Chief Justice was completely aligned with that view of her.
She was warm, welcoming, funny, just wonderful to be around.
It was said that the members of the Wilentz court could finish each other’s sentences,
and it was correct.
And so people were expecting that the Chief Justice Poritz may have some difficulty adjusting.
(Coleman) But she did not.
(Coleman) She fit in immediately very well and within a very short period of time, she too was finishing
each other’s sentences.
When she asked a question, unlike some people, who want to answer the question, she wanted
to hear from as many people that she could.
And if she had a particular position, it was never shared with us in the beginning.
Her selection of cases to author herself was very thoughtful and wise.
Some were cases in which she obviously felt strongly about the results; some were cases
in which she felt that the cases were controversial and so she wanted to bear the burden of authoring
a decision that might be criticized by the public.
She is certainly remembered for Dale versus the Boy Scouts, in which the court held that
(Long) the Boy Scouts could not preclude a homosexual person from becoming a Boy Scout leader.
(Stein) She wrote,
I thought that was a beautiful opinion.
Regrettably it was reversed by the United States Supreme Court.
Then in Lewis versus Harris, she wrote the dissenting opinion, which eventually became
the law of the land in Obergefell.
In our case, the majority of the Court said—“It doesn’t matter what you call the union between
(Poritz) two men or two women, those unions.
(Poritz) What matters is they get equal benefits.
(Poritz) And the dissent agreed, but it also said what you call something matters, that language
is important, it is symbolic, it carries meaning and it changes lives.
(Poritz) Ultimately when the United States Supreme Court rulings made it clear that federal benefits
(Poritz) had to go to people who married, the word “married” became important and immediately
in New Jersey the court acted
(V/O) In the sixth Abbott v. Burke school funding decision, Poritz,
(V/O) writing for the majority, reaffirmed the Court’s commitment to quality
(V/O) preschool education for the state’s poorest districts and ordered the Department of Education
(V/O) to follow through on their promise to staff preschools with certified teachers.
People tend to say we haven’t accomplished enough, it hasn’t been worth all of this,
we have poured money into and look what we have.
I think that’s wrong, seriously wrong, and it appalls me when I see that.
It was clear that those programs were – not just largely successful – enormously successful.
She is like the drum majorette for equal justice.
And that’s because she understands that there is no such thing as justice for just
some of the people in society, and that a justice system which operates in a way that
rich people get different outcomes from poor people is not a justice system at all.
(Long) And that is really, I think, what has motivated her deep commitment to Legal Services.
Every year as we get, just even close to budget time, I know I am going to hear from Justice
Poritz, and I know it is going to be about money for Legal Services and why that organization
(Weinberg) is so important to so many people in our state, whether we are talking about lack of housing,
(Weinberg) healthcare, women’s access to defense against domestic violence.
Her commitment, her tenacity, her belief in the program through all the years that she
(Miller) was on the board, and particularly when she was chair of the board, made all the difference
(Miller) in terms of Legal Services funding and ultimately preserving and expanding legal assistance
for low-income people in New Jersey.
When I became Chief Justice, I said to my assistant, “Do we have any of Chief Justice
Wilentz’s files on Legal Services?”
We pulled from the cabinet a number of files, including speeches he’d made for Legal Services
and about Legal Services: interactions and meetings, public statements.
What I learned from Chief Justice Wilentz after he died was the love he had for the
(Poritz) organization, the concern he had about its viability, about the resistance to funding,
about the important work that Legal Services was doing.
In this society where you have to navigate through so many contexts in which the law
makes the difference, and where you are trying to help people who have no experience, no
background, no way of navigating through that, you are in a position
to give them their lives back.