Lowcountry Profiles

Jane Fender

By Jeff Kidd
Jane Dowling Fender married an attorney. Her father and uncle established one of the most influential and successful legal practices in modern Beaufort. One of her two sons became a lawyer, as well.

Given her background, one might assume the 23 years Fender spent on the bench as a 14th Judicial Circuit Family Court Judge was a natural career path — a foregone conclusion, perhaps.

To the contrary, Fender might never have been a Family Court judge had she had not first stood in front of one. “I was a daughter, and I grew up in a time when daughters didn’t get involved in the business stuff. 

You’re with your mom, and you do the cooking. … I didn’t think I could be a lawyer. No, no, girls can’t do that,” Fender says with a laugh. But when she and Sherwood Fender divorced in 1980, she decided a fresh start and a new career were in order. She graduated from the National Institute of Paralegal Training in Atlanta in 1982, then worked for a while at a Savannah firm. Her duties there demystified the legal profession for her, “and I thought, awww, why not just go for it?” So it was back to college.

She enrolled in the University of South Carolina School of Law and earned her juris doctorate in just 2 1/2 years. Eventually, she wound up working for her father’s firm, practicing mostly family law. Then, she and her brother JoJo started their own firm. Fender had been a practicing attorney just nine years when she was elected to the 14th Judicial Circuit Family Court bench in 1994, filling the unexpired term of Judge Albert L. Kleckley. She served full-time until 2008, then part-time until 2017. But if Fender came to the profession late, she also came to it honestly.

Her father, Joab Dowling, and her uncle G.G. Dowling opened a firm in Beaufort in 1948. She remembers trips with her father to Hilton Head Island, before the bridge connected the burgeoning resort destination to the mainland. By the early 1960s, the Dowling firm was performing much of the legal work necessitated by the island’s booming development and real estate industry. As a result, their practice was, for a time, South Carolina’s largest.

Joan sent his daughter to Ashley Hall in Charleston, then to the University of South Carolina, where she met Sherwood Fender. They married in 1965. Already a practicing attorney, he got a job with State Farm Insurance in Spartanburg, so Fender transferred to Converse College. Sherwood was then hired by the Dowling firm, so the couple moved again and Fender finished her political science degree at Armstrong State in 1968.

She taught science for one school year at Beaufort Academy, sold real estate for a while and delighted in her volunteer work with the St. Helena Episcopal Church and civic groups such as the LaSertoma Club. Fender’s judgeship forced her to relinquish many of her civic affiliations, so as not to risk conflicts of interest. However, she found her work on the bench to be a fulfilling replacement.

“Most of my career I really concentrated on the best interest of the child, and people knew that,” she said. “I might not have been that good on big-money cases, but give me children.” Fender said she found herself frequently dispensing the same advice to litigants who stood before her in custody matters: “I used to tell parents that you have to love your children more than you hate your spouse.” It is practical advice that comes from both the heart and experience, Fender said.

Despite some initial acrimony, “Sherwood and I have had such a great relationship, and we have for most of our divorced life,” Fender said. Raising their sons demanded as much. Today, Sherwood Jr. works in land development and real estate near Asheville, N.C. Addison Fender is a third-generation attorney, practicing family law at his own firm in Beaufort. Fender’s professional pace has slowed since her retirement, giving her more time to travel and to devote to her needlepoint and quilting projects. She converted a duplex unit that she once leased to renters into a studio for her craftwork, which she frequently donates to Lowcountry Legal Volunteers, the S.C. Bar Foundation and other charitable causes.

She also keeps a hand in the law, working as a Family Court mediator, attempting to help parties resolve their disputes before the case reaches a judge. Mediators cannot force or compel action. Ironically, Fender finds that empowering. “In a lot of ways, this is even more satisfying than my work as a judge,” she said. “When you’re a judge, you make a ruling. You give custody to one parent. You give visitation to the other and you deal with all the debt. You think you’re fixing their whole life, but you don’t know if it really worked. You don’t get to see how it all turns out.

“That’s one thing I like about mediation — the parties choose for themselves. They decide without a judge’s intervention what’s most important to them, be it the Budweiser mirror or the Christmas decorations. A judge is just going to order them to be sold at a garage sale. But if I can help them decide for themselves how those things should be divvied, they have a stake in the process, and it often ends on a much happier note.”

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