Eleanor Swift

Born in Washington, DC on October 16, 1945, Eleanor Bowne Swift joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 1979, where she quickly distinguished herself as a beloved teacher, a pathbreaking scholar, and a trailblazer for women in academia. Among her many professional accolades, Swift received the Law School’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction in 1998 and UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2000, the highest teaching awards in the department and on campus. As a sign of her former students’ enduring affection, the Law School Alumni Association honored Swift with the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. In 2022, in recognition of her contributions to the field of evidence, the Association of American Law Schools’ Evidence Section bestowed upon Swift its highest honor, the John Henry Wigmore Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Swift grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, where she served as president of the Student Council. She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College where she joined the Harvard Crimson and wrote editorials about the Vietnam War and social justice. Swift was one of only eight women in her entering class of 170 students at Yale Law School, where she later served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating from Yale, Swift clerked for Judge Joseph Blumenfeld on the U.S. District Court in Connecticut and for Judge David Bazelon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She then practiced law at Vinson & Elkins in Houston for five years before coming to Berkeley.

Swift was the fifth woman hired on the Law School’s faculty. In 1987, after the faculty denied her tenure, Swift filed a sex discrimination grievance, which led to a landmark settlement. As her colleague and friend Professor Steve Bundy JD ‘78 recalled about the time, “When Eleanor joined the faculty, there were few women and the culture of the senior faculty was sexist and unwelcoming to women. Drawing on her remarkable internal resources and her skills as a litigator, Eleanor filed a privilege and tenure grievance against the Law School and prevailed when a review panel found that her scholarship was of comparable quantity and quality to men who had been recently granted tenure. The success of her claim helped to trigger a reexamination of gender discrimination in the Law School and across the campus. For this alone, she was and remains a heroic figure to me and to so many others.” Swift chronicled her battle for intramural recognition in a moving law review essay, Becoming a Plaintiff, 4 Berkeley Women’s L.J. 245 (1989).

The University awarded Swift tenure in 1989. Gracious, forgiving, and resilient, Swift returned to the Law School, where she flourished for another 25 years, becoming an eminent scholar in evidence, particularly on the law of hearsay. She co-authored an Evidence casebook and McCormick’s Treatise on Evidence, and she twice chaired the AALS Evidence Section. Swift served as Associate Dean under Herma Hill Kay, where she was instrumental in founding two of the Law School’s signature programs, the Center for Clinical Education and the Center for Social Justice.

According to Swift’s husband, Professor of Law Emeritus Robert Cole, “what most defined her career were her dedication to the clinical program and social justice, her teaching, her inspiration of women students, her counseling of other women who had been denied tenure, and her mentoring of junior women colleagues.” Indeed, the clinical program now provides hands-on legal training to hundreds of students each year who in turn serve the unmet legal needs of clients locally, nationally, and internationally.

But Berkeley was not always a leader in the clinical field. As Clinical Professor of Law Emerita Carolyn Patty Blum reminisced, “Eleanor helped give me a home at Berkeley Law. I was a very young clinician, and there were scant few of us back in the 1980s, and Eleanor was our champion. She was the muscle behind the fight for a real clinical education and experiential learning program. The amount of time, work, massaging, cajoling and advocating she had to do to help birth the Center for Clinical Education was mind-boggling. But she persevered … there was never any question she would.”

In response to the devastating impact at the Law School of the UC Regents’ resolution SP-1, which in 1996 abolished affirmative action at the University, and Proposition 209, which abolished it in all State agencies the following year, Swift created the Center for Social Justice with Professors Angela Harris and Rachel Moran. The Center was crucial for attracting and supporting students of color and other students who wanted to use the law to fight poverty and racism. The Center, now named for distinguished federal judge and Berkeley Law alumnus Thelton E. Henderson JD ‘62, thrives to this day. Henderson Center Executive Director Savala Nolan JD ‘11 fondly recalled, “Eleanor was not only a beloved member of our advisory council, she was one of the Center’s founders. Her legacy makes my heart crack open—to think of the thousands and thousands of students who’ve been nurtured, challenged, and gone on to do good because of Eleanor.” In a fitting tribute to Swift’s contributions, each year the Law School presents the Eleanor Swift Award for Public Service to exceptional members of the Berkeley Law community (faculty, staff, or students) who strengthen its commitment to public service.

Swift’s mentorship of younger colleagues, especially women, has also left an indelible mark at Berkeley and beyond. On Swift’s passing, Berkeley Law Professor Andrea Roth wrote, “Like so many others, I can attribute a significant amount of any success I have as a teacher and scholar to Eleanor’s courage, generosity, and kindness.” Former Berkeley colleague and current NYU Law Professor Erin Murphy added, “As if her brilliance and kindness were not enough, all the juniors were also in awe of her effortless cool as every morning she jumped off her Vespa, impeccably dressed with each strand of hair perfectly in place. She was funny, strong, smart, generous with her time, and had a deep sense of purpose. She loved Berkeley so much that even when it mistreated her, she found the resolve to make it a better place rather than walk away, which served as an inspiration to so many of us junior women.”

In 2011, prior to her retirement from teaching in 2014, Swift was elected President of the Women’s Faculty Club, a unique and important century-old campus institution that was founded because women were not allowed in the Men’s Faculty Club. It remains the only women’s faculty club in the country with its own building. Swift devoted herself to the Club, with all her remarkable talents, for the next eight years, among many other things leading its successful capital campaign to raise over a million dollars to ensure that it continues to thrive in its second century. The centerpiece of the campaign was an outdoor patio, which the Club has named for her.

Swift passed away on September 20, 2023. She is survived by her husband of more than 40 years, Professor of Law Emeritus Robert Cole; her son, Ben Glass, his wife Noa Levy, and their daughter Ella; stepson Adam Cole; stepdaughter Felicia Cole, her husband Dean Amundson, and their daughters Abby and Talia Cole; and stepdaughter Sarah Cole, her husband Martin Vogelbaum, and their children Freddie and Anna Vogelbaum.

Jeffrey Selbin