The Great Eight

Candace Jay Heisler is a graduate of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (now UC Law San Francisco). She served as an Assistant District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco for more than twenty-five years, heading the office’s Domestic Violence Unit — which handled both domestic violence and elder abuse cases — as well as its Charging, Misdemeanor, and Preliminary Hearing Units. For more than two decades she also taught as an adjunct professor of law at Hastings.

After retiring from the District Attorney’s Office, she became a nationally recognized trainer and consultant on elder abuse and domestic violence, developing curricula for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, the American Bar Association, and the California courts, and teaching for the National Institute for the Prosecution of Elder Abuse. She co-authored Elder Abuse Detection and Intervention: A Collaborative Approach and co-authored and co-edited Ethics and Vulnerable Elders (2019).

Her career of protecting society’s most vulnerable began in the same spirit that made her a founding director of the Queen’s Bench Foundation and part of its earliest work on behalf of victims of violence.

Nancy Lee Hersh earned her B.A. from the University of California and her J.D. from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. With her father, LeRoy Hersh (1920–2003), she co-founded the San Francisco plaintiffs’ firm Hersh & Hersh. As one of the first women to specialize in personal-injury and pharmaceutical litigation, she took on groundbreaking cases on behalf of women’s health, including the DES litigation and the first diet-drug (Fen-Phen) case filed and settled.

In 1984, according to her firm, she became the first attorney in the nation to win a case contending that breast implants cause immune-system disease, when a San Francisco federal jury awarded $1.7 million against Dow Corning Corporation. In 2010 she received the San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award — the first time the honor had gone to a woman trial lawyer. She has been named to the Lawdragon 500, recognized repeatedly as a Northern California Super Lawyer, listed by the Daily Journal among the Top 50 Women Litigators in California, and has served in the leadership of the American Board of Trial Advocates.

She was a founding director of the Queen’s Bench Foundation — an early expression of the advocacy for women’s health and dignity that came to define her career.

Mildred W. Levin was a member of the UC Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco) Class of 1934. She entered law school at age nineteen and graduated in the top ten percent of her class as one of only four women. She served as President of the Queen’s Bench Bar Association in 1959 and remained a fierce advocate for women’s rights throughout a legal career spanning six decades.

In People v. Rincon-Pineda (1975), she appeared before the California Supreme Court as an amicus curiae, objecting to the centuries-old jury instruction that “rape is a charge easily made and difficult to defend against.” The Court’s unanimous decision abolished the cautionary instruction — making California the first state in the nation to do so — in the very year the Queen’s Bench Foundation’s rape research was underway.

She was the matriarch of three generations of women lawyers: her daughter, Judge Ina Levin Gyemant (Queen’s Bench president, 1979), and her granddaughter, Anne Gyemant Paris (Queen’s Bench president, 2017), both also graduates of UC Law San Francisco. The Mildred W. Levin Scholarship at UC Law SF honors her legacy. A founding director of the Queen’s Bench Foundation, she died in 1997.

Lee Penland French served as President of the Queen’s Bench Bar Association in 1955. An active San Francisco Bay Area attorney, she was a fixture of the Queen’s Bench community’s professional and civic life through the 1950s and beyond, including its annual activities at the State Bar convention. Nearly two decades after her presidency, she joined seven colleagues as a founding director of the Queen’s Bench Foundation — a testament to a lifetime of service to the association.

Jettie Pierce Selvig (December 16, 1932 – February 25, 2022) was born in Van Buren County, Arkansas, the daughter of sharecropper farmers, and rose from humble beginnings to a distinguished legal career. She earned her law degree at the University of Arkansas and was admitted to the California Bar (State Bar No. 31989). Arriving in San Francisco, she began as a legal secretary to the legendary trial lawyer Melvin Belli, with whom she forged a lifelong professional relationship.

She built a practice spanning workers’ compensation, probate, and personal injury, and her San Francisco Chronicle obituary remembered her as “one of the finest lawyers in her field of supporting injured workers.” She held numerous executive positions in state and national legal organizations, and in People v. Rincon-Pineda (1975) she appeared as an amicus curiae — alongside fellow founder Mildred W. Levin — in the case that abolished California’s cautionary jury instruction in rape trials.

She served as President of the Queen’s Bench Bar Association in 1975, the very year the Foundation’s rape victimization research was published, and was a founding director of the Queen’s Bench Foundation. She passed away at her family home in Mill Valley at the age of eighty-nine.

The Honorable Agnes O’Brien Smith was a member of the University of San Francisco School of Law Class of 1941. A pioneering trial lawyer, she became the first woman named to the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) and took part in the formative years of the organization’s San Francisco chapter. She served as President of the Queen’s Bench Bar Association in 1951, and from 1970 to 1978 she sat as a judge of the Municipal Court of the City and County of San Francisco.

While on the bench, she joined seven Queen’s Bench colleagues as a founding director of the Queen’s Bench Foundation. Her memory is honored by the Hon. Agnes O’Brien Smith Scholarship, endowed by the Queen’s Bench Bar Association at USF Law, which remembers her as “an admired jurist and lawyer.”

Dagny K. Winkler was a Bay Area attorney active in Queen’s Bench during the 1970s and one of the eight founding directors of the Queen’s Bench Foundation. Her name closes the Foundation’s original roll of directors — eight women whose shared conviction created an institution devoted to research and education in defense of human and civil rights.