“Our happiness isn't frivolous,” Susan Crumiller ’06 told an audience on February 25 as she accepted Law Women’s 2025 Alumna of the Year award. She was reflecting on her career, on motherhood, and on the founding of her own litigation firm, Crumiller PC, also known as The Feminist Litigation Firm. “I encourage you to make a decision to believe in yourselves, and to believe in the importance of what you stand for and what you can do–and that love and joy aren’t luxuries to be relegated to your spare time,” Crumiller said. “They are our strength, and they are our life.”
Sarah Mihm ’26 and Gabriela Socarras ’26, co-presidents of Law Women, presented the award to Crumiller. They also announced that Law Women, a student organization that promotes both women’s rights and women’s success in the legal field, has begun dispersing funds from its endowment to law students pursuing term-time unpaid internships that engage in public interest work.
In her remarks, Crumiller told how her career changed after the birth of her second child, when a supervisor requested she return to work only seven weeks into her five-month parental leave. “I knew that I could tell him to go screw himself if I really had to—but I just kept thinking, ‘What if I couldn't?’” she said. “There are so many women and men in these situations who have to just sacrifice. I didn't want that to happen to anyone else, so I decided to start a pregnancy rights law firm.”
Crumiller described how she has built her one-person practice into a six-lawyer firm focusing on workplace disputes, sexual harassment and abuse litigation, and medical malpractice litigation. To do fulfilling but intense work like this, she said, lawyers must protect and take care of themselves. Joy, love, and connection “give us power, and they give us inner strength,” she said. “There are plenty of people who can’t see that because they are a prisoner to their misogynistic views that love and joy are weak feminine things. Those people are absolutely wrong.”
As she concluded, Crumiller offered some advice to the law students in the audience: “Rejecting the trappings of niceties and formality and [of] worrying about what other people think—it makes you better at everything. If you’re not afraid to see your clients as people, your colleagues as people, [if you’re] not afraid to go to difficult or uncomfortable places, then you can be assured a life of meaning wherever you find yourself.”
Posted March 17, 2025