User:Lagrange613/Molly Munger

Molly Munger (born 1948) is an American lawyer and political activist.

Personal life
Molly Munger was born in 1948, the second child of lawyer and investor Charlie Munger, who would go on to fame as the longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and his first wife, Nancy Huggins Munger. The family lived in Pasadena, California. In 1955, when Molly was seven years old, her older brother Teddy died of leukemia at age nine. Molly has a younger sister, Wendy Munger.

In 1953, her parents divorced. Her mother remained in Pasadena and married Bob Freeman, a radiologist who had been one of Teddy's doctors. Freeman had children from a prior marriage, but they were much older than Molly. Molly's father moved to Los Angeles and married divorcee Nancy Borthwick, who became known as Nancy Barry Munger. Molly's stepmother had two children from a prior marriage, and she and Molly's father went on to have four more. Among them was Charles Munger Jr.

During her time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Munger dated William Weld, future governor of Massachusetts. Munger overlapped with Stephen English at Harvard Law School, but they did not meet until later, when they were both working at the Los Angeles law firm of Agnew, Miller & Carlson. Munger and English married and had two children, Nick and Alfred, in the early 1980s. They live in Pasadena.

Munger was raised "casually high Protestant". She and English were married in a Unitarian church. Their children were baptized in the Church of the Brethren, English's family's tradition. While living in Pasadena, they began attending St. Bede the Venerable Roman Catholic Church, and eventually converted to Catholicism.

Education
Munger's mother and stepfather sent her initially to the Westridge School for Girls, a private school in Pasadena. However, at her request, she began attending public school beginning in eighth grade, ultimately graduating from Pasadena's John Muir High School in 1966. She then attended Radcliffe College, nominally a women's college in Cambridge but by that time a de facto component of Harvard College. There she majored in economics. Later she reported having had to battle "the stereotype of the 'California airhead'" at Radcliffe, recalling in particular one occasion in which an economics professor wrote on her exam paper, "I guess you're not such a dumb blonde after all."

Munger then enrolled at Harvard Law School. This was a transformative time for women at Harvard Law: when Munger's class entered in the fall of 1971, it was the first time the student body comprised more than 10% women. (The proportion would increase to over one-third by 1984.) There were no tenured or tenure-track female professors. Munger helped two classmates organize and teach a not-for-credit Women in the Law course after Dean Derek Bok rejected their request for a for-credit course. (The next year, the new dean, Albert Sacks, approved the course.) Munger graduated from law school in 1974.

Legal career
After graduating from Harvard Law, Munger returned to Southern California, joining the Los Angeles corporate law firm of Agnew, Miller & Carlson. She was the firm's first female employee. She became a litigator, drawn to the complexity of the work and the opportunity to make a mark in a male-dominated legal specialty. She left Agnew, Miller & Carlson to join the United States Attorney's office. She intended to work there for three years, but ended up staying for five years to complete a particularly complicated tax fraud prosecution.

In 1983, Munger left the U.S. Attorney's office. Together with Lourdes Baird, who was also also leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, and one other woman, she founded the firm of Baird, Munger & Myers, the only female-only corporate law firm in Los Angeles. By 1988, Baird was a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, and Munger's other partner was trying to become a judge. Facing the departure of both her partners, Munger joined Fried Frank as a partner in their Los Angeles office, focused on litigation in the aerospace industry. While at Fried Frank, she served as president of the Federal Bar Association of Los Angeles.

In 1992, riots broke out in Los Angeles. The riots constituted the worst episode of domestic unrest in the United States since the Civil War and exposed serious racial fissures in the region. Munger was conscious of racial disparities within Pasadena due to her family's close relationships with some members of the local black community. Her alarm increased in 1993, when she volunteered at John Muir High School and discovered that many programs and amenities had been eliminated as the nonwhite student population had increased in the decades since she had attended. Eager to do something more substantial about such problems, she applied to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She started there in the spring of 1994 and focused initially on law enforcement issues, particularly police brutality.

Soon, though, Munger was spending more of her time on Proposition 209, a ballot proposition scheduled to appear before California voters in the November 1996 elections. Proposition 209, called the California Civil Rights Initiative by its backers, aimed to amend the Constitution of California to bar consideration of race, sex, or ethnicity by the state government in various contexts. The proposition was a threat to affirmative action in California. Munger and Constance L. Rice, the co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Los Angeles office, headed an effort opposing the amendment, quickly finding allies among feminist groups. As they tried to recruit the state Democratic Party, whose resources they would need to prevail, they found themselves battling other factions within the party that wanted to avoid affirmative action as an issue or sponsor a competing proposition that would scale back affirmative action less radically. Munger and Rice pressed their case privately with Democratic leaders and at the state party convention in Sacramento in April 1995. As the election approached in 1996, Munger split with the feminist groups who had been early allies in hopes of attracting donations from the Democratic Party and unions wary of being connected publicly to the feminist groups' media tactics. But the donations arrived only in October, the month before the election. Munger also sought donations from business leaders in California, but Governor Pete Wilson discouraged businesses from working against Proposition 209, sometimes threatening to use state power against them. Munger continued to organize and headline opposition events. In the end, though, voters passed Proposition 209, 54%–46%.

Munger and Rice left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and in the spring of 1998 they founded the Advancement Project. English joined them there the following year.

Political activity
In 2010, Munger and her father were financial backers of Measure CC, which would have raised $7.1 million for the Pasadena Unified School District through a parcel tax of $120 per parcel in Pasadena, Altadena, and Sierra Madre. At the time the school district's budget deficit was $23 million, mostly due to state budget cuts. In the May 2010 vote, 54% voted for the measure, falling short of the two-thirds majority required to raise taxes.

Munger was the primary financial backer of Proposition 38, a 2012 California ballot proposition to increase state taxes and use the revenue to fund education. Munger estimated the measure would generate $10 billion in annual revenue. The measure clashed with that same year's Proposition 30, a similar effort backed by Governor Jerry Brown. Concerned that having multiple, similar plans on the ballot could prevent any of them from passing, Brown put political pressure on Munger and on the California Federation of Teachers, which was backing a third plan, to drop their efforts. By March 2012, the CFT had merged their initiative into Brown's, but Munger had rejected personal appeals from Brown and Anne Gust Brown, the governor's wife and de facto chief of staff. As the campaign continued, Munger continued to resist pressure from the governor's office, California's U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and California State Senate president pro tempore Darrell Steinberg. Voters approved Proposition 30 and rejected Proposition 38.