CAMPBELL WAS BORN AMID THE ROLLING
farmlands and Amish buggies of Bucks County,
Penn., the eldest child of two scientists. Her
father was an industrial chemist, her mother a
biochemist working on cancer research at Temple
University School of Medicine. Her maternal
grandfather, educated at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, was a civil engineer,
outdoorsman, amateur musician and overall
polymath who was a leader in the Appalachian
Mountain Club.
Campbell has three sisters and a brother,
and quickly established herself as an unofficial
third parent. “She was very ambitious from the
word go,” says Sally Jean Lee, the family’s third
sister and three years Campbell’s junior. “She
wanted to excel in everything. In high school, she
did everything she could, every extracurricular
activity. She crammed it in there.
“I should’ve known she’d become a lawyer,” Lee
adds. “She was always debating me. She liked to
debate about every issue under the sun. It drove
me nuts because she always won.”
The move toward the legal profession seemed
obvious to Campbell as well.
“From the time I was in 10th grade, when I read
Louis Nizer’s books behind closed doors, I knew
that I wanted to be a litigator,” she says. “It was
the opportunity to be involved in the issues of the
day and to speak on behalf of someone who’s
hiring you to do that.”
In 1972 she was majoring in political science
at Mount Holyoke College when Columbia Law
School offered her the chance to go there straight
from her third year of college.
“I remember her energy and enthusiasm
and friendliness and warmth,” says Fried.
“I remember taking classes with her and
being really impressed with her focus and
dedication. And I remember her being an
avid jogger, jogging around Riverside Park,
through neighborhoods, through streets. She
enjoyed seeing things, observing different
neighborhoods while she was running.”
After law school, Campbell stayed in New York
City and began a clerkship at the 2nd Circuit,
simultaneously juggling the caseloads of two
judges, Judge Harold R. Medina and Judge Sterry
R. Waterman. The following year, she joined
Townley & Updike as its second female lawyer
ever. She was an idealistic 23-year-old, sure she
was about to change the world.
“It was 1976, and I had a burning desire to do
First Amendment litigation,” Campbell recalls.
“I loved the idea that [Townley & Updike] were
in the Daily News building. I would be prepping
reporters, protecting the First Amendment,
like Judge Medina was always talking about—
shining the light.”
Two years later, the light led her downtown.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office was clearly the fast-
track thing to do,” she says. “I got in, and chose
the civil division, because I had no interest in cops
and robbers.”
The environmental unit particularly appealed
to the lifelong lover of the outdoors. It was the
dawn of the green era in American politics.
Environmentalism had gone from a niche
movement to a mainstream concern, and in
1980 Congress passed the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation, and
Liability Act, creating the mechanism by which
governmental officials could clean up locations
massively polluted with hazardous materials—
the so-called Superfund sites. Campbell
immediately saw the opportunity and brought
the first Superfund case in New York, United
States v. Berncolors-Poughkeepsie, after an
explosion and fire caused hazardous substances
from a dye manufacturing facility to be released
into the environment.
“One of the things I really like about
environmental law is it’s so concrete,” Campbell
says. “You’re dealing with operations and
businesses you can put your hand on. I like to
understand the science of it and what’s going
on with the factories and the pipes. I like the dirt
aspect of it.”
In 1983, Campbell was promoted to chief
of the Environmental Protection Unit of the
U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District
of New York. She worked closely with Robert
Kennedy Jr.’s Hudson Riverkeeper to end Exxon-
Mobil’s practice of discharging ballast upriver
in the Hudson. She also worked on a lawsuit to
compel the city of New York to build the North
River Wastewater Treatment Plant. Until then,
untreated sewage on the city’s West Side flowed
directly into the river.
“Let’s put it this way: She’s smart, she’s
determined, she’s enthusiastic, she’s composed,”
says Dennison Young, a former assistant U.S.
attorney and confidante to Mayor Rudy Giuliani,
now with Giuliani Partners. He was the senior
counsel on the first case Campbell tried, revolving
around the question of whether prisoners could
volunteer for medical experiments. “She’s what
you want a superb litigator to be.”
In 1986, Campbell and two other assistant U.S.
attorneys, Denny Chin and Michael Patrick, struck
out on their own. The trio formed a boutique firm
specializing in civil litigation.
What did they work on? “Anything that walked
through the door,” Campbell recalls. “It was a
blitzkrieg education in business development, how
to market yourself, how to run a firm, business
collaboration—all the aspects of a business.”
“I remember being on the rooftop of Michael’s
building on the Upper West Side having cocktails
as we were talking about this, when I put down
‘Campbell, Patrick, Chin, ampersand,’” Chin says.
“We were trying the combinations, but Michael
and I agreed: ‘Let’s put Susan first.’ We thought it
would be cool to have a woman first. And she was
the most senior.”
The fact that Campbell was an experienced
female litigator proved important to Ariana J. Tadler,
a Fordham law student who worked as a summer
associate in the third year of the firm, and is now
a partner at Milberg. “I worked on an immigration
matter, dealing with somebody not from the firm
who clearly, because of his upbringing and ethnic
background, had a certain bias against respecting
women,” Tadler says. “But I needed to educate this
man about his rights. I was not prepared for what
that was like. So I consulted with Susan. And Susan
said, ‘You know what you have to do. Go do it,’
literally pushing me out the door.”
If the firm was a blitzkrieg education, it was
also a costly one. The first year, each partner took
home $35,000 in income. The second, $50,000.
The final year, they made $80,000 each—a
relative pittance compared to what colleagues
were making.
“The hard part wasn’t the law part, it was
collecting money,” Chin says.
The partners dissolved the firm, and Campbell
joined Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander &
Ferdon. Her new firm’s resources meant she
could now handle cases of any size—such as
representing Stone & Webster, once one of
the largest engineering firms in the world. The
Massachusetts-based company was in the midst
of a sprawling, complex series of cases involving
hazardous waste cleanup that meant combing
through millions of pages of records from utility
companies across the country all the way back
to the 1890s—sometimes on gargantuan daily
logbooks over a century old. Campbell headed
the team going through all the records, page by
page, and tracking down former utility-company
employees who were well into their 90s.
“She had a good sense of humor about
it. You needed a good sense of humor,” says
John P. McGann, former assistant corporate
secretary and assistant general counsel at
Stone & Webster. “She can look reassuring and
calming, and yet be hard as nails.”
