"I've been doing these conventions for 20 years, and we used to at least have debates about issues. Nothing is happening basically at this convention, other than speeches." -- Susan Estrich
Susan Estrich (born December 16, 1952) is an American lawyer, professor, author, political operative, feminist advocate, and political commentator for Fox News.
"A lot of Republicans are white Christians, but the Republican Party is reaching out to Hispanics, and reaching out to blacks, and reaching out to Asians.""Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.""But here's my point to the LA Times. If you had a serious story to run, if you thought there was serious misconduct, you don't wait until the Thursday before the Tuesday. You run it early.""Everybody knows I'm a Democrat.""Gore will not win a popularity contest, he will not win a personality contest, but he can win an idealogical battle, and he can win a battle of experience.""Gore's problem is that the issues are all on his side.""I don't like cheap shots, I really don't.""I'm always suspicious of really beautiful women telling us we shouldn't be worried about beauty.""Most people don't know who Ken Mehlman is. He's the chairman of the Republican Party, obviously, but what he's doing that Howard Dean isn't doing is spending a lot of time on the nuts and bolts of putting the party together.""People don't vote for vice president, they vote for president.""So many of us had hoped that the civil system might be an alternative for some women, where the burdens were a little bit less, and cases might be easier to prove.""The Democratic chairman doesn't need to be a household name. Most people didn't know who Ron Brown was when he was chairman of the Democratic Party, but he put the party in a position where Bill Clinton could come in and he had a solid base to run from.""The Olympics are coming... and it's a big problem in American politics, because the problem with holding the Olympics this fall is that we're all going to be focused on the Olympics, and it makes that window of opportunity for Gore to win the election that much smaller.""This isn't really a convention, This is really an infomercial. And every night we'll have a different infomercial and people view it with a certain level of cynicism.""When you're standing in front of an audience like this that is so enthusiastic and so much behind you, it is very hard to give a bad speech. Even a bad speech sounds good in a convention hall like this.""Women are not required in general to be named in rape cases because of the stigmas that go with being a rape complainant, and frankly, special burdens that rape complainants often face."
Estrich was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in Marblehead on the Massachusetts North Shore, where she attended the Eveleth School.
Estrich graduated from Wellesley College in 1974, and received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1977. In 1976, Estrich was elected the first female president/editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review.
Estrich served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1988, she was the campaign manager for Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential run.
Estrich appears frequently on Fox News as a legal and political analyst, and has also substituted for Alan Colmes on the debate show Hannity & Colmes. She writes regular articles for NewsMax, for which she is a pundit. She is also on the Board of Editorial Contributors for USA Today. She is currently a law professor at the University of Southern California Law School and a political science professor at its affiliated undergraduate school. Before joining the USC faculty in 1989, she was Professor of Law at Harvard University, where she was the youngest woman to receive tenure. On January 10, 2008, Estrich joined Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, a law firm based in Los Angeles.
In several of her books, including Sex & Power and The Case for Hillary Clinton, Estrich discusses her experience as a survivor of rape. Her book Real Rape talks about the history of rape law in the United States. In 2004, Estrich challenged Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley for under-representing women on the editorial page.
Estrich was very outspoken during the 2008 presidential race, particularly on the subject of women in politics in light of the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Estrich supported Clinton in the Democratic primaries, but was strongly critical of Palin.
In 1986, Estrich married screenwriter, professor and former speechwriter Marty Kaplan, with whom she has a daughter, Isabel, and a son, James. They have since divorced. She is Jewish, having been Bat Mitzvahed at Temple Israel in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and has written about her religion in her column.
