Sylvia Pressler dies at 75; judge’s ruling opened Little League to girls

Sylvia Pressler, a trailblazing judge whose 1973 ruling opened Little League baseball to girls, has died. She was 75.

Pressler died Monday at her home in Sparta, N.J., according to her husband, David Pressler. She had been battling lymphoma and was scheduled to begin chemotherapy treatments Tuesday, he said.

While serving as a hearing examiner with New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights, Pressler ruled that Maria Pepe, a 12-year-old Hoboken girl, should have been allowed to play on a Little League team.

Pepe had played three games for her Little League team the year before but stopped when the league’s national office threatened to revoke the team’s charter. The National Organization for Women filed a lawsuit on her behalf.

“The institution of Little League is as American as the hot dog and apple pie,” Pressler wrote in a sharply worded opinion. “There is no reason why that part of Americana should be withheld from girls.”

The ruling was decried by Little League as “conceived in vindictive and prejudicial fashion of the worst kind,” but it was upheld on appeal and New Jersey became the first state to bar sex discrimination in Little League.

By the following year, Little League amended its charter to allow girls and also created a softball division.

Pressler’s own career took shape at a time when the legal profession was overwhelmingly male. Born Sylvia Brodsky in the New York City borough of the Bronx in 1934, she earned her law degree from Rutgers in 1960 and was one of the first women in New Jersey to clerk for an Appellate Division judge.

She was appointed to her first judgeship in 1973 and four years later became one of the first women assigned to the Appellate Division. In 1997, she became the division’s first female presiding judge, responsible for keeping the judicial calendar and managing staff in addition to hearing cases.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Pressler wrote and annually updated a book on the rules governing New Jersey courts.

Besides her husband of 55 years, Pressler is survived by two children and three grandchildren.

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