My father pointed out that this year is the 60th anniversary of the release of Adam's Rib, a movie about a married lawyer couple (played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn). I didn't much like the movie, but since I'm a lawyer married to a lawyer, my brother is a lawyer married to a lawyer, both of the other founding conspirators (Jonathan Adler, then Juan Non-Volokh, and Michelle Boardman, who left the blog when she took a Justice Department job) are lawyers married to lawyers, and the two judges for whom I've clerked (Judge Kozinski and Justice O'Connor) are married to lawyers, I thought I'd note the anniversary here.

These days I joke that lawyers are legally obligated to marry other lawyers, reflecting a pattern that I see throughout my circle. (It may well be different in other legal subcommunities in other places.) But once, for obvious reasons, it was unusual enough to be seen as meriting a movie.

Of course, women lawyers were also not so unheard of at the time that the plot device would be seen as too fantastic: Women judges had been around since the 1920s, a woman had been appointed Assisant Attorney General in 1921, and women lawyers had been practicing law for some decades before then. A woman's life as a lawyer was of course not easy then, and I suspect that in many places there were no women lawyers at all. But there had been some women in American law, and in high places in American law, for quite a while, rather longer than I had thought before I looked into the matter.