When Marlene Trestman began writing her highly acclaimed biography Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (LSU Press, cloth 2016, paperback 2020), she discovered that precise information about women advocates who had argued before the Supreme Court was lacking. There was no easy way for Trestman to determine how many cases Margolin (1909-1996), who spent most of her career at the Labor Department litigating Fair Labor Standards Act cases, had argued before the Supreme Court, nor how that number stacked up against other female lawyers. So, Trestman, then Special Assistant to the Maryland Attorney General, embarked on an ambitious and painstaking “side” project: developing a complete list of women advocates and the cases they argued, starting with Belva Lockwood in 1880. Only after completing the database could Trestman confidently declare that Margolin argued 24 times in the Supreme Court, earning her third place among the top women advocates of her time: behind Mabel Walker Willebrandt and Beatrice Rosenberg, and ahead of Helen Carloss, who presented 29, 28, and 21 arguments, respectively in the pre-1970 era.
After Fair Labor Lawyer was published to rave reviews in 2016, Trestman generously continued her project, updating “the list” of women advocates for the public’s benefit. The newest version (ending on May 15, 2025, the last day of oral argument) is now available. Overall, it shows that a total of 817 different women have presented arguments at the Supreme Court 1730 times. Thirteen women have argued at the Supreme Court 20 times or more, and a total of 30 women have argued 10 times or more. Trestman includes a variety of interesting statistics and provides a valuable analysis of female advocacy before the high court.
In addition to her work on the database, Trestman has pursued another tenacious quest. To persuade The New York Times to feature Bessie Margolin in its “Overlooked” section, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. After five years of prodding by Trestman, Margolin finally got her due on October 2, 2025, in a beautifully written piece by Rebecca Chao.