Congratulations to WLP interim co-director Susan J. Frietsche, who was presented the Mary Philbrook Public Interest Award last night at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.
The Mary Philbrook Public Interest Award is given each fall in recognition of Mary Philbrook, the first woman admitted to the New Jersey Bar and the first New Jersey woman to be admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Co-dean of Rutgers Law School Kimberly Mutcherson and WLP interim co-director Susan Frietsche last night at the Mary Philbrook Public Interest Award celebration.
The brilliant Kimberly Mutcherson, noted bioethics and health law scholar, law professor, and the first woman, the first African American, and first LGBTQ+ dean of law at Rutgers University (and former WLP board member), made the following remarks while introducing Sue:
As Gloria Steinem said, Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. Given this country’s history, all of us who were left out of its founding yet somehow believe in the promise of America, are dreamers of a sort. Like Sue and her colleagues, we see what is and we know what could be and what should be. We recognize the progress this country has made, even as it backslides, and we believe better is possible. And Sue has been using her skill to move us toward better for decades.
[Sue] is now the co-interim executive director at WLP… she began working there in 1992 and founded the Western Pennsylvania office. In that capacity, she has been the lawyer for the 17 freestanding clinics in Pennsylvania for what might just be forever at this point and her work for those clinics is soup to nuts: direct representation in state and federal courts, writing amicus briefs, helping ensure compliance with the byzantine regulations to which abortion clinics are unnecessarily subject, advocating with the Legislature, ensuring that the buffer zones that protect clinics from protesters are maintained, representing young women in judicial bypass proceedings and, in fact, designing the system for the proceedings in most jurisdictions in Pennsylvania that have them, and crucially, engaging in work to protect abortion providers from the violence that is a constant threat from anti-abortion activists… and did I mention she argued a case in front of Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week?
Sue has been a crucial linchpin that has kept Pennsylvania’s abortion clinics open despite so many attempts to shut them down. The list I just offered doesn’t even capture the work she’s done around sexual harassment, sexual assault in education and employment settings, Title IX athletics, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, the rights of incarcerated women, criminalization of pregnancy, and race and gender bias in the legal system.
Please join us in congratulating Susan Frietsche for earning this prestigious award!
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