When she hired Michelle Childs to practice employment law in the early 1990s right out of school, Vickie Eslinger said she knew there was something different about the freshly minted South Carolina attorney.
“I immediately identified her as someone that nobody was going to outwork,” Ms. Eslinger said. “As soon as you got Michelle working on something, everybody wanted her, because she was quick, and she was diligent.”
Ms. Eslinger is herself a trailblazer. As a law student, she was denied the right to serve as a page in the South Carolina Senate based solely on her gender, and she successfully sued to overturn that policy. Eslinger spoke with The Associated Press days after the White House confirmed Ms. Childs, now a federal judge in South Carolina, was under consideration for the vacancy on the nation’s highest court created by the impending retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer.
The potential nominees are defined by President Biden’s election-year pledge that he would nominate a Black woman for the court. Early discussions center on a handful of names, including California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer clerk now on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
But there has been focus on Ms. Childs due to advocacy from U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest ranking Black leader in Congress. He is a top ally for President Biden and suggested the then-candidate promise…
