Jerry Stouck
What those who knew and worked with Janet Benshoof
are saying about her and The Courage of One
"Janet Benshoof was to women’s reproductive rights what Justice Ginsberg was for women’s broader right to equal protection. No lawyer in America did more to protect the core of the rights embodied in Roe v. Wade than Janet Benshoof. And no one is better suited to the task of telling Janet’s story than Jerry Stouck. His brings the experience of a sophisticated litigator to effective use in telling Benshoof’s story about how she battled both her legal adversaries and even some of her allies to protect her clients’ fundamental rights. This is a story of hope and success that needs to be read and understood as our nation gears up for the next round of battles that Benshoof devoted her life to fighting (and for the most part winning).”
--Carter Phillips, Chair Emeritus at international law firm Sidley, who has argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other lawyer in private practice.
“Janet had a brilliant legal mind. I’m very glad Susie and I were able to support her; she changed, for the better, the lives of millions of women.”
--Warren Buffett
“The ideas that drove Janet overlapped with my own deepest beliefs about how everyone deserves protection from unjust treatment and cruel abuse. She had a deep sympathy for people who were vulnerable, and for victimized women in particular. Empowering women and helping them control their own lives was central to her life’s work, as it has been to mine. So we clicked, because we cared deeply about the same things. Beyond that, her passions were coupled with intense intellectual firepower. She was very smart, analytically acute, and persistent. And she also was an enormously kind and generous and open person. She’s unlike any number of cold fish that I’ve known, who believe in human rights in the abstract but don’t seem to like human beings in the concrete. Janet was a warm person, extremely open and welcoming."
--Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus, Harvard Law School
“We still don’t have reproductive freedom worldwide. But I think that Janet’s work helped a great deal in the struggle.”
--Eleanor Smeal, former President of the National Organization for Women