A Champion of Access to Justice: The Oral History of Katherine A. Mazzaferri
For thirty-five years, Katherine A. Mazzaferri shaped the D.C. Bar into one of the nation’s most comprehensive legal professional organizations—and her newly available oral history offers an intimate account of that transformation. Recorded as part of the D.C. Circuit Historical Society’s Oral History Program, this remarkable narrative spans a career devoted to access to justice, gender equity, and service to the client community.
Mazzaferri’s path to legal leadership was anything but conventional. A Latin-American Literature major at New York University, she chose law school at George Washington University with a singular purpose: “I really wanted to make a difference in the community.” She made good on that promise from her very first days at GW Law, where she helped establish a Women and the Law course and co-founded the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, serving as its second president.
Her early career took her through some of the most consequential civil rights venues of the era. As a trial attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she fought gender and racial discrimination under often harrowing conditions. At the League of Women Voters Education Fund, she won landmark regulations requiring affirmative action for women in the construction industry. Later, at the Federal Trade Commission, she engaged in complex rulemaking to establish new legal standards—gaining hard-won insight into the difficulty of translating policy ideals into enforceable law.
The centerpiece of the oral history is Mazzaferri’s three and a half decades leading the D.C. Bar, first as Executive Director and then as Chief Executive Officer. Under her stewardship, the Bar evolved from a fledgling organization into a model of professional services, legal education, and diversity. Her crowning achievement was building the Bar’s Pro Bono Center into a nationally recognized program. Upon her retirement, Bar leaders honored her legacy by establishing the Katherine A. Mazzaferri Emerging Legal Needs Fund for the Pro Bono Center.
For judges, lawyers, and historians interested in the evolution of the D.C. legal community, bar leadership, and the ongoing struggle for equal access to justice, this oral history is essential reading. It is available here through the D.C. Circuit Historical Society’s Oral History collection.