Esther Brocker Award and Reception

In 2026, Capital University Law School is proud to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of its first female graduate, Esther Brocker. You are cordially invited to the

12th Annual Esther Brocker Award Reception

Honoring
Professor Peggy Cordray and Professor Susan Gilles

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

4:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

The Kitchen
231 E Livingston Ave
Columbus, OH 43215

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Support

To support the Esther H. Brocker Scholarship fund, please go to www.capconnect.org/donate, select the designation "Other," and manually enter "Esther H. Brocker Scholarship."

2026 Award Recipients

Professor Peggy Cordray

Professor Peggy Cordray joined the Capital University Law School faculty in 1992. She loves teaching, and every year she is inspired again by the dedication, talent, and passion students bring to the Law School.

After graduating summa cum laude from the University of the Pacific, she earned her law degree from U.C. Berkeley School of Law in 1986, where she was Order of the Coif, and then earned a B.C.L degree from Oxford University in 1988. In between, she did a judicial clerkship on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit with Judge Kenneth W. Starr. Prior to joining Capital’s faculty, she worked at Jones Day in Washington, D.C. on both general litigation and appellate work, and as an attorney in the Ohio State University’s Office of Legal Affairs.

Professor Cordray currently teaches Evidence, Contracts, and Foundational Lawyering Skills. She has published on a wide variety of topics, but especially on how the U.S. Supreme Court selects the cases it will hear through its certiorari process. During Ohio’s foreclosure crisis in 2010, she established the Foreclosure Mediation Preparation Project at Capital, through which law students helped over 400 homeowners prepare to represent themselves in foreclosure mediation.

Professor Cordray is profoundly grateful to Esther Brocker and the other trail-blazing women who made her own career possible. She is deeply honored to receive the Esther H. Brocker Award.

Professor Susan Gilles

Professor Susan M. Gilles was born in Glasgow, Scotland. A graduate of the University of Glasgow (LL.B., 1981) and Harvard Law School (LL.M., 1982), she served as a litigation associate with the firm of BakerHostetler for five years in Cleveland, Ohio. Professor Gilles joined Capital University Law School in 1990, and held the John E. Sullivan Professorship from 2009-2022.

She teaches in the areas of Torts, Civil Procedure and occasionally, Media Law. Her scholarship focuses on Civil Procedure and on First Amendment/Media Law issues. An innovative and enthusiastic teacher she co-authored “Click & Learn: Civil Procedure,” an interactive online casebook designed to enhance student learning by providing immediate feedback and explanations for thousands of Civil Procedure questions.

She was the Chair of the AALS Section on Mass Communication (2004), and currently serves on the OSBA Media Law Committee frequently appearing as a panelist/moderator for its conferences. She serves on numerous law school committees, most recently chairing the Academic Affairs Committee and serving as a member of the Executive Committee for the 2020-2021 ABA accreditation visit. She is a long-time advisor to the Women’s Law Association at Capital University Law School.

About Esther H. Brocker

The path Esther H. Brocker, L’26, created while working to become the Law School’s first female graduate started in Lancaster, Ohio, in the 1920s and was built commuting to Columbus, three nights a week, over four years. It was followed by a lengthy legal career that extended well into her 80s.

Brocker was born April 21, 1883, in Lancaster, Ohio. By age 17, she was making money as a dressmaker. She married in 1902, and her first child, Mary, was born and died in 1909. Her only living child, John W. Brocker, was born in 1911. By 1916, Brocker was a single mother, working as secretary of the Hermann Manufacturing Company in Lancaster and assistant treasurer of the Hermann Tire Building and Machine Co. She then worked as secretary in the Deffenbaugh Law Offices in Lancaster. She also worked for the Department of Defense in Cleveland during World War I.

In the early 1920s, Brocker made a bold choice for a woman and single mother of that time: She decided to go to law school.

From 1922 to 1926, she made a 30-mile drive and took the interurban trolley to attend classes at Columbus School of Law, a predecessor of Capital University Law School. After 664 trips and nearly 40,000 miles, she became the Law School’s first female graduate on June 9, 1926, at age 42.

After graduating, Brocker opened a successful private law practice in Lancaster, handling criminal cases and probate work. Her first office was above a bank in Lancaster; later, she would move her law offices to one-half of the house in which she had lived with her parents. She served two terms as Lancaster’s city solicitor and was elected vice president of the Fairfield County Bar Association in 1960.

She worked as an attorney until age 83 and died in 1972 at age 88.

Brocker was not the first woman to attend the Columbus School of Law. Other women had taken classes starting in 1918, 15 years after the YMCA opened the school in 1903 with a mission of making a legal education available to everyone, regardless of race, gender, or background. But Brocker was the first woman to finish her classes and earn a law school diploma, along with nine male classmates.

Esther Brocker’s legacy lives on at Capital University Law School in the form of an endowed scholarship, the Esther H. Brocker Scholarship Fund.

In 2012, Brocker was inducted into the Capital University Law School Hall of Honor, which recognizes individuals who have profoundly influenced the Law School and reached and remained at the pinnacle of their fields for a period of time that demonstrates perseverance and maturation.

Past Esther H. Brocker Award Recipients

2025 Laurel Beatty Blunt
2024 Mary Amos Augsburger, L'02
2023 Kathleen M. Trafford, L'79
2022 Lisa L. Sadler, L'84
2021 Gretchen Koehler Mote, L’78
2019 Sharon L. Kennedy
2018 Betty D. Montgomery
2017 Yvette McGee Brown
2016 Evelyn Lundberg Stratton
2015 Maureen O'Connor
2014 Deborah D. Pryce, L'76

*there was no 2020 award due to the COVID-19 pandemic.