Page 34 - November December CBA Report

MEMORIALS
Memorials honor the lives of deceased members of the local Bar. For more information, contact Lisa Quintanilla at (513) 699-1391 or lquintanilla@cincybar.org.
Bea Larsen
1929 – 2025
Bea V. Larsen, a trailblazing attorney
who in 1986 became the first woman
to serve as president of the Cincin-
nati Bar Association, died Aug. 12 in
Bloomington, Indiana, at age 96. “Bea
was such a mentor and role model to
so many young women lawyers, espe-
cially at a time when there were so few women who had blazed
the trail for us,” said Barbara J. Howard, who was Cincinnati
Bar Association president in 2001-2002. Larsen was one of the
few women in Hamilton County to work as a trial lawyer in the
1970s. She served as director of the Legal Aid Society’s public
defender division from 1974 to 1979.
For the last several decades of her more than 50-year legal
career, she was a mediator for the Center for Resolution of
Disputes, which she founded in 1988. Larsen was “calm and
wise,” said Marianna Bettman, a former judge and retired law
professor who shared office space with Larsen in the 1980s.
“She always somehow had that calming effect on us and always
prodded us to come to our own conclusion about better ways
to handle things than just getting mad,” Bettman said. Larsen
shared her weekly commentaries on the air at WVXU-FM
radio from 1994 to 2002. She then moved to blogging online
at bealarsen.com. In 2019, she published several of her essays
in her book, “The Third Person in the Room: Stories of Rela-
tionships at a Turning Point,” which Kirkus Reviews called
“an emotional, thought-provoking read about the fragility of
relationships.” With her colleague Bob Rack, she co-founded
Beyond Civility, a nonprofit that hosted workshops and side-by-
side conversations to encourage respectful public discourse. She
finally retired in 2017, when she was 88. “She had such a huge
impact on the legal profession, and but she also just as a person
had such an impact on a number of us as individuals, friends,
professional colleagues,” said Jerry Lawson, who was execu-
tive director of the Center for Resolution of Disputes alongside
Larsen for more than 20 years. “There’ll never be another Bea.”
“She’s not…one of the Boys”
She was born Beatrice Vita Rosenblum on March 9, 1929, in
New York City. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs,
Ohio, where she met her future husband, Leonard Larsen. They
were married in 1949. The family moved to Cincinnati in 1956
when Leonard was hired as a geology professor at the Univer-
sity of Cincinnati. “I lived the life that women lived back then in
the ’50s,” Larsen told Kirkus Reviews in 2020. “I never expected
to do anything but be a homemaker until the ’60s hit and the
world changed.” With her kids in school, at age 35 she began
attending law classes at night at Salmon P. Chase College of Law,
then held in the Central Parkway YMCA building. She was the
only woman in the class of 1969. Larsen blazed another trail in
1979 by running for Hamilton County Municipal Court Judge.
Her campaign slogan, “She’s not … one of the boys,” stirred up
voters who saw the courtrooms dominated by men. Although
she came in seventh for five seats on the bench, her good
showing gave more women confidence to run for judgeships. “I
think the fact I did run as well as I did send a message to both
parties that the time is right (for women judges),” she told The
Enquirer in 1979. “Certainly, it’s clear the electorate is ready.”
She then started a private law practice specializing in domestic
law, but became frustrated by the way divorce proceedings more
often lined lawyers’ pockets than solved disputes.
As President of the Cincinnati Bar Association, she introduced
a mediation program as an alternative to litigation, allowing
sides to settle before going to trial. That led to the creation of the
Center for Resolution of Disputes, where she served as mediator
for nearly three decades. “She was very instrumental in starting
the notion of collaborative law,” said Bettman. “Instead of
being adversaries, trying to work things out together somehow
instead of being on opposite sides, trying to come to a resolution
together.” Larsen also helped establish the Roundtable cooper-
ative between the Cincinnati Bar Association and members of
the Black Lawyers Association of Cincinnati to create opportu-
nities for minority lawyers. Larsen was inducted into the Ohio
Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988. Her husband, Len, died in 2002.
She is survived by her children, Neil, Grey and Julia Larsen; six
grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
— This memorial was originally published in The Cincinnati
Enquirer on Aug. 20, 2025
34 THE REPORT | November/December 2025 | CincyBar.org