When Ramona Romero took her first job and became the only Hispanic lawyer at a large law firm, she felt lost and isolated.
“I felt like a flower trying to bloom in the desert,” said Romero, the newly appointed general counsel to the University who starts her new post on Monday.
Romero, in building a respectable career that has led her through both the private and public sectors, has established herself as an eminent lawyer and a national leader. In the past 25 years, Romero has worked at prominent law firms and the Department of Agriculture, before shifting to take over the position of general counsel at the University, its top in-house legal job. In her new role, she will be involved in matters such as affirmative action, faculty and student affairs, and academic and research misconduct.
Romero’s appointment was confirmed by University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 on Sept. 24, making her one of the highest ranking Latina employees at the University. She will replace Peter McDonough, who stepped down at the end of the 2013-14 academic year.
She takes over at a time when the University is not facing any high-profile legal troubles. The University recently resolved a dispute with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after being found in violation of Title IX. It has overhauled its procedures for handling cases of sexual assault and has hired a handful of new officials to serve in new adjudicating roles. The University is, however, facing a national headline-making challenge to its tax-exempt status in New Jersey state tax court. The plaintiffs allege that part of the University’s profit-sharing practices are contradictory with the tax-exempt status of a nonprofit corporation.
However, Romero also comes to the University without legal experience in the higher education sector, which her predecessor possessed because of his years of work within the University's Office of the General Counsel. Romero says she plans to learn on the job for the next several months.
Romero graduated from Barnard College in 1985 with a degree in political science and went on to pursue a law degree at Harvard. Romero served most recently as the general counsel for the USDA starting 2011, before taking the position at the University.
A humble childhood
“I didn’t speak a word of English. Some people might say I still don’t,” Romero said, with a laugh, of her immigration to the United States at 10 years old.
Romero, who was born in 1962 in the Dominican Republic, said that she grew up in a single-parent family.
When her mother immigrated to New York City in 1969 to find work, Romero, 6 years old at the time, stayed in the Dominican Republic with close family friends. Romero followed in her mother’s footsteps and immigrated four years later to New York, where her mother worked in a factory.
“The most important part was that I was reuniting with my mother,” Romero said about the move. “Those four years apart were hard.”
After living in a local hotel for several nights provided for by the Red Cross in the wake of a fire that burned down her apartment, Romero and her mother moved into single-room occupancy housing for three months, before moving to an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.
Her first dream was to become an astronaut, Romero said, adding that the time in which she grew up was one of innovation and exploration. Romero’s enthusiasm for the legal profession derived from her own love to argue and to reason, she added.
“For me, I guess it was always just astronaut or lawyer,” she said.
From respected student leader to law associate
After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, a magnet school concentrating heavily on mathematics and science courses, Romero arrived on the campus of Barnard College in fall 1981.
At Barnard, Romero majored in political science and held various positions in class government, including freshman class president, officer of the board, vice president and president of the student body during her senior year.
“I like leading and doing things and being proactive,” she said. “I like leaving these institutions better than when I found them.”
Several women served as role models for Romero, she said, including Barnard professor Flora Davidson, who was Romero’s senior thesis adviser, recently retired Vice President for College Relations Dorothy Denburg, and former president of Barnard and current president of the American Museum of Natural History Ellen Futter.
Romero said that their willingness to engage with students in a variety of ways made them ideal mentors.
Romero said that because her transition to college coincided with Sandra Day O’Connor's nomination as the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, O'Connor became a source of inspiration for her throughout her college years and beyond.
“I didn’t know a single American lawyer at the time — I grew up in a working-class Latino community,” Romero said.
Romero was an incredibly curious and highly motivated young woman who was widely respected by her peers, according to Davidson.
“She was a tremendous student of integrity as student body president and as the years unfolded and her career moved forward, too, it always seemed to make perfect sense,” Denburg said.
Romero enrolled as a student at Harvard Law School in fall 1985 after graduating from Barnard, and she said that the next four years constituted a period of great personal growth, learning and opening doors.
