Mary Lee Leahy 1940-2012
ISBA Laureate Mary Lee Leahy passed away Wednesday in Chicago. She was 72. Leahy was best known for winning the U.S. Supreme Court case Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois – which banned most political hiring. She passed away in her Chicago condominum following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
Here is the bio from her 2001 Laureate induction: Two years after she graduated from law school in 1966, Mary Lee Leahy was principal attorney in the first of several landmark cases she has won in her distinguished career.
Pickering versus Board of Education, argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, established the right of public employees to publicly criticize their employers.
Perhaps her most familiar case – Rutan – was a class action decided in 1990 by the U.S. Supreme Court. It established the right of public employees to support or not to support a political party or candidate for public office without being denied promotion, transfer, recall from lay-off and employment due to a political patronage system. As the saying goes, "this changed everything."
In 1997, she won the Denton case in which the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the absolute preference for veterans in state government hiring.
Mary Lee Leahy graduated from Loyola University in Chicago in 1962, received a Masters of Arts from the University of Manchester in England as a Fulbright Scholar in 1963, and attend the University of Chicago's Law School where she qualified for law review.
Upon being licensed and joining a Chicago law firm in 1966, she began her work on affirming the constitutional rights of public employees.
The Sixth Constitutional Convention of the State of Illinois in 1969 brought her to Springfield as a delegate. She was chief sponsor of the Environmental Rights Article and major handler of the Rights of the Handicapped provision at the Convention.
She moved to Springfield in the 1970's, first to work in state government – she was assistant to the governor and Director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – and then to continue in the private practice of law.
Today, she is widely regarded as one of the finest civil rights lawyers in Illinois. She was recently listed as one of American Lawyer Media's "Ten Most Influential Women Lawyers in Illinois." Inclusion on this prestigious list was due to her work against Archer Daniels Midland on a harassment case. She obtained a four million dollar verdict against ADM for their practices not once, but a second time, on retrial.
A lawyer who has worked with her on cases sums up her style: "She is unfailingly professional and compassionate; intelligent and insightful; zealous and practical."
Read her obituary in the Springfield State Journal-Register
Read her obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times