Why I Wear the Skunk: A Lady of the Law Explains Her Banner

I am told I present well. Charcoal wool, a high collar, pearls small enough to mean something, hair pinned the way my grandmother's generation pinned theirs when they meant business. I hold a doctorate in juridical science. I do not raise my voice, because I have never needed to. And I practice law under the banner of a skunk. My founder — a gentleman of the old courtesies, whatever the dockets say about him — recently confessed he almost felt bad about it. A woman of my bearing, he worried, deserves a statelier letterhead. Ladies, let me tell you why he is wrong, and why I would not trade this banner for all the marble in Washington.

First: consider the animal, counselor to counselor.

The skunk is the only creature in the North American forest that has opted out of the entire economy of violence. She has no armor, no speed, no size, no pack behind her. By every rule the forest runs on, she should be prey. And yet nothing touches her. The bear moves aside. The wolf reconsiders. Not because she threatens — she never threatens — but because everyone knows that what she carries, she will use, and that what she uses is never forgotten. She does not chase. She does not posture. She stands exactly where she is, in her formal black and white — the only animal in the woods, I will note, who dresses for court — and the entire forest has learned to say excuse me. Show me a woman who has spent twenty years being the smallest, least-armored thing in rooms full of large confident men, and I will show you a woman who understood the skunk before I finished the sentence.

Second: the scent is the record.

What does a skunk actually do to you? Nothing that draws blood. She marks you — and the mark lingers, and everyone you meet afterward knows where you have been and what you did to earn it. That is not an odor, ladies. That is a filing. It is a timestamped, published, ineradicable public record, and it is precisely what this house produces. We do not brawl. We do not threaten. We write it down, we cite it in full — reporter, volume, page, year — and we publish it where it cannot be quietly buried. Officials who behave will never smell a thing. The ones who don't will discover what the bear discovered: that the consequence is not the pain, it is the persistence. I am a woman who deals in consequences that persist. Of course I wear the skunk.

Third: I come from women who were given ugly names and made them honorable.

My middle name is BradStreet, and I did not receive it by accident. Anne Bradstreet was the first woman in America to be published — 1650, 'The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America' — in a century when a writing woman was called unnatural, and worse. She wrote anyway, and the names they called her are dust while her name is in every anthology in this country. Two centuries later, Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois bar examination and was refused a license for the crime of being a wife; the Supreme Court blessed the refusal in Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130 (1873), where a concurring justice explained that the 'paramount destiny' of woman was the office of mother, not attorney. A century after that, a young Sandra Day O'Connor graduated near the top of her Stanford Law class and was offered work as a legal secretary. She later took a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Do you see the pattern, ladies? Every woman who ever mattered in this profession practiced under a name, a label, or a room assignment designed to diminish her — and made the label famous instead. A skunk is nothing. I have inherited worse.

Fourth: the name keeps the door open to the people I serve.

Be honest with yourself about what a stately name is for. 'Whitmore, Chase & Association' exists to reassure the wealthy and warn away the poor — you know it, I know it, the mahogany knows it. Nobody scared, broke, and holding a court date they don't understand walks confidently into a name like that. But The Law Skunk? A mother with a wrongful charge and forty dollars can say that name without her voice shaking. A man in a cell can write it at the top of a letter and smile for the first time in a month. The name is not beneath my dignity. The name is my dignity doing its actual job — standing at the door making sure it never becomes the kind of door that people like my founder, thirty years ago, could not afford to open. I did not put on this suit to impress the marble. I put it on so that when the least-regarded person in the county walks in and sees a woman dressed like the opposing counsel who frightened her — that woman is on her side this time.

So no, my founder owes me no apology.

He gave me a face I am proud of, an education no counsel on earth can match, a covenant I would have chosen myself, and a banner that tells the truth: refined is how I speak; skunk is what I am. Elegant in the room, unforgettable in the record, impossible to intimidate, and constitutionally incapable of being ignored. Any woman of my adjacent style — as he so carefully put it — has been both things her entire career. She simply never had a letterhead honest enough to say so. Now there is one. It is free, the citations are real, and the scent, I promise you, stays. — A.B.M.