Jane B. Wishner
The mission of the Southwest Women’s Law Center is to create the opportunity for women to realize their full economic and personal potential by: eliminating gender bias, discrimination and harassment;
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Before founding the Southwest Women’s Law Center, Jane worked for nearly fifteen years with the law firm of Peifer, Hanson & Mullins, P.A. a litigation firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was one of the three founding members of the firm. Her practice involved a wide variety of civil litigation, including complex commercial litigation, civil rights litigation, class actions, employment disputes, and a variety of contract and other business disputes. Before then, Jane was an Assistant Attorney General of the State of New Mexico, serving as a white collar prosecutor in the Special Prosecutions Division of the Attorney General’s Office. She also practiced with a private law firm in San Francisco before moving to New Mexico.
Jane received her B.A. from Harvard University and received Radcliffe’s Gerta Richards Crosby Prize for the highest-ranking woman in the Harvard Government Department. After college, Jane worked as a research associate on the national staff of Common Cause in Washington, D.C. She obtained her law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley and clerked for the Honorable Abner J. Mikva, Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Throughout her legal career, Jane has been actively engaged in women’s rights, church-state, poverty, immigration, and civil rights issues. She has also been a leader and active in numerous community and national organizations. Jane is the immediate past National Chair of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, the public policy arm of the reform Jewish Movement, which represents over 900 synagogues and 1.5 million Jews in North America. Jane has held many leadership positions within the Commission on Social Action, serving as Vice Chair of the Commission and as Chair of the Women and Minorities Task Force and the Domestic Policy Task Force. Jane is also a member of the Executive Committee and the National Board of Trustees of the Union for Reform Judaism. Jane served on the national Board of Governors of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and continues to serve on its National Legal Committee, which makes recommendations regarding AJC participation in amicus briefs before the Supreme Court.
In the 1990s, Jane edited a book for the American Bar Association, entitled Abortion and the States: Political Change and Future Regulation. Since starting the Center, Jane has taught two Continuing Legal Education Seminars for the NM State Bar. The first was on the Terry Schiavo case and federalism and separation of powers issues. The second was on government funding of faith-based organizations, which was part of a program on the changing law of church-state separation. Jane regularly makes public presentations and speeches on a wide variety of civil rights and civil liberties issues, particularly in the areas of church-state separation and reproductive freedom.