Nancy Erika Smith \u201977 has scaled the heights of her profession as a civil rights lawyer who, since the age of 25, has been breaking ground and making news, winning cases for those who face discrimination based on age, race, gender, sexual orientation or disability.<\/p>\n
And as she squares off in court with lawyers who went to institutions like Brown, Columbia and Harvard, she remains proud and appreciative of her degrees from Montclair (Social Work) and Rutgers Law School.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen an adversary feels the need to tell me where they went to college 30 years ago, I always tell them where I went \u2013 starting with Ocean County College. Then I beat them,\u201d Smith told graduates as the Distinguished Speaker for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Commencement last year.<\/p>\n
Smith, who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, is perhaps most famous for her role in the sexual harassment suit that resulted in Roger Ailes being fired from Fox News, but she has many wins in her column starting with\u00a0Slohoda vs. United Parcel Service<\/em>, which ultimately rewrote the law on marital status discrimination.<\/p>\n \u201cIt helped that I didn\u2019t know anything,\u201d says Smith, who pursued an argument for the workplace termination suit that big firm lawyers thought was outrageous. \u201cJon Slohoda was fired from UPS for having a relationship outside his marriage, but he was separated, getting a divorce and not supervising his wife. They fired him because he was an \u2018adulterer.\u2019 Isn\u2019t that marital status discrimination?\u201d<\/p>\n It was a heady start to her career, but it didn\u2019t go to Smith\u2019s head. Coming from a working class background in Keyport, New Jersey, Smith is well grounded. After her father died when she was 15, she and her mother lived in a trailer park in Toms River. Smith started at Ocean County College and ultimately transferred to Montclair as a commuter student when she moved to Parsippany.<\/p>\n Now Smith lives a busy life, rich with court cases, five grown children, nine grandchildren (so far) and a successful law practice with her husband. One secret to her success: \u201cDo your best in everything you do,\u201d she told students last spring. \u201cNever settle for OK.\u201d<\/p>\n But she also says she doesn\u2019t want to play into the Horatio Alger myth.<\/p>\n \u201cVery few people change class in our society,\u201d says Smith. \u201cI\u2019m really eternally grateful to Montclair State, and I really hope that we can invest in public education so that kids don\u2019t leave with debt and they can afford to do public interest work.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think that Montclair doesn\u2019t get enough credit for that,\u201d says Smith. \u201cWe need to really let people know that this is the place where we do public service and train people to do public service.\u201d<\/p>\n She adds, \u201cI appreciate and understand the privilege of an affordable public education that prepared me for a life of meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Mary Barr Mann<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Winning cases for those who face discrimination based on age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":326,"featured_media":211105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-77_alumni-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211104"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211114,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211104\/revisions\/211114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}