Interview: Judge Ilana Rovner

Judge Ilana Rovner has served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since 1992. Before that, she was a District Court Judge for the Northern District of Illinois.

Below is her interview with Joe Hanlon, a high school senior from North Carolina. They talk about Judge Rovner’s childhood, when she escaped Latvia with her family during World War II; her experience at law school; and the most difficult part of her job as an appellate judge. Hope you enjoy!

What were you like in high school, and what interested you?

Answer: For the first two years, I was not as serious as I should have been. But in my junior year, I became very serious about learning and about understanding and becoming educated. An entire world opened up for me and to me. And, I really learned to love the knowledge that I was being given. I started to understand that it was an enormous gift. I went to an all-girls high school, a public all-girls high school, called The Philadelphia High School for Girls. An overwhelming number of the teachers there had PhDs and with one exception, the teachers were all women. I never had a male teacher.

My education stood up against that of the women that I went to Bryn Mawr College with. In those days it was, and of course still is, an all women’s college, and was highly regarded in the nation. Very highly regarded. And many of the young women who attended came from the most prestigious private schools in the country, and my education at Girls High held up to that of those young women.

How did you become interested in law?

Answer: I wrote my first essay on wanting to be a lawyer, believe it or not, when I was seven years old. That is because my mother, father and I escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II. When I was a child, I was not read fairy tales like other children were. Instead, my father would talk to me about law, order, and constitutions, and how the laws had not been upheld in Germany and because of that there was this unspeakable… there are no words to describe what occurred. He also impressed upon me, that under normal circumstances, lawyers were good people who did good for people. Who tried to help people. And so as a tiny person I got it into my mind that I wanted to be a lawyer. I had never met a lawyer, and I certainly had never met a woman lawyer, as there were so few. But I got that into my head, so when I was seven, I wrote an essay that my mother actually kept about how when I grow up I want to be a lawyer and do good. So studying law was always on my radar screen.

What was law school like for you?

Answer: Well, I went to a number of law schools actually. When I graduated from Bryn Mawr, I went to England and I studied law at the University of London, at King’s College. After that I went to Georgetown. There were only, as I recall, eight women in my class, but there were two sections and only four of us in my section. Some of the young men were very kind and some of the professors were very kind, but some were very unkind and wanted to know ‘why we were there,’ ‘why we had taken the place of a man,’ ‘were we there to catch a husband?’ ‘would we ever practice law?’ It was not an easy time for women in the law, and women had only been at Georgetown Law School for about seven years when I arrived – not that long. So there were very few of us and there was a very mixed reaction to us. I had one professor who said that he had worn a black armband—his name was professor Stetson— the day women were admitted to the law school. Then I had Professor Yaeger, whose sister had gone to law school, could not get a job, so became a nurse. He was wonderful to us, because of his sister’s experience. It was a very mixed experience.

My grandmother went to Georgetown for nursing school, and when she was there, women weren’t really allowed on the college’s main campus.

Well, I will say this. I had come from eight years of all female classmates, and now suddenly, I was surrounded by five hundred men. It would either kill you or make you stronger. It made me stronger. One of the women in my class left at Thanksgiving. That was terrible because three of us lived together and now there were just two of us left to pay the rent. She just couldn’t handle it. It was impossible for her. I had the desire, such a strong desire, that I could withstand almost anything.

That’s good. Perseverance.

Yes, perseverance is a wonderful word.

During your time in law school, whom did you admire in the law?

Well, I looked up to any woman who had made it through at the time. I thought they were really quite remarkable. I was a member of a legal sorority, and some of the older women were mentors to us and tried to give us a great deal of encouragement. I did look up to them.

I’ve been interested in law for a few years now, and I’ve found that it’s always good to have someone older than you who is on the same track to steer you along and provide good insight.

It’s the most valuable gift that can be given to you. Because without that, you make a lot of rookie mistakes. I mean we all make rookie mistakes anyways, but having someone guide you along is just tremendous help.

Turning more to your job today: What is like being a federal appellate judge? 

It’s the greatest privilege and honor I could have ever imagined. It is a responsibility of very large proportions, and it is an amazement that this could have actually happened for me. I also loved being a district court judge, a federal trial judge, which I was for eight years. Then I became the first woman on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

You’ve prefaced my next two questions! I read that you were a district court judge, so I was curious about how your tenure as a trial court judge informed your process of reasoning as an appellate court judge.

Being a trial judge gives you a wonderful background to understand why judges do as they do, rule as they do, and think as they do. Nothing could have prepared me better for the appeals court than to have been a trial judge.

What has been your experience as the first woman judge to sit on the Seventh Circuit?

As for being the first, I have actually been the first at a lot of things. I was the first woman supervisor in the United States Attorney’s office in Chicago, and I was the second woman on the federal trial court in Chicago. So I had experience being first. It’s terrifying to be first, because you are fearful, or I was fearful, that if you fail, you would be the last woman [laughs]. But that didn’t happen. 

What is the most difficult part of your job?

The most difficult part is knowing that you have people’s lives in your hands. That you are making decisions that will reverberate for a long, long time, and you want them to be the right decisions. It’s very difficult to be in charge.

When I had juries, afterwards I would always meet with the jurors. They would say the same thing: “I’m so glad I’m not a judge. I could not do this day in and day out – deciding people’s fates.”

How do you deal with very emotional cases, where there might be a conflict between what the law commands and how you feel? 

You compartmentalize. You know that you have to set your personal feelings to the side. You have to. Because that’s the oath you’ve taken, and you want to be true to your oath.

On the flipside, what is the most rewarding part of your job?

There are so many rewarding parts, but I think the biggest one is when I honestly believe I have done justice. I just feel so good. You see, dear, I come from a family that had no justice. The family that we left behind, the friends, our whole world, was annihilated, and it’s always been my belief that those people were wonderful people and that even though they were not afforded any justice, that they would have wanted a just and fair world to once again appear. So that is the greatest reward, when I am quite certain that what I’ve done is the best I can do, and justice has prevailed.

Having lived through such horrors in Latvia, what went wrong? There were lawyers in Germany and lawyers in Europe, so what went wrong with the system?

The people were swayed by an authoritarian monster named Hitler who set out to destroy entire populations, and came very close to winning.

Do you think the people who disagreed were not vehement enough in their disagreement or was it an institutional failing?

It’s everything. It’s all of that. It’s decent people unable to fight back and a world gone silent as long as it didn’t touch them.

What does it mean to live in a society that functions under the rule of law?

Everything. Without the rule of law we are nothing. We are animals in a jungle harming one another. An assault on the rule of law is an assault on each and every one of us.

As a society, how can we best safeguard ourselves from falling into patterns where the rule of law is ignored?

By voting for people in a democracy who believe in the rule of law, not those who would destroy it, and by decent people speaking out. In the smallest of ways we make huge statements, by never laughing at a joke that is harmful to people who are different from us. By never laughing at those who are weaker than we are. By caring about the weakest and most helpless in our society. By giving of ourselves in every way possible to keep what so many have fought and died for, our democracy. By teaching civics and history to young people so that they have a fuller understanding of the danger signs.

What is one thing you’d hope to impart to anyone reading this?

For the most part, for the greatest part, federal judges have in the past been apolitical. Once they reach the federal court system they were no longer Republicans, or Democrats, or libertarians or anything else. They were judges who look at each case as fairly and as impartial as humanly possible. That’s what we have to strive to continue to do.