Mary Ziegler

I attribute my success to just loving what I do. I think, ironically, if you care too much about the outcome - if you're doing something just to succeed - it's both not going to be very fun, and you're not going to be very likely to succeed. There are long periods of time in any job where no one else is going to give you any accolades. Like, if I'm writing a book, I'm just sitting there alone writing the book for a year or two years with no one caring. What keeps you going in those moments is just that you enjoy what it is that you're doing. I think that's really important. Often, if you love what you're doing, you're good at it. And also, even if you don't receive an accolade at a particular moment in time, you don't mind as much, because you're enjoying the actual work and it has meaning to you independent of what other people think of it.

I think probably the best career advice I've ever received was to think through what the day-to-day will actually be like. People often think of careers either in terms of what a career will get them - whether that's recognition or income - or whether the career will be intellectually fulfilling to them, but people don't actually really envision what it would mean in terms of daily experience. I think sometimes when fashioning a career, it's really important for people to think through what they want their daily life to look like, and bringing together those other pieces that are, I think, easier to recognize. That's really invaluable.

I think it's obviously a period of a lot of upheaval in law, both because the courts have changed in recent years, and because there's been conversations about the relative role of the courts compared to other political branches more than there has been in a really long time. I think that can be discouraging for young women going into law, but I think, if anything, that's kind of misleading. There's a lot of importance that the rule of law still has, and that's true for people across the ideological spectrum. I think it's also a pretty important time in law in the sense that at moments of change - whether that's technological change in terms of how AI is testing legal doctrine and how legal doctrine is changing AI, or whether it's political and sociocultural change - that's when lawyers are often the most valuable. So I think it's important for young women to recognize that there are a lot of opportunities to sort of make the career their own, and that's really kind of exciting, in a sense, to be going into the field.

I think the biggest challenges and opportunities are sort of related in the sense that there's a ton of change and legal uncertainty right now. That both creates opportunity, because there's lots of room for people to be doing policy and litigation work on questions related to reproduction and parenting. It also is a challenge, because it's hard to mentor people, and it's hard to even know what your schedule is going to be like, because you're partly responding to whatever your day job requires, but you're also partly responding to opportunities that you can't predict - and really obligations and responsibilities that you can't predict ahead of time. That's true in a lot of legal fields generally - that you're sometimes responding to developments in business or politics that raise really important cutting-edge legal questions that you don't know about until they happen. I'm a planner, so I wish that wasn't true, but it also makes it exciting and creates lots of opportunities.

The values most important to me in my work and personal life are intellectual integrity, empathy, compassion, and drive or work ethic.