Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the topper of Columbia Law’s Class of 1959, could find no law firm in New York willing to hire a female attorney. Yet, she was not one to give up. Taking to academia, she became a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, teaching some of the first female law students there. In 1971, she appeared before the Nine with her lead brief in Reed v. Reed, where the court was considering whether men should be preferred over women as executors. Ginsburg won the first gender discrimination case of the court in USA. In 1972, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and, under this banner, took numerous causes to the court on which she would one day go on to sit as a Justice herself.
October 5, 2020
Time:
4:00 pm
Facebook Live
Interestingly, the current legal landscape in Pakistan is quite similar for female lawyers to what Ginsburg consistently fought against in the US. It continues to be a hostile and unwelcoming environment for them, with little progress over the years. While women are increasingly taking up space in public and private law schools across the country, their presence is almost non-existent in the top echelons of legal practice and the judiciary.
Join us for the forty-seventh session of LUMS Live: Remembering Justice Ginsburg: Confronting Women’s Challenges in Pakistan’s Legal Fraternity. Organised in collaboration with the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative (SWGI), the distinguished panelists for the discussion include Justice (R) Nasira Iqbal, Ms. Reema Omer and Ms. Nida Usman Chaudhary.
Date: Monday, October 5, 2020
Time: 4:00 pm
Moderated by Ms. Zehra Zaidi, the session will be broadcast live via the LUMS Facebook page. Please click here to listen to our panelists discuss the opportunities available to and the challenges faced by women in the legal fraternity, and how these relate to feminist jurisprudence in Pakistan.
During the session, please use the live stream's comments bar to ask questions or email them at ask@lums.edu.pk.
After the session, kindly share your feedback and suggest future topics for discussion/guests here.
Join us for this important conversation!
Profiles of Panelists
Justice (R) Nasira Iqbal - Former Judge, High Court of Pakistan
Recipient of Government of Pakistan’s Sitara-e-Imtiaz, Justice Iqbal is one of the first five female Judges appointed to a High Court in Pakistan where she served as a Justice from 1994 to 2002. Currently, the President of an activist group, the Concerned Citizens of Pakistan Society, she has won several honours including the Fatima Jinnah Medal for Women's Rights in 2006, the Woman of the Year Star Award in 2007, and the Wonder Woman Award in 2011. Justice Iqbal has been a member of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan, the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan, and the Pakistani delegation to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Justice Iqbal teaches Law, is a former President of the Lahore High Court Bar Association and a member of the executive committee of the Public Interest Law Association of Pakistan (PILAP). She is also an honorary legal advisor to the International Women's Club, Lahore, and the All Pakistan Women's Association, Punjab, a trustee of Transparency International and a member of the Pakistan Women Lawyers’ Association.
Ms. Reema Omer - International Legal Adviser for South Asia at The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)
Ms. Omer did her BA-LL.B from LUMS followed by an LLM specialising in public international law from the University of Cambridge. Ms. Omer joined the ICJ in 2011 and since 2018 has served as ICJ’s International Legal Adviser for South Asia. She is a member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and writes regularly for national and international publications on issues of human rights, the rule of law and social justice.
Ms. Nida Usman Chaudhary - Founder of Lahore Education and Research Network (LEARN) and Women in Law Initiative Pakistan
Ms. Usman Chaudhary holds LL.B (Hons) and LL.M in Law and Development from the University of London. She is a diversity and inclusion advocate and the founder of Lahore Education and Research Network as well as the Women in Law Initiative Pakistan. Her focus has been on bridging the gap between legal education and practice through capacity building and to work for equality of access and advancement of female lawyers in the profession. She combines her professional interests in law and human rights with her activism on environmental and development issues. She was the Founding Member and Chairperson of the Gender equality and Diversity Committee of the Lahore High Court Bar Association from 2018-20. Currently, she is leading women in law's collaborative project with the Ministry of Law and Justice and Group Development Pakistan on increasing women's representation in Law.
Ms. Zehra Zaidi - Adjunct Faculty, School of Law, LUMS
Ms. Zaidi is a Barrister at Law from Lincoln’s Inn, UK with many years of practice in Karachi and London. She has considerable teaching experience in Jurisprudence, Contract Law, and Feminist Legal Theory. Currently, she is teaching Contract Law at LUMS.
