Call Her Madam Chief Justice: Debra McCloskey Todd ’79
Pennsylvania Chief Justice Debra McCloskey Todd ’79 poses for a portrait in her Pittsburgh chambers. (Nancy Andrews)
For the most part, Debra McCloskey Todd ’79 never wavered from the path to law school. But near the end of her four years at Chatham College, where she majored in politics and theater, there was a blip in that plan.
It happened when Todd, who’s now the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, and her roommate heard that the circus was in Pittsburgh for an engagement at the Civic Arena. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey company put out an open call for performers. “Because we were Chatham women, who thought we could do anything at the time, we said, ‘Let’s go do that! We could do that,’” Todd recalled. They put on leotards and wrap skirts, did their makeup and hair, and hopped on a 7 a.m. Port Authority bus to the arena, where they auditioned to be dancers.
To their delight, the circus later sent both of them offers to sign a one-year contract, which would include training in Sarasota, FL, followed by a tour around the country by train. “I was so excited,” Todd said. “I thought, this would be a great gap year, a great thing to do between college and law school. I told my parents, and they said, ‘Absolutely not!’” Neither Todd nor her roommate ended up joining the circus.
So, Todd stuck with her original plan, went to law school, and became an attorney. After 18 years as a lawyer, she ran in 1999 as a Democrat for the state Superior Court and was elected as a judge. Voters in 2007 chose her again, this time for a spot on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, where she served for 15 years until, in 2023, she became the first female chief justice in the more than 300-year history of the court.
In an interview in her chambers in Pittsburgh last summer, Todd said she still has that letter offering her a job at the circus, though now she can see that her parents were “very sensible people” for steering her back to law school.
(Nancy Andrews)
Todd’s parents raised her and her two sisters in Ellwood City, located about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh. Her father was a steelworker. Her mother was a homemaker. At 12 years old, Todd started her first job; an attorney named Jim Keller, who lived a few blocks away from her family’s house, asked her to work as his file clerk. “That was a time in our lives—in my family’s lives—when I needed to have a job,” Todd said. “It was important for me to work.”
Her first assignment for Keller was to organize his extensive set of form files, which were, at the time, arranged in alphabetical order. Todd wondered if it would be more practical to put the papers in chronological order, beginning from the start of a case’s litigation and ending with appeals. Keller was impressed by the innovative idea.
“That was when Mr. Keller said to me, ‘You’re really smart. You know, women can be lawyers. You can be a lawyer,’” Todd said. “I was actually taken aback, because it never occurred to me that I could be a lawyer, or even that women were lawyers. The only lawyers I knew were Mr. Keller and Perry Mason.”
“They had confidence in me,” she said of Keller and his wife. “For a kid to be told ‘You’re smart,’ to be told ‘You can have this great career, and we believe in you,’ that meant a lot. That meant everything.”
Throughout middle and high school, Todd clerked for Keller, working full time in the summer and part time during the school year. “It became a huge part of my life,” she said. “I had never thought about law. … I was a 12-year-old kid, so I wasn’t thinking about much except my schoolwork and my activities. But I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with the law, the vibe of being in a law office and being around clients, hearing about their cases. It truly lit a flame in me that never extinguished.”
“It took 300 years for a woman to rise to the level of chief justice. I thought it was about time.”
In 1975, Todd graduated high school and came to Chatham on an academic scholarship, and she fell in love with the college, too. She felt empowered by the atmosphere of the all-female student body, the faculty, and the administration. Though she studied both politics and theater, she said she spent most of her time with the theater crowd. “I knew I wanted to go to law school, but I didn’t want to give up theater because I had been a theater kid throughout my childhood and high school, and I loved it so much,” she said.
Her friends included her roommates, Robin Meloy Goldsby ’79, a onetime musician on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood who now performs as an international pianist, and Margaret “Peggy” Melozzi ’78, a writer and creative director. “The three of us were actors in college; that’s basically how we looked at ourselves,” Todd said. Among her greatest gratitudes to Chatham, she said, are the wonderful, lasting friendships she made there. “If you think about it, it’s been a long time since we graduated from college, and we live worlds apart, and to stay close friends is a gift.”
For her senior tutorial performance in 1979, she wrote a paper and put on a production, incorporating her two majors in one project, which looked at the political impact of musical theater in America. During her 90-minute performance, she sang songs that reflected the mood of different periods in U.S. history. One of them was “Oklahoma,” the title song from the smash Rogers and Hammerstein musical. Another song came from Call Me Madam, a satire based on the exploits of Perle Mesta, the socialite and American ambassador to Luxembourg. According to the student newspaper, the Matrix, Todd spent $100 (approximately $450 in 2024) to acquire the rights to the music.
