Hon. Constance Baker Motley Essay Competition- 2nd Place Winner

The Federal Bar Association’s Hon. Constance Baker Motley Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Young Member Essay Competition is created to celebrate the life of Hon. Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005) and promote her legacy by encouraging law students and younger federal practitioners to promote, achieve, and sustain diversity, equity, and inclusion in the legal profession.

The competition is named after Judge Baker Motley, the first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary and the first woman judge in the Southern District of New York. She was a key leader of the African American civil rights movement, a lawyer, judge, state senator, and Borough president of Manhattan, New York City.

Aubrey Shi, Second Place Winner of the Hon. Constance Baker Motley Essay Competition

Diversity is easier to imagine as a gate than as a room. We know what it means to let someone in. What is harder to picture is what happens after arrival: whether the institution makes space for that person to flourish and lead.

Judge Motley was remarkable not simply because she entered federal practice, but because she excelled in institutions that were never built with her in mind. She became one of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s first women attorneys, litigated Brown, and won nine of twelve cases before the Supreme Court. Yet none of it was enough to be seen as a leader. Her own patron, Thurgood Marshall, could not envision a woman running the organization she had spent decades building, and chose a man as his successor.

This failure of imagination has not left us today. Women have been a majority of first-year law students since 2015, and racial diversity in entering classes has hovered around 40 percent. Yet women are only about 40 percent of the federal bench, women of color roughly 17 percent, and nearly three quarters of federal judges remain white. The numbers thin not at the entrance, but inside the institution. Sustaining Motley’s legacy therefore requires more than inclusive hiring. It requires cultivation before, during, and after entry into federal practice.

Before employment, the FBA should build pipelines beyond elite law schools. It should partner with organizations at regional schools and historically underrepresented institutions, collaborate with legal aid and community organizations, and eliminate fees for FBA events and memberships that create early financial barriers. Outreach can be designed with underrepresented communities in mind while remaining open to all, expanding access without relying on exclusionary classifications.

During employment, the FBA should treat entry as the beginning, not the finish line. It should create structured mentorship programs pairing junior attorneys from underrepresented backgrounds with senior federal practitioners who can offer concrete support: feedback, introductions, clerkship guidance, writing opportunities, and recommendations. The non-Ivy-credentialed attorney, the first-generation lawyer with an accent, and the immigrant’s child who never absorbed the informal vocabulary or wardrobe of professional spaces may arrive qualified yet culturally isolated. They are often excluded from the informal networks where assignments, reputations, and future opportunities are built. Mentorship makes those hidden networks visible and shareable.

The FBA should give junior diverse practitioners institutional voice through standing committees and working groups connected to chapter programming, student pipelines, and recruitment efforts. These should not be symbolic advisory roles that produce reports nobody reads. They should create leadership opportunities, public visibility, and reasons to stay.

After entry, the FBA should publish annual circuit-level transparency reports tracking representation across clerkships, federal appointments, leadership roles, and advancement. Which circuits produce diverse clerkship cohorts? Where does representation collapse between entry and elevation? The FBA’s nearly 100 chapters give it infrastructure no single court or firm has. Making the filter visible is the precondition for changing it.

Motley’s legacy is not merely opening doors. It is building rooms where difference remains, rises, and governs.

Bibliography

Law School Admission Council, LSAC’s Knowledge Report: Composition of the First-Year Law School Class and Enrollment, 2021–2025 Trends, https://www.lsac.org/data-research/research/lsacs-knowledge-report-composition-first-year-law-school-class-and-enrollment-2021-2025-trends.

Bin News, Trump Appoints 27 Judges in Second Term, None of Them Women of Color (Feb. 4, 2026), https://www.binnews.com/content/2026-02-04-trump-appoints-27-judges-in-second-term-none-of-them-women-of-color/.

Supreme Court Historical Society, Constance Baker Motley, https://civics.supremecourthistory.org/article/constance-baker-motley/.

About the Author

Aubrey Shi is a J.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Class of 2028. She is a member of the California Law Review and serves on the board of the Berkeley Business Law Journal. She works as a research assistant to Professor Frank Partnoy on earnouts and price-adjustment mechanics in private acquisitions. She has interned with the Federal Bar Association and in the chambers of the Honorable Peter H. Kang, United States Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California. Before law school, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in English and in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. She will spend next summer as a summer associate at a law firm in San Francisco.

About the FBA

Founded in 1920, the Federal Bar Association is dedicated to the advancement of the science of jurisprudence and to promoting the welfare, interests, education, and professional development of all attorneys involved in federal law. Our more than 14,000 members run the gamut of federal practice: attorneys practicing in small to large legal firms, attorneys in corporations and federal agencies, and members of the judiciary. The FBA is the catalyst for communication between the bar and the bench, as well as the private and public sectors. Visit us at fedbar.org to learn more.