In her spare time, Romero worked as the director and student attorney for the Prison Law Assistance Project, in which she represented prisoners during processes such as parole or disciplinary hearings. She also worked as the student attorney for the Jamaican Plains Services, in which she helped represent primarily immigrant and working class families in the neighborhood of Jamaican Plains.
However, she added that her humble background sometimes differentiated her from those around her — a gap that existed to some extent at Barnard but became clearer at Harvard Law School. She noted that one of her most painful moments at law school occurred in her first year as a graduate student when she was in Harvard Square with friends.
“I was wearing a dress I was particularly proud of,” Romero said, “and this guy says, ‘You so remind me of my maid.’ I became conscious of the fact that perhaps I was different.”
Romero added that she felt it was more of a socioeconomic issue rather than a racial or ethnic issue.
After graduating from law school in 1988 with an enormous amount of debt, Romero said she planned accordingly to find a job that would enable her to pay it off. She spent 10 years at her first position, an associate of counsel at Crowell & Moring LLP, although she had initially only envisioned to stay there for three or four years.
After working closely with DuPont employees in her time at Crowell & Moring, Romero became the senior counsel and corporate counsel in litigation at DuPont from 1998 to 2005.
Thomas Sager, then-general counsel to DuPont, said that DuPont hired Romero because the company had wanted to focus on diversity within the legal department and Romero had demonstrated interest in a position at the company.
Sager, who served as Romero’s senior supervisor as well as a reference for her interview process at the University, said that Romero’s legal acumen, candidness and strong interpersonal skills made her a great lawyer and employee at DuPont.
DuPont is an American chemical company, and Crowell & Moring is a law firm that serves as the primary law firm for DuPont.
From 2005 to 2007, Romero transitioned into the position of corporate counsel and manager, a different specialized area of the firm.
Stephen Kastenberg ’88, current partner at Ballard Spahr law firm, worked with Romero for approximately 15 years and noted that he first met her in 1997 while working on a high-stakes lawsuit, DCV Holdings v. DuPont and ConAgra, in which Romero served as DuPont’s in-house counsel.
“There were several hundreds of millions of dollars at stake,” Kastenberg said, “but Romero had every confidence in the legal team. She was tough and was very involved in the defense.”
Spearhead of the HNBA: Blazing trails for Latino legal professionalsRomero began her term as president of the Hispanic National Bar Association in September 2008.
Although she had left her position as vice president of external affairs on the HNBA board of governors in 2002 in order to devote more time to DuPont and her newborn daughter, Emilia, she rejoined the HNBA board in 2004.
Romero had also been former president of Hispanic Bar Association of D.C. from 1997 to 1999.
As her term as president of the National Bar Association coincided with the first year of a new presidential administration, Romero started the HNBA’s Appointments Project to advocate for the appointment of lawyers of color within the administration.
Her second major initiative involved the creation of the HNBA Latina Commission, which focused on closing the achievement gap for Latinas in the legal profession. The initiative resulted in a publication titled, “Few and Far Between: The Reality of Latina Lawyers,” which found that Latinas are inadequately represented in leadership positions in the legal profession.
Romero said that her third and less glamorous initiative involved the extensive amendment of the association’s bylaws and improving the governance and finances of the association.
Leading the association often necessitated the reconciliation of different and strong opinions, Romero noted, but she added that she felt the end goal was to recognize that the overall result would be the best one for the institution.
“I have strong opinions too, but I’m flexible and open-minded enough to change my mind. I don’t think I have a monopoly on good ideas,” Romero said, adding that she enjoyed the diversity of opinions from the broad range of people she encountered in the association.
“She’s a visionary. She’s instituted a number of national programs that are still in existence today,” said Roman D. Hernandez, a current lawyer and shareholder at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, and former president of the HNBA from 2009 to 2010.
He first met Romero in 2001 on the HNBA’s Board of Governors, when they were both presidents of regional Hispanic Bar Associations. Hernandez, who worked closely with Romero as president-elect from 2008 to 2009, said that her ability to develop a valuable rapport with other board members while earning respect from others set her apart from the others.
From 2007 to 2011, Romero served as Corporate Counsel of Logistics and Energy at DuPont, and in the meantime, from December 2008 to December 2010, also served as general counsel to Sentinel Transportation LLC, a trucking joint venture between DuPont and Phillips 66, a multinational energy company.
