GARDEN STATE BAR ASSOCIATION
ANNUAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR 2007-2008
GERALDINE REED BROWN, ESQ. PRESIDENT

I feel deeply honored and privileged to have had the opportunity to serve during the past year as President of the Garden State Bar Association, to be part of the leadership team of an organization that assists African-Americans and other minorities to become part of the legal system, that works to improve the administration of justice, that supports initiatives to improve economic conditions of individuals, and that works to eliminate discrimination based on race and ethnicity. The GSBA is an organization that has faced challenges. But it is also an organization that has had great successes despite those challenges. This past year we continued to build on the past, standing on the shoulders of our past leaders.

Thank You
I want to take this opportunity to thank our leadership team. I owe a debt of gratitude for your support during my tenures as President. All of you have been and are vitally important to GSBA. I wish I had the time to recognize each of you individually. But my time is limited, so I will recognize only a few of you, my officer team: Greta Gooden Brown, incoming new President; Vice President Nashon Hornsby; Secretary, Loryn Lawson; Treasurer, Demetrice Miles; and all of the members of the Board.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Demetice Miles for the extraordinary amount of hard work he did in putting our financial house in order. We also want to thank Will Rogers for working with Demetrice on Financial matters.

I also want to thank our Committee Chairs, especially Sobande Adolabi Hammonds, for her hard work as membership chair, Sharon McGahee for steering the scholarship committee, and our gala committee for a wonderful event. Those of you who attended the event know we had a wonderful evening. Pictures of the event appeared in the New Jersey Law Journal and are on the GSBA web site. Let me reiterate, those of you who attended our 33rd Anniversary Scholarship gala know that we had a wonderful time. Again I want to thank the Gala Committee and its Chair, Decanda Faulk for their work and to thank Mary Jones our event coordinator, as well as Al Bundy and his company for producing videos on each honoree. Our honorees this year were the Honorable Michael A. Shipp, the Honorable Siobhan A. Teare, Junius Williams, Sharon McGahee, and Shavar Jefferies. We anticipate having these videos on the GSBA website. We had a successful gala even though the financial environment was becoming increasingly challenging. We were able to present scholarships to five law students.

I also want to thank Marisa Slaten and Steve Hockaday for their work in setting up a number of networking events as part of the work of our Young Lawyer's Committee.

I also want to thank Tracy Thompson and Lisa James Beavers for maintaining our email group. I especially want to thank my husband Ron Brown for his efforts in keeping the GSBA website updated, to place articles and hyper links of interest on the web site. If you have not done so recently, I hope each of you will visit the website. There is lots of useful information and there will be ongoing efforts to improve it, including adding video capability.

I also want to thank our immediate past President, Michael Rambert for his advice and counsel, as well as Edna Baugh, Pamela Miller, and Karol Corbin Walker for their support.

Looking Back---Representing the GSBA

As your President, I have had the privilege of representing GSBA by participating in a number of events this past year. We had a busy year. Here are some of the things we did:

  • We represented the GSBA at a New Jersey chapter of the National Organization of Blacks in Law Enforcement (N.O.B.L.E.) program.
  • We had several general membership meetings. In December, Rashida Hasan addressed the membership. At the March general membership meeting we had updates and reports from various committees, a presentation by NJ LEEP, and a presentation by New Jersey Families Against Mandatory Minimums. We also had an information report about possibly participating in and otherwise collaborating with the Association of Black Women Lawyers with a new Inn of Court. And by the way, we are still interested in participating.
  • We attended a reception for minority judges.
  • We represented GSBA at the Governor's Black History Month celebration at Drumthwacket.
  • We were a co-sponsor, with other minority bar associations, of a meeting with Chief Justice Rabner at the New Jersey Law Center.
  • We wrote a letter regarding the need for diversity on the bench, that was published in The New Jersey Law Journal. It is great to see the increasing response to that call for action. We also wrote letters to support our members in various matters.
  • We supported and were represented at the Minority Student Program's 40th Anniversary at Rutgers Law School.
  • We represented the GSBA at the New Jersey Bar Foundation's Anniversary Reception.
  • We helped to facilitate a meeting of minority law students with Chief Justice Rabner at the Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton.
  • We distributed copies of the New Jersey Directory of Minority Judges (Federal, State, and Municipal).
  • We attended a meeting with the Attorney General to discuss a pending bill.
  • We attended meetings of the Supreme Court's Committee on Minority Concerns
  • We attended the Association of Black Women Lawyers Scholarship event.
  • We arranged to have GSBA represented at the Annual Meeting of the Asian Pacific American Lawyer's Association
  • We arranged to have GSBA representation at a Caribbean American Lawyers Association event.
  • We represented the GSBA at a Law Day program held in Union County
  • We attended a program at the New Jersey Supreme Court that celebrated the 60th Anniversary of the Constitution of New Jersey.
  • We continued to collaborate with other bar associations. Currently we are working with other specialty bar associations in support of a program that will celebrate minority judges and which will take place on December 1, 2008
  • We have also agreed to co-sponsor with the Middlesex County Bar Association an event that will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