“I remember the support I got from Chatham,” Todd said of the project. “At Chatham back then, you could say, ‘I’m going to go to the moon, and I need three students and 10 professors to go with me.’ And they’d say, ‘We’re there, we’re with you.’
“It was just this unbelievably encouraging environment. I remember putting together a stage manager, tech people, choreographer, and getting it together just with students at Chatham who were happy to help.”
That same year, she was also named one of Glamour Magazine’s “Top Ten College Women” after submitting herself for their yearly competition. The reward included a trip to New York City, where she shadowed Robert Morganthau, who was just four years into his decades-long tenure as the Manhattan District Attorney. “I got to spend the day with him and kept in touch with him, and I came very close to going there for work after law school, but I decided instead to stay in Pittsburgh and work for U.S. Steel.”
After several years with U.S. Steel, she was elected to Pennsylvania’s Superior Court, the appeals court where she spent eight years as a judge. During that time, she wrote what she said were some of her most impactful opinions. One of those included a dissenting opinion in a case in 2000 which challenged the legality of same-sex couples’ ability to adopt children. This was 15 years prior to same-sex marriage becoming legal in all 50 states after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges.
Her fellow judges who wrote the Superior Court’s majority opinion said Pennsylvania’s Adoption Act forbade same-sex couples from adopting one of the partners’ legal children. Todd and Judge Justin Morris were the only ones to dissent from this opinion. Todd’s argument was that this interpretation of the statute was not only discriminatory against the potential parents but also the children. “You’re denying them the love of a committed two-parent relationship,” Todd said in her interview with the Recorder. “You’re denying them social security benefits, medical benefits, all sorts of things that could come with adoption.” Todd’s analysis of what was best for the child was not done by the majority.
“I’ve written a lot of majority opinions, of course, but it does stick with you when you write a dissent, and you hope that, in the future, the law is going to come around your way,” Todd said. And it did—when the case went to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2002, the majority came down on the same side as Todd. It was a groundbreaking decision in the history of LGBTQ rights in Pennsylvania.
(Nancy Andrews)
Seven years after that, Todd was elected to be one of those justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. This is where cases go when appeals move beyond the Superior and Commonwealth courts, which is rare. If the justices choose to take up an appeal, they analyze and study the case history, read briefs submitted by the appellate attorneys, and listen to oral arguments from both sides. Then, the justices can decide whether to overturn a lower court’s ruling, keep it in place, or send it back down to the lower courts with instructions on next steps.
When Chief Justice Max Baer died in late 2022, Todd filled the vacancy. In 2023, she was officially appointed to the spot, placing her in the top seat of one of the commonwealth’s three branches of government. That means she’s also in charge of the courts’ administrative functions. Here, she said, the biggest difference between being a “normal” justice and being the chief justice: the workload. “Just being a justice on the supreme court is a whole lot of work, and it’s good work, and it’s a wonderful job. But when you jump into that chief justice role, it just becomes a tremendous amount of additional administrative responsibility.” In other words, the buck stops here.
With that in mind, Todd said she’s focused on implementing initiatives in the courts that will be good for all of Pennsylvania. That includes expanding existing programs aimed at elder justice, behavioral health, veterans’ courts, children in foster care, and people with autism. The goal, she said, is to have a justice system that is more rehabilitative than punitive. “We’ve learned through our specialty courts that … a lot of the people who come through the criminal justice system are mentally ill,” she said. “If we’re not helping them, we’re just throwing them in jail, and jail is a very expensive prospect for any state.” When appropriate, she said, she’d rather see tax dollars spent helping someone get back on the right path in life.
While she explained her ideas for the future of the courts and praised the service done by jurists at every level of Pennsylvania’s judicial system (“Some of the very best people I know are judges,” she said), Todd also took a moment to reflect on the historical significance of her own ascension to the role of chief justice. “Our court was originally established in 1684 as William Penn’s Provincial Court,” she said. “Then it was established as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, formally established pursuant to the Judiciary Act of 1722. So, we are 300 years old, and it took 300 years for a woman to rise to the level of chief justice. I thought it was about time.”
Since she became chief justice two years ago, Todd has made a couple trips back to Chatham, including her recent appearance as the distinguished alumna at the University’s 2024 Homecoming Weekend. But how much influence could four years at Chatham have had on Todd’s 25 years as a woman in politics?
“A lot,” she said. “My friends and I often joke about the fact that we just didn’t know there was something we couldn’t do. We were so ambitious and so excited that it just didn’t occur to us that a goal could be beyond our reach. That was the professors, that was the environment, that was the way the administration encouraged the students to excel.”
This article by Mick Stinelli was originally published in the Winter 2025 issue of the Chatham Recorder alumni magazine. To view more Recorder stories, click here.
Mick Stinelli is the editorial and communications manager at Chatham University. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, WYEP.org, and 90.5 WESA.