Beryl Joyce Levine (nee Choslovsky) passed away on June 4, 2022, at her home in San Mateo with her family at her side. Beryl was born on November 9, 1935 in Winnipeg, Canada, the second of four children of Bella and Maurice “Chick” Choslovsky. Beryl, then age 19, met Dr. Leonard Levine, who predeceased her in 2020, at a wedding in 1955. The couple fell in love, Beryl dropped out of college and they married just three months later on June 7, 1955. The couple then lived in Cleveland, Ohio, Grand Forks, North Dakota, and back to Winnipeg briefly before settling in Fargo, North Dakota in 1964 where they lived for the next 32 years.
After the birth of the couple’s sixth child in 1966, Beryl returned to college and earned her undergraduate degree. She then enrolled at the University of North Dakota School of Law in 1971. Despite the encouragement from the dean in the first week to drop out because she was, in his words, “bored, spoiled and frivolous,” she remained in law school and graduated number one in her class with numerous awards in 1974. For the next decade, she worked as an attorney in one of the state’s most prestigious firms, advocating for women’s rights and she was a leader in the fight against domestic violence. Then, in January 1985, then-Governor George Sinner appointed her to the North Dakota Supreme Court, the first woman in history to serve on the state’s highest court, where she served with distinction until her resignation on March 1, 1996. Following Beryl’s retirement, Beryl and Leonard moved to Palo Alto in 1996 and subsequently to San Mateo in 2017.
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