When I began my tenure as your President I set forth a number of goals. For the most part, I think those goals were met. However there was one goal I set that we did not achieve, and I want to briefly state it here in hopes that GSBA can be part of achieving that goal in the future. Here it is:

"As we build on the past and look to the future, we hope to find ways to facilitate increasing the number of African American partners at the state's major law firms. Perhaps one of the approaches that would be productive, would be to start holding some conversations around this topic and to approach it in some new and hopefully innovative ways. As a possible part of that process, perhaps we could look at holding a colloquium combined with a practice forum in which law firms, law schools, and others could focus on identifying ways of providing support to African American lawyers who seek to became partners at law firms or move up the ranks in the Corporate Counsel's Department.

n that connection, I want to direct attention to note that appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Volume 120, June 2007. The Note was entitled "A Proposal For Law Schools To Combat Structural Discrimination At Law Firms Through Management Based Regulation".1

The Note begins by stating the following: "Although women and minorities are no longer excluded from jobs by law or overt discrimination, significant barriers continue to preclude full workplace equality for these groups. The legal profession in particular lacks gender and racial parity as women and minorities remain dramatically underrepresented in senior positions and as importantly may be getting less out of their jobs than their white male counterparts. Despite these significant disparities, there is no clear consensus on how to progress toward full workplace equality or on what such equality would look like. Recently, a growing number of employment law scholars have suggested that persistent inequality may result from 'structural' forces in workplaces that impose real but unseen barriers on achievement by women and minorities. These scholars argue that traditional antidiscrimination law is focused on overt, animus-based discrimination, and is therefore insufficient to address more subtle and generally unintentional structural sources of ongoing inequality. A new regulatory tool, sometimes called management-based regulation might better address the complex problem of structural discrimination."1

"We may want to look having a forum or colloquium to discuss this issue, and I hope that the deans of our State's law schools, members of other minority bar associations, the State Bar Association, managing partners in our state's law firms, Director's of Diversity in law firms, practitioners, law students, management consultants, and other organizations committed to and interested in diversity would be among those interested in such an forum or colloquium. Since some larger firms not only have offices in New Jersey but also in New York, there might even be an opportunity to examine this type of challenging opportunity there as well as here."

The GSBA is a great organization and I believe it has a great future. With vigilance and determination, we will always be ready to respond to the challenges of leadership in the legal profession. During my tenure as your President I think we have responded to those challenges, and you have been the wind beneath GSBA's wings, taking us up to higher ground.

Looking Forward

A Yoruba proverb observes: "When the door closes, you must learn to slide across the crack of the sill." The comedienne Jackie 'Moms" Mabley observed: "If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got." Demosthenes once observed that "small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises." Think about these three observations. Each one contains some wisdom that applies to life and business, and particularly to how we can approach change, challenge, and opportunity If we conceive, then believe we can achieve and accomplish more together than any of us can accomplish separately. Someone once observed :"Belief is the knowledge that we can do something. It's the inner feeling that what we undertake, we can accomplish. For the most part, all of us have the ability to look at something and to know whether or not we can do it. So in belief, there is power: our eyes are opened; our opportunities become plain; our visions become realities." We need to remember that delay comes from looking back, defeat comes from looking down, distraction comes from looking around, deliverance comes from looking up and determination comes from looking forward. The past is prologue. The best is yet to come.

Thank you.