Justice is a woman

"Justice is a woman" by Helen Haberman is a novel written in the mid-20th century. It centers on modest attorney Larry Frank and his brilliant, politically connected friend Arthur H. Bemrose, a famed trial lawyer shaped by the late Judge Haynes. Set in pre-war New York with Washington always on the line, it blends legal strategy, ambition, and media scrutiny with fraught relationships, notably Bemrose’s charged attraction to journalist Janice Baldwin and the quieter troubles of Iowa-born Lucy McVail.

The opening of the novel follows Larry into the reverent, marble-trimmed offices once ruled by Judge Haynes, where he meets Tim Hoxter and Tim’s young friend Lucy, whose inheritance dispute Bemrose agrees to untangle. Through flashbacks and office talk, we see Bemrose’s rise from Haynes’s protégé to a lawyer courted by the Attorney-General, his careful handling of clients, and his curious reluctance to bill big winners. A night at Danny’s bar shows Arthur unsettled by Janice Baldwin’s incisive article invoking Haynes and the Supreme Court, and by his own resistance to “brainy” women, even as a Storey household party pulls him deeper into her orbit. Larry offers to shoulder Lucy’s case, then visits her neat but threadbare West End Avenue home, explains the settlement she’ll sign, and quietly notes her gentle composure—and her warm rapport with coworker Phil Kenyon—against a backdrop of talk about Lend-Lease. Tension peaks at a Downtown Law Club lunch, where Janice announces plans to return to England, Arthur frets over a Washington bill and control, and a barbed exchange drives Larry to walk out. These scenes set the triangle of loyalties and the novel’s core concerns—law, power, and personal conscience—before the larger world crisis fully breaks in. (This is an automatically generated summary.)