Craig Cramer Honored

L to R: Amelia Craig Cramer, Pamela Donison, Kimberly Demarchi

This morning’s breakfast sponsored by the Arizona Women Lawyers Association was the occasion for the awarding of its annual award, named in honor of Sarah Herring Sorin. The honoree was Amelia Craig Cramer.

Craig Cramer, the State Bar’s Second Vice President (and to be the First Vice President after this Convention), is the Chief Deputy in the Pima County Attorney’s Office, the second in charge of that law office. She was introduced by her boss, Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall.

LaWall described the career of her chief deputy, which took her through Dartmouth and Stanford Law School. Craig Cramer has worked in a variety of positions, including private law practice, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and executive director of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD).

Comparing Craig Cramer to the standard set by President Bartlett in The West Wing, LaWall said the honoree is smart, always tells the truth, and is someone whom LaWall would trust with her life.

Craig Cramer used her acceptance speech to heap praise on numerous other women who have mentored her or provided an example. She recalled her law professor Barbara Babcock, who once was asked what it felt like to have gotten her position because she was a woman. Babcock paused and then said, “It feels a heckuva lot better than not getting the job because I’m a woman.” She also admired Judge Sally Simmons, whom she met when she started at Brown & Bain. Craig Cramer said that Simmons “was a mentor for every woman in the firm, in Tucson and across the state.”

She earned a raucous laugh from the attendees when she said that at her San Francisco law firm, she answered to four partners: “three Peters and a Dick.”

Her move into a public law office when she determined that “Billable hours were not going to be conducive to me being called Mama at home” by her daughter, rather than, perhaps, “Mrs. Craig,” a salutation foisted on another working woman lawyer she had met. Not for Amelia: She wanted her daughter to have her around—a lot.

Craig Cramer praised her wife, Amy Cramer, who is an economic professor at the University of Arizona, and their daughter Margaret.

She ended her remarks by saying, “I hope that when Margaret grows up she will have a woman’s group that is as wonderful to her as the AWLA has been to me.”

Barbara LaWall

 

L to R: Amy Cramer, Margaret Craig Cramer, Amelia Craig Cramer

 

Sally Simmons and Amelia Craig Cramer