Judge Vanessa Ruiz ’72 grew up around the law. Her father was a litigator, and she remembers listening intently at their home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when he talked about the cases he was working on. That experience didn’t propel her into law herself—at first. She majored in philosophy at Wellesley and considered graduate school in the field. But during the immense upheaval and social change of the late 1960s and early ’70s, she saw how much progress was happening through the nation’s courts and legal systems. “That really interested me,” she says. “The notion of how to make change and reform things that needed reforming.”

“What do I want to do that would make good change come about,” Ruiz finally asked herself, “and what’s the best way to do that?”

After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center in 1975, she worked in international, commercial, and intellectual property law. Only five years out of law school, she successfully argued an important civil rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court—Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman. She represented an African American renter and a nonprofit housing group that used testers to identify and fight discriminatory housing practices.

She says she didn’t start out with a “business plan for my career” or a vision of exactly where she would end up—she was just always on the lookout for interesting opportunities to learn more and work with smart people. That curiosity has continued to drive her throughout her career, one in which she has broken ceilings and led the way for generations of lawyers and judges.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Ruiz to the highest court in Washington, D.C.—the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. She was the first—and still only—Hispanic person to join the court.

The leap from lawyer to judge almost didn’t happen, though. In the early 1990s, she says, people told her she would make a good judge, based on her ability to think deeply about cases. But when a vacancy arose on the D.C. Court of Appeals, she thought her background wasn’t quite right for the job. So she called one of the only women judges she knew—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who at the time was serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. They talked for a long time, Ruiz says; Ginsburg asked her how she liked to approach cases. At the end of the conversation, Ruiz thanked Ginsburg for her time and said she’d continue to think about whether to apply. “No, stop thinking about it,” Ginsburg said. “Just do it. You’re going to be great at this. Just put your name in, and don’t look back.”

After her appointment to the judgeship, Ginsburg, who had since taken her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, administered Ruiz’s oath.

Ruiz has received numerous awards for her legal and service work, including Judge of the Year from the Hispanic National Bar Association; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hispanic Bar Association of D.C.; the Latina Leader in Law Award from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute; the Outstanding Service Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation; Woman Lawyer of the Year from the Women’s Bar Association of D.C.;  the Lady Justice Award from the National Association of Women Judges; and the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award of the American Bar Association.

Ruiz says her time at Wellesley was deeply influential and “quite special” because it helped focus her mind academically but also allowed her to take classes from Shakespeare to philosophy to computer science, including one taught by Noam Chomsky at MIT called Intellectuals and Social Change. “I’ve never been a particularly organized student,” she says, “but I was a very curious student.”

Wellesley, she says, “allowed this range of intellectual curiosity to play out. The offerings were there, and you had the space and time to do it.” She especially appreciated it being a women’s college, she says, likening it to a “nature preserve for women, with a big sign that says, ‘No hunting.’ You’re not supposed to shoot these women down when they are trying to do something new—just let them roam.”

Ruiz can still recognize Wellesley alums, she says, by the “red mark we have on our heads from going into brick walls repeatedly.”

“In part because we’re stubborn,” she says, laughing, “but in part because you don’t expect the brick wall to be there. We were led to believe while at Wellesley that the brick wall shouldn’t be there.”

That, combined with the College’s proximity to Boston during a time of great social unrest, lit a fire under her to help enact the change being demanded by the movements all around her—an experience and education she sees as very different from her upbringing in Puerto Rico.

Now a Senior Judge, Ruiz advocates for and supports women judges globally, including as a member of the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), of which she’s a past president. That work kicked into overdrive in 2021, when two female judges in Afghanistan, one of whom Ruiz had met through her work, were assassinated while on their way to work at the Supreme Court. IAWJ turned into a humanitarian relief organization overnight, navigating the immense task of helping evacuate female Afghan judges who were no longer able to work following the Taliban’s takeover to safer environments with their families. It’s intense and tiring work, Ruiz says, that serves as a constant reminder of how fortunate the U.S. is to be able, for the most part, to rely on basic safety and judicial independence in our courts.

Ruiz is also advocating for better access to the judicial system for all Americans. She’s been increasingly concerned with how those without legal representation and new immigrants, especially those with language barriers, navigate the system. She worked with the American Bar Association (ABA) to spearhead the adoption of national standards for interpretation and translation in court, making sure those services are provided as a matter of right. “How could you possibly go through a process where you don’t understand what’s happening?” she says. “In many ways, it’s more important to have a good interpreter than to have a good lawyer; at least you can tell your story to the judge and make yourself heard.” She’s now working with the ABA to update those standards.

If there is one ethos that drives her career and service work, Ruiz says, it is “Don’t be afraid.” When presented with a new opportunity, she advises, “don’t freeze up—look at it as an exploration into who you are going to be. No direction is irrevocable, no job needs to be forever. You don’t need to know what the next thing is, and that’s the beauty of it,” Ruiz says. “You just need to have your antenna out and be on the alert.”