Justine Wise Polier papers, 1970-1976

Justice in the Domestic Relations Court of New York City, 1934-1962, Judge of the New York State Family Court, 1962-1973. Polier was affiliated with the Children's Defense Fund and the Field Foundation (Barnard A.B., 1924).

Justine Wise Polier (1903-1987) was born in Portland, Oregon to Louise Waterman Wise, founder of the Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee (1916) and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leading Jewish communal figure and founding member of both the NAACP (1914) and the American Jewish Congress (1918). She attended Bryn Mawr College from 1920-1922 and Radcliffe College from 1922-1923, before finally completing her BA at Barnard College in 1924. She then attended Yale Law School and received her degree in 1928.

From 1929-1934, Wise Polier worked for the Workmen's Compensation Counsel, and in 1935, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed her judge in the Domestic Relations Court (now known as the New York State Family Court). At this time, Justine Wise Polier, only 32 years old, was the first woman to hold a judgeship in New York--in fact, the first woman in New York State to hold judicial office above magistrate--a position which she maintained for 38 years.

For more than 30 years she was president of Louise Wise Services, the adoption agency founded by her mother which became a voluntary agency serving children and families. She was also vice president of the Citizens Committee for Children, founder and president of the Wiltwyck School for Boys -- the first nonsectarian and interracial agency that cared for and educated neglected and troubled youth in New York--, board member and later president of the Field Foundation and a member of the Institute of judicial Administration of the American Bar Association. After she retired, she headed the office of juvenile justice of the Children's Defense Fund. The distinguished jurist and activist for children's rights and civil liberties died in 1987.

In 1989 Columbia University established the annual Justine Wise Polier Memorial Lecture. Each year the lecture, sponsored by the School of Social Work, the Law School and the psychiatry department's division of child psychiatry, was given by a distinguished expert in law, child advocacy or mental health.