Women's Law Group to Sponsor Radcliffe Session on Law Careers

The Harvard Women's Law Association is sponsoring the first annual Radcliffe Conference on "Law as a Career for Women" to encourage more women to apply to the Law School.

Only eight to ten per cent of the 1800 students presently at the Law School are women.

Myra Karstadt, resident tutor in Currier House and one of the organizers of the conference, said yesterday that she "got the impression from the admissions office that if more women apply to law school, more women will be accepted."

The Conference is scheduled for February 27 at Currier House and will consist-of speeches followed by group seminars. Among the scheduled speakers is President-elect Derek C. Bok, dean of the Law School.

The number of women accepted at the Law School for 1971-72 has already increased by about three per cent over this year, according to Russell A. Simpson, director of admissions. Simpson foresees the possibility that the total percentages of women accepted by March will constitute 15 per cent of the student body.

The Law School has had trouble in the past keeping the women it accepts Of the 83 women accepted last year, only 45 registered-a withdrawal rate of 46 per cent. In 1969, 49 per cent of the women accepted failed to register.

Sixteen out of 44 Radcliffe applicants were accepted at the Law School last year, but only eight enrolled.

Simpson said that the ratio of women who turn down Harvard in lieu of other law schools is "no higher than that of men," and that many women who refuse Harvard "do not go to law school at all."

The Law School Faculty is also taking measures to increase the number of women faculty members. Presently the Law School has no tenured women law professors and only one woman with faculty status.

But one member of the Law School appointment committee said yesterday that the faculty "has issued an invitation to a distinguished woman teacher" from another university to teach a special course on "Women and the Laws" to second and third-year students.

He said that the faculty has "become interested in finding women members of the faculty," adding that "there isn't a large pool of excellent women law students who are interested in a scholarly life."

Part of the reason for this, he asserted, was that women have "no models of women faculty members at Harvard." The Law School began to accept women students in 1951.

Only recently has the "lack of women faculty members been perceived as a problem," he commented, adding that the increase in women law students would probably soon be reflected in the number of women on the Law School faculty.