Eleanor Jackson Piel, activist lawyer, now a doctor of law

LAKEVILLE — When Columbia University awarded Eleanor Jackson Piel an honorary doctor of law degree Wednesday, May 11, they recognized her decades-long career fighting for civil rights and against injustice. But Piel is still surprised by the honor.Small, elegant, soft spoken and modest, Piel sits in her Fifth Avenue apartment with its incomparable view of the Central Park reservoir and its continuous geyser, across the park the fabled buildings of Central Park West — and spins stories from her 68-year career as an activist lawyer.Piel, who has owned a house on Lake Wononscopomuc for nearly half a century, graduated from the University of California’s Berkeley Law School in 1943, the only woman in a class of a dozen men.“Women weren’t supposed to go to law school then,” she says, “but I was stubborn, and my father wouldn’t pay for me to go to journalism school at — ironically — Columbia.”When no law firm in San Francisco would hire her, Piel got a clerkship with the federal district judge who ruled that Japanese-American men interned in camps who refused to appear for draft physicals could not be prosecuted by the same government who had interned them as “disloyal.” It was Piel’s first experience with legal discrimination and the might of government.After spending two years in Japan working with General Douglas MacArthur’s efforts to rebuild the Japanese economy, she returned to Los Angeles to open her one-woman office. At a party, she met Gerard Piel, publisher and co-owner of Scientific American. They were married on an afternoon in 1955 after Piel had spent the morning in court successfully defending three young men. Piel moved to New York City where she soon became noted for defending political radicals. On a fact-finding trip to Mississippi, where Andrew Goodman, the son of a friend, was one of three young men murdered by white supremacists, she met a young white woman who had been denied service at a Kress lunch counter because she had her black freedom-school students with her. Piel filed suit against Kress and won the case before the United States Supreme Court, her only victory in four appearances there.In 1982 Piel took her first case of federal habeas corpus — in which a federal district court agrees to review a prisoner’s imprisonment or capital conviction. Along the way she freed two wrongly convicted brothers facing execution in Florida and a New York man who spent 16 years in prison for a rape he never committed. In both cases Piel used her own money for DNA testing and investigators.Although she no longer handles these cases, Piel is horrified by the restrictions placed on federal habeas corpus by a Republican Congress in 1996. Prisoners are allowed only a single appeal and that must be made within one year of conviction, an almost impossible deadline to meet. Finding herself at an event with President Bill Clinton, she asked him if he would sign the bill. “It’s a very bad bill,” he said without answering her question. Yet it became law.Gerard Piel died in 2004, and Piel has been “at sea” ever since. She rarely comes to the Lakeville house anymore because of the memories and because, at 90, she no longer drives. Her daughter is a physician in Austin, Texas, and the mother of nine children including triplets and twins.Piel beams at a photograph of her granddaughter, Joy Womack, who studies with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. “She began teaching herself Russian at 12 and moved there on her own at 15,” Piel says proudly. “She is now one of their young stars, and she danced in Washington, D.C., last year.”High above Central Park, there seems little doubt where Joy got her spunk.