A transition into public service
President Barack Obama announced Romero as his nomination to the position of general counsel to the USDA in June 2010.
At the USDA, Romero oversaw a team of approximately 300 lawyers in order to advise the Secretary of USDA and other government officials involved in USDA programs. The USDA addresses areas of expertise varying from food safety to land conservation to food stamps, which Romero said hit close to home for her, as she had relied on food stamps during one point in her childhood.
Romero’s collaborative approach and willingness to include her team and colleagues in discussion made her an effective leader, Inga Bumbary-Langston, deputy general counsel to the USDA, said.
Bumbary-Langston, who has worked with Romero since February 2012, said that Romero’s major accomplishments included improving technology, customer and client services, diversifying USDA staff and streamlining the organization.
Lee Fink, senior counselor at the USDA, said that Romero’s strongest attribute was her aptitude for communicating with both internal leaders and external stakeholders effectively and making decisions that would ultimately benefit the institution.
“She really found a way to make the system work, she didn’t just come up with legal guidelines,” added Fink, who said that she was a role model and mentor to many people around her at the USDA.
Romero explained that her wish to serve under a Democratic administration motivated the decision to accept the position.
Romero is a Democrat and was the recipient of the Community Service Award by the Democratic Club of Maryland in 2009. However, she noted that the process of nomination and confirmation was not easy, and that some opposed her confirmation because of her affiliation with DuPont and its involvement in genetically modified crops.
“Before the commercialization of certain genetically engineered plants, USDA analyzes whether they pose a risk to other plants. But I never had anything to do with matters involving DuPont while at the USDA,” Romero said.
Romero noted that she only allowed herself to be considered for appointment by the White House after her term as president of the HNBA ended.
Before joining the USDA, Romero had met with officials from the Office of Presidential Personnel, the Vice President’s Team and the White House Counsel’s Office on behalf of Latino professionals who were searching for positions in mainly the executive and judicial branches.
Romero testified as a representative of the HNBA before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2009 in support of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’76, who was later confirmed in August that same year.
A student leader 2.0: Back to the University
Romero had already decided to leave government service by the 2012 national election, a decision that solidified when a recruiter contacted her about possibility of working at a university instead.
“The normal move would have been for me to return to a company,” Romero noted, adding that she had never thought about working at a university.
When the general counsel position at Princeton became available, Romero said that she decided to go through the extensive process of interviewing for the job.
Eisgruber explained in a previous Daily Princetonian article that the very competitive national search for and selection of a new general counsel was facilitated by legal recruiting agency, Major, Lindsey & Africa.
“It was a wonderful opportunity, and similar to the best aspects of working in government," Romero said. "Working with smart people who cared about their mission — educating future leaders. I loved it and I loved the campus,”
Romero explained that although much of her experience was easily translatable to her new position at the University, she expects to spend the next three months working hard and learning to tackle new issues and areas particular to universities that she has not before.
Noting that one of Romero’s first actions as general counsel to the USDA was to meet and interact with as many individuals, both staff members and clients as she could, Bumbary-Langston said she thinks Romero will take the same approach at the University.
“[Romero] values being accessible, and I think that’s important to a college campus,” Bumbary-Langston said.
“You want someone who’s going to be fair and balanced and sensitive to the victims," Sager said about dealing with complex issues like sexual assault. “You want someone with empathy. That’s [Romero].” Miguel Pozo, the immediate past president of the HNBA, who first met Romero in 2004, said that he was confident in Romero's ability to resolve University matters. "She's good at dealing with sensitive issues and she's gone to an Ivy League school, she'll understand what issues might be unique to Ivy League schools," Pozo said.
Romero said she expects to stay with the University indefinitely.
She noted that her new job at the University will also make it easier to spend time with her family, as the University’s location makes it far more convenient for her to commute during the week when appropriate.
Romero’s family will relocate to the Princeton area at the end of the academic year, she said.
Romero said that her life values have included working hard while maintaining respect and awareness for the privileges that one has.
“Don’t occupy a chair if you don’t know what you’re going to do while sitting in that chair,” Romero said.
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