Both the federal judiciary and Harvard Law School were male-dominated institutions when, as a second-year law student, I first encountered Shirley Hufstedler in the fall of 1971. Judge Hufstedler was the only woman sitting on a United States Court of Appeals anywhere in the country and only the second woman ever to do so: Florence Ellinwood Allen was the first, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. There were, of course, no women on the United States Supreme Court; although there were a handful of women serving on the federal district courts, none was on the bench in any of the states within the Ninth Circuit.