A Tribute to Dianne Avery

Dianne Avery has been a part of my experience of the Buffalo Law School since we arrived, separately together, in 1973. As a friend, student, graduate and colleague, Dianne is one of the rocks on which SUNY Buffalo Law has been built. Her thinking and writing about the law of employment discrimination, women’s rights and gender stereotypes is nationally recognized, and her teaching in these fields, as well as labor law, property and federal taxation, has been treasured by students for years. The core of Dianne’s teaching can best be illustrated by her casebook on employment discrimination law written with other members of the Labor Law Group, a collection of scholars who have worked to keep the ideals of the National Labor Relations Act alive for workers everywhere. In this book she has striven hard fairly to present this body of law that she cares so much about and at the same time to make equally clear the ways that this law made life more difficult for individuals in the workplace that we sometimes recognize as “the real world.” Still, I have been regularly unhappy when it was time for my friend to update the casebook. My unhappiness was not because the activity was a waste of Dianne’s time, but because of what the effort took out of her life, a life that many of us enjoyed when she had the time to spare.

Dianne’s scholarship has been marked by the same clarity and concern as her teaching. Whether the topic was assumptions about women and their roles as workers or workers’ alleged propensity toward violence, the disruptiveness of handbilling or the supposed implausibility of female military cadets, Dianne attempted to present clearly the issue as seen from the perspective of those individuals whose lives the law affected. In doing so, she placed front and center her concern for the attempts of workers, or women, or women workers, to better their lives, to secure some measure of dignity, when these aspirations were undermined by unjustified assumptions about humans’ limits or their proper place.

Though necessarily of smaller compass, Dianne brought the same clarity and concern to the scholarly topics that she essayed in the employment discrimination casebook. But not just there. Her name is mentioned numerous times in the first footnote in articles and books written by others, silent testimony to her efforts to bring out the clarity and concern implicit in the scholarship of colleagues and friends, a generosity with her time and talents that all appreciated.

In all of her work Dianne has offered an object lesson in the importance of meticulousness when doing law. She never accepted the standard “Good enough for government work.” From time to time, some of us were inclined to take the quick and dirty approach, but were later thankful that Dianne had bucked our desire to be over and done with a task and forced us to get it done right. For that too we love and miss her.