Judge Maxine Broderick is first Black woman to lead Nassau Bar Association

During her tenure at the Nassau County Bar Association, Maxine Broderick worked to ensure that lawyers and judges from all walks of life felt welcomed among its 4,000 members.

Now, as the first Black woman elected president of the 127-year-old association, Broderick hopes that achievement reflects that same commitment to inclusion.

The historic significance of her election is neither lost on Broderick, the presiding judge of Nassau County’s Human Trafficking Intervention Court, nor accepted as a final laurel on which she will rest. She hopes the bar association, which serves as a home for burgeoning and veteran practitioners of the law through continuing education, as well as a legal resource for the wider community, will continue to become more diverse, as it has in recent years. And as a Hofstra Law School adjunct professor, a mentor to elementary schoolers and a Uniondale High School mock trial coach, she understands the importance of holding the door open for all those following her path.

“It’s truly an honor and a privilege,” Broderick, 53, told Newsday. “I think that representation is important, not representation for its own sake, but because representation brings different perspectives along.”

Broderick, a Hempstead Village native, assumed her new role June 2. Presidents of the Nassau County Bar Association are nominated by past presidents and others in leadership positions to serve a single, one-year term, she said. Until 1994, only men had held the position. The first Black man, Lance Clarke, was elected president in 2007. 

Her presidency marks a culmination of 14 years spent on various committees and leadership positions within the organization. Two stints as co-chair of the association’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee allowed Broderick to foster what she described as “a community within a community.”

“When I first came to this bar association, it was fairly homogeneous,” she said. “That’s not always the most comfortable position to be in, if you’re kind of feeling that you’re in a room and there aren’t other people like you in that room. . . . We have people of all backgrounds that are part of that committee. I’m very proud to say that that committee has been one of many safe spaces here at this bar association.”

‘ABLE TO MANAGE HER ROOM’

Mickheila Jasmin-Beamon, an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, credited Broderick with helping remove her doubts about the Mineola-based bar association.

When Jasmin-Beamon, 38, of Elmont, first heard a member describe the legal organization by its nickname, “Domus” — the Latin word for “house” or “home” — she asked what the word meant. The answer, she said, was “pretentious” and “snooty” — “like ‘if you know, you know.’ ”

That interaction kept Jasmin-Beamon away from the bar association until she met Broderick five years later. The woman whom Jasmin-Beamon now views as a mentor quickly won her over.

“She told me, ‘This is a bar association that really benefits from a diversity of ideas that benefits from different people, from different outlooks,’ ” she said. “I started coming around, and then I started hearing this word ‘Domus,’ and I realized that it was the same place that I was so turned off by. I really just needed a better introduction to it.”

Broderick can be “very reserved” in a professional setting but will not shy away from “pausing, taking a temperature of what’s going on” and stepping up to bring it down, Jasmin-Beamon said.

“I’ve seen her in intense situations, things escalated, people were yelling, people were carrying on, heated debates, and she always brought a calming effect to the situation,” Jasmin-Beamon recalled. “Sometimes you have some individuals who just want to be agitators, they just want to be contrarians and cause a ruckus, especially when you’re talking about things relating to diversity and inclusion,” Jasmin-Beamon told Newsday. “She silenced it. She was always able to manage her room, and I found that so impressive.”

A NATURAL MENTOR

Longtime Uniondale attorney Dorian Glover, the second Black man to serve as president of the Nassau bar association, described Broderick as a “natural fit” when she joined its Alan B. Hodish Mentorship Program. Association members who volunteer are paired with elementary and middle schools throughout the county.

The mentors, Glover, 60, of Hempstead, told Newsday, do “more listening to the students than talking, to meet the students where they are and to help guide them along what would be their journey.”

Glover said he first invited Broderick about a decade ago to join him as he met with children ages 9 through 11 at the Barack Obama Elementary School in Hempstead. She’s been paired there ever since.

“We’ve taken topics of the day and we ask students if they have an understanding of particular topics, including what they know about what lawyers do and if they know what judges do,” Glover said. “They’ve never met a judge before, and it breaks down those barriers so they see that attorneys and judges are real people, and they’re able to ask their own questions about what may be circulating in their mind about our particular roles.”

A few years after Broderick became a judge in 2017, she began to coach Uniondale High School’s mock trial team. She also serves as a judge for other mock trial competitions. The mock trials allow the students to take on the role of attorneys and argue cases in a courtroom environment before Broderick and other judges.

INTERNSHIP INITIATIVE

She also helped start the bar association’s paid summer internship program, which pairs law students with local firms. It’s this sort of work with the next generation of lawyers that Broderick’s older sister, Monica Broderick, 55, of Hempstead, said she finds “most amazing” on a resume that also includes helping parents battle for custody and overseeing human trafficking cases.

“She is, in many different aspects and in many ways, both for the young and for mature adults, finding ways to make paths easier for other people, both by example, but also by creating opportunities where there weren’t opportunities before,” Monica Broderick said. “I know something like [the internship program] was not something that she was able to have when she was becoming a lawyer, and she had to work full time while she was going to law school. . . . So for her to have gone on and worked with others to create a program that gets paid internships for law students, I think it’s huge.”

Maxine Broderick said her older sister served as inspiration. Monica Broderick graduated from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and become a psychiatrist.

After graduating from Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls Roman Catholic High School in Hempstead, Maxine Broderick followed her sister’s path to college and graduate school. She attended Fordham University at the Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. For four years after earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Broderick said she worked in corporate America. But then, she said she “had the realization that a four-year degree just wasn’t as valuable as it was maybe a generation or a couple of decades before, and that if I wanted to have a certain amount of social mobility and stability, I would have to pursue a professional degree.”

After graduating from Brooklyn Law School and passing the bar exam, Broderick began practicing law on Long Island in 2004. Four years later, she opened her own practice and specialized in family and matrimonial law.

Monica Broderick said lawyer and judge are fitting roles for her sister. “I remember situations in school where my sister would be very offended by there being students in the class who other kids picked on, and I saw her sort of step into that role of being a defender of other people.”

In 2017, Broderick was sworn in as Hempstead Village Court Justice. Later that year, she was elected to the Nassau County District Court. Since 2023, she has presided over Nassau County’s Human Trafficking Intervention Court.

“As a judge, she’s brought to that role everything she built over a distinguished legal career: precision, fairness, deep knowledge of the law and an unwavering commitment to justice,” Glover said, reading from remarks he prepared for her June 2 inauguration. “Putting on that robe was not simply a personal achievement. It was a signal to every young girl watching, that the highest seats in our legal system belong to them too.”

While being “a first” carries “tremendous weight,” Glover told Newsday he believes Broderick’s legacy at the bar association will be greater than simply making history as one. Citing her commitment to younger generations, he described her as “an awesome leader, and she just gives of herself unselfishly to help others.”

“The law at its best is about fairness, about making sure every voice is heard, and every person is seen,” Glover said at her inauguration. “There’s no one more suited to lead this association toward that ideal than Judge Broderick. She’s earned this moment not once, but 100 times over.”