This article originally appeared in the winter 2026 issue of Res Gestae.
Susan Taylor Hansen (JD ’76) was always hanging around her father’s law practice as a teen and wanted to go to law school as well—despite having met only one female lawyer ever.
“There was only one woman in my father’s class of 1948 at Stanford Law School, and he knew only one other practicing female lawyer in the state,” Hansen says. “So we went to lunch with her.”
When she started at Utah Law soon after turning 21, Hansen was surprised to see that the class of 1976 included a much larger cohort of women compared with previous years—around 30, she recalls.
“We were a nice, collegial group and really helped and enjoyed each other. We also had exceptional teachers. My torts professor, Dean Sam Thurman, had taught my father torts at Stanford, which was very cool. I remember Wallace Bennett as a particularly standout professor,” she says. “When I compare notes with colleagues who attended other law schools, it has always been clear to me that the reputation of the law school and the quality of life in Utah produces an especially fine level of instruction.”
The 1970s also brought many changes to both employment and environmental law.
“We used the first textbook on sex discrimination written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg when I was in law school. Environmental law was also a relatively new specialty. Looking back, I don’t know if I appreciated what a special time it was to be in that field,” Hansen says. “There was a really robust body of science that was increasingly respected, and also an advocacy for the understanding of the effects of a healthy environment on human health.”
Embarking on a career in environmental law
During the first few years of her career, Hansen worked in corporate law in Washington, D.C., and Maryland, and five years later took the Bar exam in Minnesota to work there while her husband finished his medical residency at the Mayo Clinic. After four years in Minnesota, she took a third Bar exam and practiced with a large law firm in Baltimore while her husband completed a fellowship at Johns Hopkins.
“There were about 100 lawyers in my firm in Baltimore and maybe three or four women among them, though about half a dozen young women were entering the firm,” Hansen recalls. “It was really reassuring to see the profession starting to grow in terms of female presence.”
A few years later, Hansen moved to Virginia, where she practiced environmental law for the next 30 years.
“I was lucky to practice in the field during a time when there were significant regulatory penalties for non-compliance. From a public relations perspective, many of my clients were sensitive to the negative optics of creating an environmental hazard in their community. They wanted to find a way to come into compliance,” she says. “Well-paying clients were seeking out lawyers to help them look good to their potential customers, colleagues, and the public. It enabled me to practice in the nitty-gritty of the field and, at the same time, visibly hold leadership roles in environmental advocacy groups. I feel very fortunate that in the era of my career, I was able to spread the word that it was possible to run a profitable business and find ways, using scientific advice, to come into compliance with existing environmental regulations.”
She worked closely with several East Coast environmental advocacy organizations, including The Elizabeth River Project and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. However, Hansen is most proud of her work with the Public Housing Authority in Portsmouth, Virginia, which had created racially segregated, deteriorating public housing years earlier under a federal statue.
“We needed to find a way to offer the folks who lived there a much better quality of life, clean up that site, and use that property in a much more constructive way,” she remembers. “It was a 15-year process of suing all of the liable parties, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), bringing them together to construct a reasonable solution to the contamination, and then creating, using a major HUD grant, new housing opportunities.”
However, the outcome of that arduous process was a satisfying ending for many residents.
“The residents either went to home ownership, or to subsidized, integrated rental facilities of a higher quality, hopefully giving their children a different view of life and a different set of opportunities,” she says.
Welcoming more women to law
After retiring, Hansen returned to Utah to be closer to her grandchildren and two of her four daughters, one of which also graduated from Utah Law. She says having a daughter in the profession has allowed her to more accurately see how law has changed for women over the years.
“When I was in law school, my father reluctantly told me that some of the lawyers he knew in larger Salt Lake City firms had said they simply wouldn’t consider interviewing women—and I ran into that elsewhere, not just Utah,” she says. “It was wonderful to see my daughter Tessa Hansen in a class that was more than 50% women. Because she’s in the state where a lot of her law school classmates practice, she has a tremendous group of friends that are very supportive of each other. She was given a lot more credibility much earlier in her career than I was, with less effort to prove herself. Not always having the words woman or female attached to her accomplishments is really fun to watch.”
In 2011, Hansen got a call from the Women Lawyers of Utah about an event they were planning to recognize the first 100 women lawyers in Utah. She says she’d assumed the first 100 women lawyers were long dead—but the caller on the phone told Hansen she was probably about number 99.
“My jaw dropped. The first thing I think I said was, ‘I’m pretty young, you know.’ I was shocked that it took until the class of 1976 to hit that number,” she says. “There were not many women in the classes before us, but gosh, we valued them. We had our eye on them and where they were working, and they were so generous in sharing with us how it was going.”
Forming relationships with other lawyers is incredibly important, especially when you are starting out in the field, Hansen says.
“My dad had relationships with many lawyers throughout the state when I was a child. I know that it was really meaningful to him to know who to call to noodle through a problem. I have mixed feelings about the work-from-home culture, because learning from your colleagues and having interaction with them is really important,” she explains. “I would have loved the opportunity to work from home more often, but I value the times I could pick the brain of a colleague and create relationships with both senior and junior lawyers.”
Hansen recalls that while she wasn’t able to work only in environmental law at the beginning of her career, she was always trying to move in that direction. She encourages young lawyers to figure out a passion for something to help them keep going.
“It’s important to care about what you do, whether it’s the persons you work with or a natural resource like I did. Find some aspect of your profession you feel strongly about, and then it will be satisfying to do that work,” she says.
Though women in law today have many more opportunities than she did, Hansen says there is still work to be done to achieve equity. She continues to advocate for women in leadership, along with her colleagues in Utah.
“I reconnected with law school classmate Denise Dragoo (JD ’76), who introduced me to the Utah Women’s Forum,” Hansen explains. “It’s a wonderful group of accomplished women with a finger in so many positive things happening in the state.”