The Suffolk University Law School community will gather at the Boston Park Plaza to celebrate Suffolk Law’s women trailblazers on Thursday, November 15. The event, All Rise: Uniting to Advance Women and the Future of Law, is bringing together Suffolk Law alumnae to celebrate their impact in the world.

Recently retired Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court Linda Stewart Dalianis JD '74, and Deborah Marson JD’78, General Counsel of Iron Mountain, will be honored with the school’s Marian Archer Trailblazer Award. The award is named after Marian Archer JD ’37, the first woman to graduate from Suffolk Law.

Suffolk Law Professors Karen Blum and Ilene Seidman will receive the Catherine T. Judge Teaching & Service Award. In 1967, Catherine Judge, the namesake of the award, became the first woman to join Suffolk Law’s faculty. Proceeds from the event will fund a scholarship program in Judge’s name.

The keynote address will be delivered by the president-elect of the American Bar Association Judy Perry Martinez. Martinez, Of Counsel at Simon, Peragine, Smith & Redfearn in New Orleans, will become president of the American Bar Association’s more than 400,000-members in August 2019.

Learn more about the above and other speakers.

“We are excited to celebrate just a few of the many women who have done so much to change the legal landscape. We are also delighted that the money raised at the event will support the next generation of Suffolk Law student leaders as they blaze their own trails,” said Suffolk Law Dean Andrew Perlman.

Chief Justice Dalianis has achieved many New Hampshire legal milestones. She became the first woman judge on the Superior Court in 1980, the first woman appointed chief justice of that court in 2000, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court the same year, and the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 2010.

Marson is general counsel of Iron Mountain, a document and records management corporation that serves more than 225,000 organizations around the world, with a real estate network of more than 85 million square feet spanning 50 countries. Earlier in her career, Marson opened the Gillette Company’s first legal offices in Asia and Latin America. Over the course of her tenure at Gillette, she served as counsel to each of the five Gillette businesses and concluded her time there as the head lawyer for all of the businesses.

Clinical Professor Seidman, the faculty director and co-creator of the award-winning Accelerator-to-Practice Program, was instrumental in the founding of the Victim Rights Law Center, a first-in-the-nation provider of legal services for victims of sexual assault. Professor Seidman served as Associate Director of Clinical Programs (2006-2010) and became the first clinical faculty member to serve as the Law School’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (2010—2016).

Professor Blum, a renowned expert in federal civil rights litigation, has regularly trained federal judges in the intricacies of that field of law and taught at the Law School for more than 40 years. She pioneered Suffolk Law’s First-Year Summer Internship Program, which places students in internships with judges during the summer after the first year of law school. The program started with just a few students and now places more than 100 Suffolk Law students each year.