Zoe Bedell ’03, from the Corps to the Court

When Zoe Bedell ’03 joined the Marine Corps in 2007 after graduating from Princeton University, she admits, she was looking for “the hardest thing” she could do. She didn’t want to work in Congress but found politics appealing, she wanted adventure, and she wanted to learn more about being a leader.

That decision started her on a path that has included two seven-month tours in Afghanistan, a lawsuit against the Pentagon for gender discrimination, graduating from Harvard Law School, clerking for two current Supreme Court justices, and most recently, work as a litigation associate at a D.C.-law firm.

Fresh off a year clerking for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Bedell returned to NCS this winter to share that experience with the Politics in America class.

“Each of the nine justices has four clerks from all across the political spectrum. It was really cool to talk to people who truly looked at problems differently than I would look at problems,” she said to a class made up mostly of seniors from NCS and St. Albans.

“Some of my most interesting conversations were with Justice [Clarence] Thomas’s clerks. I’d be looking at a modern understanding of a question … and his clerk’s way to interpret this was ‘What was happening at the founding?’ You’d get this interesting history lesson, even if that didn’t necessary influence our thinking about a problem,” she said.

Bedell, who previously clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals, says she has learned a lot from working with both conservative- and liberal-leaning justices.

“In a contentious time in Washington, it’s a helpful experience to have…as people are fighting about different views of the world,” she said.

A Supreme Court clerkship is just the latest of Bedell’s many accomplishments. After college, she served the Marine Corps as a logistics officer for four years, completing two tours in Afghanistan.

“On my second deployment, I ran a program called the Female Engagement Team, where I led 47 female Marines, and our job was to go out and talk to Afghans. They saw us as less threatening and were more willing to tell us if there was a bomb in the road ahead and more willing to be open about what was going on in the community,” Bedell recalled.

The Marine Corps were about 94 percent men at that time, and Bedell says one of the biggest obstacles she faced was sexism. She felt that, no matter how good she was at her job, she was confronted by barriers, including a large number of jobs being closed to women.

“It was really frustrating because the Marine Corps at the time had a policy that said women couldn’t serve in combat roles. If you have an institutional policy that says women are not good enough and cannot do these jobs, that trickles down in everyone’s attitudes,” she said.

After leaving the Marine Corps, Bedell joined an investment bank in New York. Shortly after that, the American Civil Liberties Union approached her about becoming a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the military on the basis of gender discrimination.

“The lawsuit was a really direct way to challenge this particular policy that made my life and the life of my Marines challenging and problematic,” she said.

Shortly after the suit was filed, the Pentagon reversed its policy and permitted women in combat roles in all branches of the military. Bedell was encouraged by this quick change: “I had been interested in law school before, but [the lawsuit] was also why it really appealed to me. The law is the way you change things you don’t like.”

Bedell went to Harvard Law School and graduated in 2016. The lawsuit, meanwhile, continues to play out today as the military explores how to enforce its new policy. Bedell is no longer a plaintiff. Instead, she now serves as a lawyer on the case as part of her new job at Munger, Tolles & Olson.

Bedell shared with NCS students that her years on the Close were particularly meaningful. She remembers being overwhelmed trying to juggle academics, extracurriculars, and sports. Yet she also learned the important skills of prioritizing and managing her time and workload, something she uses every day on the job.

She also credits NCS for teaching her to write: “In college, I had a lot of friends who had to learn to write from the beginning and struggled because they were picking up those skills, and for me, it was tweaking and adding finesse to those skills. NCS had really given me that foundation so I could keep growing in different ways.”

Reflecting on her decision to go into the military, Bedell believes her girls’-school background gave her confidence in her own skills and capabilities.

“I think it gave me the sense of entitlement that, of course, as a woman I can do anything,” she said.