After leaving the acting profession in the early 1970s, Kuehl became an adviser to students in campus activist groups at her alma mater, UCLA, and eventually became an associate dean of students. When Kuehl was passed over for a promotion that was given to a man, Kuehl felt that her treatment had been unfair and became interested in a legal career to address the position of women in the workplace.
In 1975, at age 34, after being denied admission into UCLA, Kuehl was accepted at Harvard Law School. In her third year she was elected class marshal and president of the student council. She received her J.D. in 1978. During her final year, she chaired the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the first group of women to be admitted to the law school, and became the second woman to win Harvard's prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition, judged by a panel including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Kuehl recalled that the Justice "strode over to me, clasped my hand in his two huge hands and said, 'Lady, I like your style.'" Kuehl was recognized in the ABA's Law Student Division magazine as one of the nation's top five law students.
It was while at Harvard that Kuehl came to grips with her sexuality. She later recalled:
So it wasn't until I went to [Harvard] law school in my thirties that I fell in love again with a woman after having dated lots of men in between, and I thought 'Oh, no, this is really who I am.' And by then in the mid-seventies, there was consciousness about being gay. My second partner was out…and I was still in the closet I thought, [but] I wasn't really in the closet at school. It's just sort of like you creep out a little at a time. But there was no movement, no organization, no club at Harvard, and so when we came back and lived together, it only lasted a couple of years and she left. I was so broken-hearted but I had no one to talk to. I hadn't told anyone I was even in a relationship. So I decided to come out to my sister and then my friends and very shortly thereafter my parents. And that was probably '79, so I was 38. So I knew I was gay when I fell in love with a woman for the second time. It wasn't an aberration for me….
After law school, Kuehl became an associate at Richards, Watson & Gershon in Los Angeles, where her practice focused on municipal law. She later became an associate at Bersch & Kaplowitz in Beverly Hills, practicing family, anti-discrimination, and civil rights law.
-more, so much more-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Kuehl
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