Lise Pearlman, Producer

Lise wrote the book on which the documentary is based, The Sky’s the Limit: People v. Newton, The REAL Trial of the 20thCentury? (2012) which won awards in the categories of law, U.S. history and multicultural nonfiction. Lise is regarded as the country’s leading expert on the 1968 Huey Newton trial that transformed the American “jury of one’s peers” from the traditional 12 white men to the diverse panels that Americans often take for granted today. Over the past 25 years she has given numerous acclaimed MCLE presentations on ethics and elimination of bias for California lawyers as well as presentation to a wide variety of educational and community groups. She also wrote a prize-winning companion to the film entitled American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton (2016) and a biography of Newton’s pioneering woman lawyer, Fay Stender—Call Me Phaedra: The Life and Times of Movement Lawyer Fay Stender. 

Pearlman was in the first class of undergraduates at Yale University to include women (1971) when Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale faced trial in New Haven for murder. She graduated Order of the Coif from Berkeley Law (1974), clerked for California Chief Justice Donald Wright and was a Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School before becoming a litigator at an Oakland firm where she was named managing partner in 1984—the first established firm in California to be headed by a woman. In 1989 she was selected by the California Supreme Court as the first Presiding Judge of the State Bar Court. After retiring from the bench, she served as a mediator and arbitrator, Chair of the Oakland Public Ethics Commission, President of Women Lawyers of Alameda County and on the Board of California Women Lawyers where she first became acquainted with co-founder Fay Stender’s extraordinary achievements as a lawyer, including as co-counsel for Huey Newton.