Life and Early Career As A Judge
Ebadi was born in Hamadan from an ethnic Persian family, Iran. Her father, Mohammad Ali Ebadi, was the city's chief notary public and a professor of commercial law. Her family moved to Tehran in 1948.
She was admitted to the law department of the University of Tehran in 1965 and in 1969, upon graduation, passed the qualification exams to become a judge. After a six-month internship period, she officially became a judge in March of 1969. She continued her studies in University of Tehran in the meantime to pursue a master's degree in law in 1971. In 1975, she became the first woman president of the Tehran city court, and also the first ever woman judge in Iran.
Following the Iranian revolution in 1979, conservative clerics insisted that Islam prohibits women from becoming judges and Ebadi was demoted to a secretarial position at the branch where she had previously presided. She and other female judges protested and were assigned to the slightly higher position of "law expert." She eventually requested early retirement as the situation remained unchanged.
As her applications were repeatedly rejected, Ebadi was not able to practice as a lawyer until 1993, while she already had a law office permit. She used this free time to write books and many articles in Iranian periodicals.
Read more about this topic: Shirin Ebadi
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