At 63, She Is ‘Outstanding Young Lawyer’

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Among the 23 youngish, idealistic attorneys at Neighborhood Legal Services in Buffalo, perhaps the most youthful and most idealistic is 63-year-old Ree Adler.

“I’ve never realized my age,” she says. “That’s my problem.”

In January, the New York State Bar Assn. also disregarded her age when it chose Adler to receive its Outstanding Young Lawyer Award. The honor goes each year to an attorney who is younger than 37 or has been a member of the bar less than 10 years. Adler began practicing law in 1986.

“She certainly challenges our whole notion of young,” said her boss, James Morrissey, director of Neighborhood Legal Services. “She is very young. Most of us hope we’re like that when we’re 45, let alone 63 or 65.”

Adler went to law school at an age when many lawyers are thinking about retirement. At 52, she enrolled in the University of Buffalo law school. She had spent the previous 10 years as a full-time volunteer with social services agencies.

Since her graduation in 1983, she has been a volunteer at Neighborhood Legal Services, getting a dollar a year as one of the most tenacious champions of poor people in Buffalo.

“And don’t think I’m not happy to get that dollar,” she said.

After eight years as a legal aid attorney, Adler retains the ideals and sense of social responsibility of a lawyer fresh out of school.

In her spare time, she is rereading “The Federalist,” an early framework for the Constitution. On her office wall hangs a poster with the slogan, “Where Law ends, tyranny begins.”

“I really believe that,” she said. “This can be, and is, a noble profession.”

Adler was named Outstanding Young Attorney because of her devotion to helping the poor, said Thomas Clements, who headed the committee that chose her for the award.

Adler led a four-year crusade that resulted in the creation of an education and child-care center for 60 teen-age mothers in Buffalo schools. It all started when Adler met a 14-year-old mother who could not go to school because she had no one to care for the baby.

“Ree took that one girl’s circumstances and realized that a lot of other young women were in the same shoes,” Morrissey said. The center now provides schooling and day care for 60 teen-age mothers.

Adler also helped to start a coalition of doctors and lawyers who meet to discuss health issues. She helped organize a group of lawyers that assists poor people seeking Medicaid, and she persuaded the city to adopt rules protecting poor people from having their water shut off.

“I don’t want to come across as a bleeding heart, but if you don’t help the poor people in our community, you’re going to pay anyway,” Adler said. “You don’t have to do it out of altruism. You have to do it out of self-interest.”

The $1 salary she is paid each year is something of a trophy, a symbol of finally doing things she felt were denied women when she was younger.

When she started college, she thought of studying medicine. Instead, she majored in English, was graduated in 1950, got married and had a family. She raised five children and has two grandchildren.

“Back then, there was a fear that if you got too smart, no one would marry you,” Adler said. “My options after school were to get married or go back home. In those days, a woman with her own apartment would be considered a fallen woman.”

Adler was divorced in 1970 and began doing volunteer work. Her second husband, Richard, is a surgeon.

Since she won the young lawyer award, Adler has heard from older women across the country who are considering law school. Adler said she tells them to go ahead and do it.

“I’ll never know what I would have achieved,” she said. “Maybe it wouldn’t be anything. Maybe it would have been wonderful. But at least, now I am achieving a little of what I’ve wanted to do. I am a lawyer. That’s something that means a lot to me.”