Ethel Rebecca Benjamin was famous for being New Zealand’s first female lawyer. On 17 September 1897, she also became the first woman in the British Empire to appear as counsel in court, representing a client for the recovery of a debt. She was also famous in 2010 to 2011 because she was a judge’s clerk to Justice Tipping in the Supreme Court, as well as being a tutor for legal research and writing at Victoria University in 2011. As well as being a solicitor at Meredith Connell, Rebecca is also a tutor for public laws at Auckland University. She had many achievements throughout her life along which makes her a signficiant women. She won a 2015 Pegasus Scholarship to the Inner Temple, London, and in 2009 she won the Otago District Law Society Prize for general excellence throughout a law degree.  She succeeded in many things which gave her the potential to be the first female lawyer in New Zealand.  It is interesting that the first women lawyers in the Empire came from the colonies and not the mother country. The formal barriers against women’s education, their role in the professions and in public life were removed much earlier. Ethel Benjamin was able to take advantage of this liberal attitude to women’s education. Her speech that she presented, was remarkable, "It was only yesterday that I was asked to undertake this pleasant task, and while deeply sensible of the compliment paid to me, I was somewhat diffident about taking so much upon myself at so short a notice. But I knew that little would be expected of me and even if I succeeded in talking nonsense, the charitable verdict would be "Oh well, it is all that can be expected of a woman". She went on to say "New Zealand has her lady butcher, her commercial traveller, optician, dentist, watchmaker, even her lady blacksmith... and it is well that women should make such an inroad into the fields of labour. We should come to a position where women should be economically independent of men and should marry for love and not just for a home".