BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Isabel Marcus, a University at Buffalo law professor and women’s rights advocate who met with protesting students in China’s Tiananmen Square and confronted Operation Rescue protesters closer to home, has died. She was 83.
Marcus spent most of her five decades in academia at the University at Buffalo, where she co-founded the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender, served as director of graduate and international programs at the law school, and was twice a Fulbright Scholar.
She died Oct. 31 in Los Angeles after living with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, according to family members.
At Buffalo, Marcus focused on women’s rights and gender equality, becoming a scholar of international human rights. Her public conflicts with Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group that staged a massive protest in Buffalo in 1992, led to death threats, her family said.
A lifetime of wanderlust took her to Latin America, Europe, Egypt, India, the Middle East and China, where as one of the few Westerners in Beijing in June 1989, she met with students at Tiananmen Square before China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. She was evacuated on one of the last flights out along with other professors and students who were on a UB exchange with Beijing University.
As the Cold War came to an end, Marcus — who would spend time in 1997 as a Fulbright scholar in Romania and later Macedonia — turned her attention to developing a legal framework for women’s rights in Central and Eastern Europe. Her seminal work “Dark Numbers” explored the lack of official accountability for domestic violence.
“Her intellectual rigor and willingness to go places others would not helped train a generation of lawyers who have pushed for equal rights in Eastern Europe and...
