From left to right: Judge Jerome Frank, Carmel Ebb, Judge Augustus Hand and Lawrence Ebb at the Ebbs' wedding reception. Courtesy photo.

Carmel Ebb, believed to be the first female to clerk for a federal appeals court judge, died in Maryland on Feb. 10 at age 94, leaving a legacy as a pioneering lawyer who overcame barriers that made a career in the law difficult for women.

According to her obituary, Ebb—then Carmel Prashker—finished first in her class at Columbia Law School in 1945. Nonetheless, she wrote in an ABA Journal article last year, “female graduates couldn't expect to be recommended as law clerks to sitting judges, no matter how well their records stacked up against their male classmates.”

One of her sons, Peter Ebb, a partner at Ropes & Gray in Boston, said this week that Carmel Ebb entered the legal profession in “an environment in which women (including my mother) were, literally, chased around desks by male professionals with relative impunity.”

But an article in the Saturday Evening Post by the acclaimed Judge Jerome Frank of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York inspired her. He wrote that women were as intellectually competent as men, and that there was no reason not to hire a woman for a job that was viewed as man's work.

That emboldened her to apply for a clerkship with Frank, and he hired her. There she met her future husband, Lawrence Ebb, who was clerking for another Second Circuit judge, Augustus Hand. Coincidentally, not long before she went to work for Frank, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas hired Lucile Lomen to be the first woman to clerk at the high court.

After her clerkship on the Second Circuit, Carmel Ebb's husband went on to clerk for Chief Justice Fred Vinson in Washington. She followed suit, and interviewed with an unnamed Supreme Court justice for a clerkship.

It went well, but as her obituary put it, “Her hopes were dashed when the justice concluded their conversation by saying he had no doubt she would be a fine clerk, but that his wife would never allow him to work in such close proximity to a woman.”

Her son, Peter Ebb, declined to name the justice, explaining that his mother “wasn't interested in maligning people.”

Undeterred, Carmel Ebb landed jobs at the Atomic Energy Commission and other federal agencies where women were more welcomed. She went on to work in private practice at firms in New York, becoming a partner in one firm—a rare achievement for a woman. She stayed active in the law through her 80s.

Peter Ebb said his mother's long career as a lawyer was largely unheralded. “She thought it was foolishness” to be described as a trailblazer, Ebb said. She would downplay all that, he said, instead just saying, “I got very lucky.”