Shirley A. Siegel Papers

Shirley Adelson Siegel was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1918. She attended Barnard College from 1933 to 1937. Through a New Deal program called the National Youth Administration, Siegel was given the opportunity to work for an organization called the New York Legislative Service, on the topic of housing. This opportunity shaped Siegel’s professional interests, and she would continue to work on housing justice issues for much of her career. When she attended Yale Law School in 1938 as the only woman in her class, her interest in housing issues was supported by the faculty there.

Upon finishing her law degree, after experiencing significant discrimination for being a woman and Jewish, Siegel became the first female lawyer at the firm Proskauer, Rose & Paskus. She continued her work on housing issues, volunteering for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Citizen’s Housing Council. In 1959, she was approached by the New York State Attorney General to organize a civil rights bureau, where her early work was focused on local labor unions and equal rights to apprenticeship opportunities. Shirley Siegel also served as general counsel of the Housing and Development Administration, and in 1979 she was appointed as the New York State Solicitor General.

Following her professional work as a practicing lawyer, Siegel went on to teach land use planning law at Columbia University, and state and local government law at Cardozo Law School and Fordham Law School. She retired from teaching in 2004, at the age of 86. However, in 2008, she became active in housing law again, through the New York City Bar Justice Center, where she does pro bono legal work for the Lawyers Foreclosure Network, a group that provides legal assistance to low-income homeowners facing foreclosure.