Neither the Madison Club nor Union City, New Jersey, proved much of a match for Shirley Abrahamson.
Abrahamson, the longest-serving Wisconsin Supreme Court justice in history, told a packed room at the University of Wisconsin Law School on Oct. 19 how, as a young lawyer at La Follette, Sinykin, Doyle & Anderson, a group of lobbyists tried to take her out for a lunch meeting at the private club in downtown Madison. “We walked into the front entrance and were stopped,” Abrahamson recalled at the law school’s annual Robert J. Kastenmeier lecture. First the group was ushered in through a side entrance and then they were told women couldn’t eat lunch there.