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Professor Marina Angel is a prolific legal scholar who has achieved outstanding professional excellence, distinguishing herself among law school professors and researchers nationwide for her groundbreaking legal scholarship in areas vital to the equal participation of women in society, including legal education, juvenile justice, gender studies, and comparative law.
— Thomas M. Golden, President of the Pennsylvania Bar Association
As a writer, teacher, and scholar, Professor Marina Angel has dedicated herself to improving the status of women and minorities in the legal profession and reforming the profession to make their advancement possible. Even more importantly, she has selflessly devoted herself to aiding countless individual colleagues and students in supporting and counseling them step-by-step along the paths of their careers.
In 1965, Professor Angel earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and began her legal career in 1969, when she received a law degree (magna cum laude) from Columbia Law School. While in law school, Professor Angel worked as a law clerk at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. After graduating, she worked as an attorney for the Philadelphia Voluntary Association and obtained an LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 1973, she served as an associate at Gordon & Schetman, P.C., in New York, where she represented professional unions and handled major sex discrimination cases.
In 1978, Professor Angel joined the faculty of Temple University Law School and immediately began to venture into a previously uncharted territory, as she researched and wrote about women’s legal rights and the status of women in the law. Professor Angel’s writings have focused on sexual harassment, abuse, and violence against women and girls, legal education, criminal law, and labor and employment law.
In her research, she has analyzed the psychiatric and legal issues relating to sexual harassment. She documented, for the first time, the nature and the scope of sexual harassment perpetrated by judges. Later, she focused on abuse and violence against women and girls and the criminal justice system’s responses, analyzing the relationship between gender stereotypes and violence. She has over forty publications to her credit.
In her years at Temple, Professor Angel served as Associate Dean for Graduate Legal Studies and External Programs, directed Temple’s Summer Session Abroad at the University of Athens, and founded and chairs the Pennsylvania and Delaware Valley Women Law Teachers. Also, Professor Angel taught abroad as a visiting law school professor at various universities, including Queensland Institute of Technology and Wollongong University in Australia, Tel Aviv University, the University of Puerto Rico, and Temple University Japan. She continuously mentors many young women and men.
Professor Angel’s service career at Temple University is extensive. At the law school, she chaired several law school committees and served as an advisor to the women’s caucus and law student groups of various ethnic backgrounds. At the university, Professor Angel chaired the Committee on the Status of Women and the University Student Disciplinary Committee and served as Secretary of the Faculty Senate.
Professor Angel chaired the Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Section on Women in Legal Education, serves as Temple’s delegate to the AALS House of Representatives, and organizes a networking dinner at each AALS Annual Meeting. In 1995, she became General Counsel to the Modern Greek Studies Association and the Greek American Women’s Network in New York.
Active in the American Bar Association (ABA), Professor Angel has served on seven ABA law school accreditation site inspection teams. She is a member of the bar associations of New York City, Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, and she has served on the Philadelphia Bar’s Gender Bias Task Force, the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s Minority Bar Committee, and numerous other bar committees.
Starting in 2001, Professor Angel has compiled statistics on the status of women in the legal profession within the state of Pennsylvania. The results and findings from this information are presented in the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s “Annual Report Card.”
The Philadelphia Bar Association awarded Professor Angel the Sandra Day O’Connor Award in 1996 in recognition of her legal, academic, and mentoring contributions to the legal profession. The Pennsylvania Bar Association’s Commission on Women presented Professor Angel with the Anne X. Alpern Award in 1998. In 2003, the PBA gave her a Special Achievement Award in recognition of her many accomplishments.
In 2004, Professor Angel received the national American Bar Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award. In the tradition of Margaret Brent, Professor Angel’s life work embodies an unfailing commitment to advocating for women and minorities in the profession. She has pioneered in legal scholarship, excelling in the quality and extent of her contributions, and in her continually forthright stands for equal rights.
In Fall 2006, Professor Angel held the Kate Stoneman Professorship of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School. In Spring 2007, she received the Kate Stoneman Award from Albany Law School. In Spring 2010, Professor Angel taught Comparative Employment and Labor Law and Comparative Criminal Justice in Tokyo at Temple University Japan.
In June of 2018, after forty years at Temple University, she retired. She continues to live in Philadelphia and is currently a member of the Greek Orthodox community of St. George Cathedral, where she also continues to give of her time to the Ladies Philoptochos.