Papers of Justine Wise Polier, 1892-2015

Justine Wise Polier, judge and authority on juvenile justice, was the daughter of Stephen Samuel and Louise (Waterman) Wise. Both parents were strong influences on their daughter: Stephen Wise was an inspirational reform rabbi, founder of the U.S. Free Synagogue, a leader of the U.S. Zionist movement, and active in social and labor reform; Louise Wise, social worker and painter, was the founder of Louise Wise Services, a social service agency.

Polier was born on April 12, 1903, in Portland, Oregon, where her father was rabbi, and grew up in New York City. She attended Bryn Mawr (1920-1922) and Radcliffe (1922-1923), and received her A.B. from Barnard (1924). She worked in a textile mill in Passaic, New Jersey, to experience factory life first-hand, took part in a union drive and strike, and left the mill when she was blacklisted by her employer. She studied briefly at the International Labor Office in Geneva (1924-1925) and visited and wrote about the Soviet Union. She then entered Yale Law School, was editor of the Yale Law Review, and received her LL.B in 1928. She married (1927) one of her professors, Leon Tulin; they had one son, Stephen Wise Tulin. After her husband's death in 1932, she married (ca.1936) Shad Polier; they had two children: Trudy (Hess Bradley) Festinger and Jonathan Wise Polier.

In an oral history interview, Polier recalled that she had attended Yale not because she wanted to practice law, but because she was interested in social and labor legislation. At the urging of Franklin Roosevelt, Frances Perkins hired her as Referee (1929-1934), and then Assistant Corporation Counsel (1934-1935) in the Workmen's Compensation Division of the New York State Department of Labor. Her study of workmen's compensation led to changes in the law enabling workers to choose their own physicians, thereby eliminating mismanagement and misuse of funds. In 1935 she was appointed counsel to the New York City Emergency Relief Bureau and to Mayor LaGuardia's Committee on Unemployment Relief. Insisting that public assistance was completely inadequate for the one million unemployed workers in the city, she clashed with General Hugh Johnson, the relief "czar." Later that year she was appointed judge in the New York State Family Court (then the Domestic Relations Court) of the City of New York, the first woman in the state to hold a judicial office higher than that of magistrate.

The court, which was new when Polier joined it, embodied the progressive ideal of paternalistic intervention by the State in what was considered the best interests of children. Polier's tenure on the bench (1935-1973) was consistently inspired by an activist judicial philosophy in which she perceived the court as the best vehicle to assure the welfare of neglected and dependent children. She saw gaps and discrimination in child welfare services and sought to secure nonsectarian and nonsegregated shelters for neglected children, humane detention centers for delinquents, adequate foster homes, youth camps, and expanded psychiatric and clinical services. She pioneered the "treatment method" of juvenile justice, seeing the court not as a means of punishment or part of criminal proceedings, but as an arm of the social services whose goal was to understand, assess, and diagnose the causes of anti-social behavior, and to prescribe remedies. Community organizations alone, she thought, could not be entrusted with this role. In the 1960s and 1970s, Polier's philosophy increasingly fell out of favor with liberals who distrusted authority, were suspicious of paternalism, and focused, according to Polier, more on the rights and less on the needs of children. She believed that critics too often castigated the limited effectiveness of the juvenile courts and the life of barren alienation in juvenile institutions, when they should have concentrated on the deteriorating social and economic conditions, inadequate public education, and poor health services.

While on the court, Polier served on the Committee on Institutions, a standing committee of the Family Court, which investigated New York City's facilities for children, especially those belonging to the Manhattan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She was also a staunch and early champion of the civil rights of Blacks. Finding few facilities that would admit delinquent Black Protestant youths, she helped found Wiltwyck School for Boys, a nonsectarian, interracial training school, and served on its board (1942-1981). In the Skipwith attendance case (1958-1961), Polier found that de facto segregation existed in schools in Harlem and castigated the Board of Education for practicing educational discrimination. She was also one of the initiators of a class action suit (Wilder v. Sugarman, 1971-1978) against all private and public foster care agencies in New York City on the grounds that their policies resulted in a child welfare system that discriminated against Black children. Observers in her court commented on her sensitivity, and her concentration on the needs of the child. She lived up to her claim that justice should not be blindfolded, but observant and quick to respond.

In 1973 Polier retired from the Family Court to devote herself to writing and to reform of juvenile justice on a national scale. As director of the Juvenile Justice Division of the Children's Defense Fund, 1973-1976, she traveled throughout the U.S., speaking, investigating, and giving expert testimony. Her office sponsored major studies: the detention of children in adult jails, the transfer of children from juvenile to adult courts (waivers), and the practice of banishment of children out of state beyond the reach of family members. At her initiative, Children's Defense Fund served as amicus curiae in such lawsuits as Roe v. Norton (1973-1975), concerning misallocation of AFDC (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) funds.

Polier's voluntary activities were closely interconnected with her professional interests. She served on the Joint Commission of the Institute of Judicial Administration and the American Bar Association, which set national standards in the field of juvenile justice, as well as the New York State Committee on Children and the Advisory Review Board on Human Resources for New York City. She chaired the State Committee on Mental Health Services and was president of Louise Wise Services that offered comprehensive services to unmarried mothers. She was president of the American Jewish Congress - Women's Division, on the board of the Field Foundation and the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and member of many other city and state committees. As an associate and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), she worked with her on the Citizens' Committee for Children and the board of Wiltwyck School. Polier was one of a group who tried with Roosevelt's advice, but unsuccessfully, to bring 10,000 German Jewish children to the United States. Roosevelt invited her to join the Office of Civilian Defense, where she served as a volunteer for three months, 1942-1943.

Polier was a prolific writer in the field of juvenile justice, publishing several books: Everybody's Child, Nobody's Child, 1943, Back to What Woodshed, 1956, A View From the Bench, 1964, and Juvenile Justice in Double Jeopardy (posthumous, 1989), and many articles, reports, and speeches. She also wrote and spoke on labor, and race issues, and Israel and the Middle East.

Polier died on July 31, 1987.