Beverly Blair Cook

Beverly Blair Cook (December 10, 1926 – January 18, 2008) was an American professor and political scientist. She is best known for her work regarding judicial behavior, public opinion and judicial decisions, and the selection of female judges.

Education Cook received a B.A. degree in political science from Wellesley College in 1948 and an M.A. degree from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1949. After a brief period in which she raised her first four children, she resumed her studies and received a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in 1962.

Career Cook taught political science at Iowa State University from 1949 to 1950. After receiving her Ph.D., she taught at California State University, Fullerton until 1966, where she earned tenure. She published a book the next year, The Judicial Process in California, which connected the judicial process to the political process.

In 1967, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. There, she taught briefly in the School of Social Welfare before joining the Department of Political Science, where she was a professor from 1970 to 1989 and a professor emerita from then on.

In the 1970s, she contributed greatly to the study of judicial socialization. She studied and wrote about the impact of institutional socialization practices in court systems. In particular, she looked at state and federal courts, not just the U.S. Supreme Court, which was the focus of many of her academic peers.

In 1979, she co-founded the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ). Their numbers grew, and in 1980, Cook led the NAWJ in attending a special tour of the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time, there were no women among the Supreme Court justices. The crowd of NAWJ members in the building so affected Chief Justice Warren E. Burger that, one month after their visit, the Court dropped "Mr." (in reference to justices) from its official record-keeping practices. (A year later, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.)

After retiring, Cook continued to write essays on legal matters, including on U.S. Supreme Court Decisions. In 2000, Cook received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association's Law and Courts section.