Holly Maguigan, who fought for the rights of abused women, dies at the age of 78

Holly Maguigan, a law professor who used her years as a criminal defense attorney to revolutionize the legal tools available to women defending themselves against abusive partners, died on November 15 in Manhattan. She was 78.

Her husband, Abdeen Jabara, said she died in a hospital of cardiac arrest.

When Ms Maguigan started practicing law in the early 1970s, women with physically abusive partners had virtually no recourse in the criminal justice system.

Police rarely investigated their claims, but quickly arrested them when they fought back. More often than is the case today, juries and the public tended to blame the victim and wonder why she did not simply leave the relationship or flee an attack.

These views began to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a cultural shift reflected in a series of books and films – such as the 1980 book. “The Burning Bed” (and the 1984 TV movie based on it), about a woman who kills her abusive husband – which gave a voice to women who suffered decades of violence.

Still, the law struggled to keep up. Defense attorneys were ill-prepared and often afraid to take on such clients. Judges often refused to hear evidence of prior abuse. And the jurisprudence surrounding self-defense assumed equal parties, so that a small woman who shot her much larger husband while he was beating her could be convicted of using excessive force.

That’s where Ms Maguigan intervened. Then a professor at New York University, she proved tireless in her campaign to equalize the law for battered women. She connected lawyers with psychologists and other experts. She took on cases herself and then used that experience to write an influential series of pieces of legislation that reoriented the law of self-defense.

One of her most significant contributions was a lengthy 1991 article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, in which she provided data showing that a large majority of women who use violence to defend themselves from abusers do so during attacks or under imminent threat – not, as long believed, during lulls in violent behavior.

It was a critical insight. Until then, many advocates relied on the so-called battered women’s defense, which essentially argued that women in abusive relationships could not be held accountable for their violent actions. Ms Maguigan argued that this should in fact be the case – and that they should be able to claim self-defence to avoid prosecution.

“Unlike most law professors, what she did and wrote had actual impact on real people,” Steve Zeidman, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law who taught with Ms. Maguigan at NYU, said in a telephone interview . “It was groundbreaking and it had an impact. It forced people to realize that there were legitimate claims of self-defense.”

Today, thanks to Ms Maguigan’s work, it is much easier – although perhaps not easy enough in her view – for defendants in such cases to provide expert testimony and personal histories. Judges are better informed and prosecutors are less likely to bring charges against battered women.

“I think if Holly were here,” Mr. Zeidman said, “she’d say we still have miles to go, but we’re on our way.”

Holly Maguigan was born on May 29, 1945 in Buffalo and raised in Chester, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. Her father, Harvey, owned a factory and her mother, Virginia (Smith) Maguigan, was a housewife.

Holly initially didn’t want to go into law; her dream was to teach medieval history.

“I really hated lawyers,” she said in the radio program ‘Law and Disorder’ in 2021. “All they had were stories about their cases and how great they were, and they would never post bail when people were arrested.”

She received a bachelor’s degree in history from Swarthmore College in 1966 and, after studying at the University of Oxford, earned a master’s degree in the same subject from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969.

It was in the Bay Area that her attitude toward the law changed. She had become active in the anti-war, feminist, and civil rights movements, and she witnessed firsthand the value of smart, progressive lawyers – not only in freeing defendants from prison, but also in devising strategies to keep them out of jail in the first place.

She studied law at the University of Pennsylvania and even before she graduated in 1972, she wanted to become a public defender. She joined the public defender’s office in Philadelphia after graduation and stayed there for three years before going into private practice with David Rudovsky and David Kairys, themselves former public defenders.

The firm spent much of the 1970s defending clients against abuse by Philadelphia police and ultimately Mayor Frank Rizzo, a former police chief known and reviled for his aggressive, often racist approach to crime.

Mrs Maguigan married Thomas Wright in 1969. He died in 1974. She married Mr. Jabara in 1997. She is survived by a daughter from a previous relationship, Miranda Tully; three brothers, Steve, Michael and Tim; and two grandchildren.

Ms. Maguigan left the company in 1986 to teach at CUNY law school, moving to NYU a year later. She achieved emerita status in 2021.

For all the praise given to her advocacy and academic writing, Ms. Maguigan had perhaps the greatest impact as a teacher. Generations of students passed through her criminal justice clinics, many of whom continued the legal revolution she started. She was co-chair of the Association of American Law Teacherswhich earned her the Great Teacher Award in 2014.

“The law does not enforce itself,” Helen Hershkoff, who taught with Ms. Maguigan at NYU, said in a telephone interview. “Holly helped bring about changes in the law and trained lawyers who could implement her new ideas.”