Jennifer Rebholz: Publications & Authored Work

A profile of Jennifer Rebholz as she assumed the State Bar presidency, tracing the formative experiences that shaped her approach to leadership and law, from playing hooker on NAU's women's rugby team to second-chairing her first trial after just one year of law school. The piece explores how mentors, collegiality, and a willingness to pivot have defined her career, and previews her priorities for the year ahead, including expanding access to justice and welcoming new categories of legal professionals.

Drawing on her own experience joining the Young Lawyers Division as a hesitant first-year attorney, Rebholz makes the case for Section membership as a professional necessity, not an optional expense. She argues that the State Bar's 30 Sections and 7 committees offer lawyers a genuine community, a place to ask questions, find peers who understand the pressures of practice, and give back through leadership. Written during a period of prolonged remote work, the column is both a practical guide to getting involved and a reminder that participation, as Kathrine Switzer put it, is what life is for.

When the pandemic dissolved the physical boundary between home and office, many lawyers found their two selves suddenly visible to each other. Rebholz uses that moment, and a Northwestern University study finding that people with more integrated identities behave more ethically, to challenge the assumption that a separate work persona is either necessary or wise. She encourages attorneys to resist putting on a professional mask as they return to the office, and to consider whether the person their children see at home is really so different from the one opposing counsel encounters in the courtroom.

A Thanksgiving column that takes the holiday's spirit of gratitude seriously, centering it on the mentors who shape lawyers into professionals. Rebholz reflects on the supervising attorney who taught her that relationships matter as much as legal knowledge, and who gave her room to develop her own courtroom style at a time when, as a young woman, simply mimicking others was never going to work. She closes by pointing readers to the State Bar's formal mentoring programs and by making the broader case that a legal community willing to pass on what it knows is one that gets better over time.

Anchored in a childhood memory of helping strangers make free long-distance calls on Christmas Day, this column argues that lawyers are uniquely positioned to make a difference during the holiday season, and that giving back works best when it's planned. Rebholz encourages offices to replace gift exchanges with charitable adoptions, walks through Arizona's charitable tax credit for legal aid organizations, and makes a practical case for scheduling pro bono hours the same way you schedule anything else: in advance, on the calendar, as a commitment rather than an aspiration.

A new-year call to pay attention to who gets interrupted in meetings, and to do something about it. Rebholz documents the well-established pattern of women being cut off in professional settings, from law firm conference rooms to the United States Supreme Court, and draws a direct line from that behavior to the practical reforms the Court adopted to ensure every Justice could be heard. She offers concrete steps for meeting leaders and bystanders alike: stop the interrupter, return the floor, and recognize that this kind of advocacy for colleagues is both simple and visible.

Written for Black History Month, this column opens with an act of self-awareness: Rebholz acknowledges her initial impulse to write something safely generic about diversity, then explains why she rejected it. She examines specific points of inequity in the Arizona legal system: jury selection, bail conditions, the stark gap between the percentage of Black Arizonans and Black attorneys, and catalogs concrete reforms already underway, from the elimination of peremptory challenges to the Bar Foundation's "We the People" outreach program. The column closes with a challenge to the legal community to pursue representation that genuinely mirrors the public it serves.

Opening with two questions she has been asked throughout her own career: "Are you the court reporter?" and "Are you waiting for your attorney?" Rebholz uses Women's History Month to examine the cumulative toll of microaggressions on lawyers who must constantly prove their professional identity before they have said a word. She cites ABA research showing that 81 percent of women attorneys have been mistaken for a lower-level employee, and offers a straightforward remedy: instead of assuming, ask. The column directs readers to a companion piece in the same issue examining microaggressions in depth, and makes the case that small, empathetic changes in how we address people carry a disproportionate professional impact.

Using the season of Passover and Easter as a frame, Rebholz returns to first principles: the oath every Arizona attorney took at admission and the Creed of Professionalism embedded in Ariz.R.S.Ct. 41. She walks through what those commitments actually require: courtesy in all communications, reasonable extensions, cooperation on scheduling, stipulations where facts are undisputed, and notes pointedly that none of them include exceptions for when you feel you haven't been treated the same way. The column is a direct, practical reminder that civility is not a disposition but a professional obligation, and that the lawyers who live it are the ones whose reputations hold.

Published alongside the magazine's annual art issue, this column finds its subject not in paintings or photographs but in the courthouses themselves, the 15 county seats where Arizona law is practiced. Rebholz moves through the state's legal architecture with evident affection, from the pink-and-turquoise dome of the Pima County Historic Courthouse (where cowboy hat racks still line the gallery pews) to the art deco structure in Bisbee to Sandra Day O'Connor's former courtroom in the Old Phoenix Courthouse. The column is both a tribute to Arizona's legal history and an invitation to arrive early, look around, and appreciate the buildings that give the practice of law its physical dignity.

A closing column that is equal parts gratitude and conviction. As her presidential year ends, Rebholz reflects on what she witnessed during a year of reconnection after the pandemic: lawyers who did not pull back when the courts closed but found new ways to serve, volunteers who built hotlines and rewrote rules, rural members who discovered that Zoom could bring them closer to the Bar rather than further. She closes with a straightforward declaration: when you see what lawyers actually do for people in the hardest moments of their lives, the question of whether it is worth it answers itself.

Conducted as part of the Arizona Bar Foundation's Legal Legacies Project, an archival initiative preserving the stories of the state's most influential legal figures. This video oral history features Dee-Dee Samet, a certified specialist in workers' compensation, former State Bar President, and trailblazer for women in Arizona law. Rebholz conducted the interview in 2018, drawing out the personal and professional history of an attorney who has been a member of the State Bar since 1964 and whose career spans decades of Arizona legal history.