Called “Portia of the Pacific,” Clara Shortridge Foltz, who lived from 1849 until 1934, was the first woman admitted to the practice of law in California, and achieved many other “firsts” in her long professional career. Famous as she was in her day, her name was little known when Barbara Babcock set out, in the early 1980s, to bring Clara Foltz, and the times in which she lived, vividly to life. Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz is the culmination of Babcock’s quarter-century endeavor to restore Foltz to her rightful place in the history of women’s struggles to achieve full citizenship stature.