RIP to lawyer Eleanor Jackson Piel, one of the "Nuremberg Women"
Eleanor Jackson Piel, 102, died last Saturday. Her brilliant career as a civil rights lawyer shines brightly in her New York Times obituary. Less prominent there is her place among what I’ve come to call, in my research and writing, “Nuremberg Women” – the lawyers and other women professionals who worked at the post-World War II war crimes trials, at Nuremberg and beyond.
At the time of the 15 April 1946 Los Angeles Times photo spread above, she was “Miss Eleanor Jackson,” colleague of the other 4 U.S. lawyers pictured, all at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. At first Jackson – Berkeley J.D.’43 and former federal law clerk – was eager to join the prosecution staff. But her stay was brief, as I wrote in “Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal,” a 2020 essay about her and several others:
“[I]n a 2009 interview, Jackson recalled her disappointment in the tasks assigned, in MacArthur’s decision not to prosecute Hirohito, and in the social scene: ‘Housed in a drafty YWCA in bombed-out Tokyo, she caught diphtheria and worked mainly as a ‘geisha, going to parties and ballroom dancing’ with the assembled dignitaries’. Her dance partners included “Brigadier General John Profumo, then chief of staff to the British Mission in Japan and as yet unsullied by the ‘Profumo Affair’”. The quoted self-reference to “geisha” is jarring, given the tendency of Tokyo occidentals to equate the term with ‘prostitute’. In any event, Jackson quit to work elsewhere in Tokyo, and by 1948 she had opened a solo law practice in Los Angeles. Her storied career representing Black Panthers, death row inmates, civil rights activists, and a Nobel Prize laureate – sometimes at the US Supreme Court – extended into her nineties.”
RIP to a truly amazing, yet too hidden, figure.