CARLISLE, Pa. — Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA) President and Triquetra Law Managing Partner Sharon R. López will give Penn State Dickinson Law’s commencement address on Saturday, May 12, during a ceremony inside the Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium at Dickinson College.
López is the fourth woman president, the first Latina president and the second minority president of the PBA. She also is the first PBA president to have served as a staff attorney for a legal services office and the first attorney who is an alum of the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network Martin Luther King Jr. Internship Program. López will finish her one-year term as PBA president this May.
During López’s term as president, she established a Blue Ribbon Panel on Membership Enhancement that targeted membership barriers for minorities, millennials and mothers. Her commitment to membership, marketing and mentoring has been a guiding principle of her work as a community organizer, a bar leader, and a successful small-business owner. Her passion to promote the rule of law keeps her energized and determined.
Public service and community work have been an integral part of López’s career. In the 1980s, she initiated a “Community Conversation on Racism,” sponsored by the YWCA of Lancaster, where diverse constituencies from Lancaster County engaged in a revealing discussion about racism, racial justice, and changing the culture of the Lancaster community. López participated in community efforts to stop the spread of AIDS in the mid-1980s before federal funding was available. She also volunteered as a rape aid counselor for sexual assault victims, and helped them deal with the trauma of the emergency room and the courtroom.
López worked as a legal services attorney for nearly a decade. She then served as senior Pennsylvania counsel at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence (PCADV), where she collaborated with direct-service providers in legal services offices and domestic violence programs, prosecutors, civil attorneys and trial court judges.
López left PCADV in 2006 to form her own firm with her best friend and law partner, Andrea Farney, who also is a veteran legal services attorney and alum of PCADV and the Battered Women’s Justice Project. Their work primarily focuses on federal practice and civil rights litigation.
López was recognized as one of the top 25 women lawyers in Pennsylvania in 2015 and 2016 by the Legal Intelligencer Journal. She was selected as a “Pennsylvania Super Lawyer” in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 for plaintiff’s employment litigation. In 2016, she was selected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to serve as a hearing committee member for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Disciplinary Board.