She usually needs a stepstool to be seen over a speaker’s lectern. She smiles frequently and wears her gray hair in a bun.

But don’t let the packaging fool you. Seventy-year-old Deborah Poritz packs a gargantuan intellect — moving at microprocessor speed — into a pint-sized container.

Recently retired as chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court and perhaps best known for shepherding the state’s court system though a massive overhaul, Poritz reminisced recently about her life and what it meant to be a woman whose every career move meant breaking precedents.

Most of all, during a Dec. 18 interview with NJ Jewish News from her new professional home at the Princeton law firm of Drinker, Biddle and Reath, Poritz recalled the human element of the law — and individuals who are often overshadowed by the legal and political ramifications of the cases to which they are parties.

She particularly remembers a case for which she wrote the dissenting opinion. It concerned pregnancy leave for a woman who worked for a casino. The case, Christina Gerety v. Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort, was decided in 2005.

The woman “had twins and used up her sick leave and lost her job,” Poritz said. Although the casino’s leave policy was generous — it allowed employees 26 weeks of medical leave in a 12-month period — Gerety sought an extension due to pregnancy-related medical complications. The casino said no.

“The law on the issue is interesting; the company applied its policy equally between men and women. But the law is unequal in its application,” said Poritz. As she wrote in her dissent, “However laudable the employer’s intentions, pregnancy is unique to women. That biological fact requires us to examine whether an even-handed leave policy disadvantages women because they, and only they, will use leave for pregnancy-related conditions, thereby limiting its availability for medical conditions generally, a limitation never faced by men.”

Poritz discussed the case recently at Douglass College in New Brunswick at an Institute for Women’s Leadership celebration marking the centennial of the death of suffragette Susan B. Anthony.

“There I was, and I was thinking about women and how late women got the vote,” Poritz said. “It occurred to me this is another variation on the theme — as long as women face these issues in the workplace, there will be problems and a need to deal” with such issues.

At the same time, she noted how far women have come — recalling a personal anecdote from before she attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

She was young, a mother of two young children, and was interviewing for a teaching job at a college.

“The interviewer asked me if I practiced birth control,” she said with a grin. “I don’t think anyone would say that today.”

She also grins as she remembers how young she was — she got married at 21 and didn’t start law school until her children were 10 and 12 years old. Now they’re young men, married with children and careers of their own. Despite also having an uncle and cousins who are attorneys, her sons followed in their father’s footsteps into the sciences — he’s a mathematician, one son is an engineer, and the other is a chemist.

“Young women lawyers often come up to me and say,

‘How did you do it?’” she said. But, she recalled, she did not work as an attorney when her children were young. Instead, she suggested a lesson young women can take from her experience: They can devote themselves to a career later in life or take time out while their children are young and then return to the career track.

After law school, Poritz joined the NJ Attorney General’s office and served in increasingly senior positions until being named chief counsel to Gov. Thomas Kean. From 1990 to 1994, Poritz was a partner in the Princeton law firm of Jamieson, Moore, Peskin & Spicer.

Poritz was appointed the state’s first female attorney general by Gov. Christie Todd Whitman in 1994. During her tenure she defended Megan’s Law in state and federal courts.

Megan’s Law is named after a seven-year-old girl who was lured into a neighbor’s home, then raped and murdered by a convicted pedophile. The law requires authorities to notify a community of the presence of convicted sex offenders living in the area.

Whitman nominated Poritz as chief justice in 1996. In that role, she also served as the administrative head of the state’s superior and appellate courts. In all three courts, a total of 9,000 employees were under her oversight. During her tenure she helped update and unify the system.

On the difficult days, and there were several, “it wasn’t so much a matter of dragging yourself to work but once you got to work, there would be some kind of problem. Somewhere in the system there was [often] a problem — like having to suspend someone.”

Poritz retired in October, one day shy of her 70th birthday and the state’s mandatory retirement age — something she thinks should change. She has spoken about it publicly quite often, calling mandatory retirement a good but flawed idea.

“With the medical advances we have, 70 is younger than when the Constitution was written,” she said.

And yet, retirement at some point is necessary, because a typical Supreme Court work week is “very demanding — intellectually demanding [and] very challenging,” she said.

“When we were in conferences, I’d come home every night after a conference, drained. Yet I look back on those days as very special. We would go into a [judges’] conference having read briefs, transcripts, and clerks’ memos and reviewed the case law and history.”

Poritz has joined the Pennsylvania-based firm of Drinker, Biddle and Reath with the title “of counsel” and will specialize in government and corporate investigations, mediation, and arbitration as well as appellate matters. Even though state law forbids her from arguing cases in NJ courts, her advice will be valuable, said officials at the firm, which has 12 offices nationwide.

“It’s an honor to have such a distinguished jurist join our firm,” Jonathan Epstein, partner in charge of the Princeton office, said in a release issued by the firm. “Chief Justice Poritz was an innovative and outstanding leader of our court system, which enjoys a well-deserved reputation as one of the best in the country.”

Poritz doesn’t like to talk about her personal life — her reluctance appears to be a combination of humility and privacy. But she will say that she grew up in a Jewish community (she graduated from Brooklyn’s James Madison High School in 1954 and Brooklyn College in 1958) and has a strong connection to the Jewish community.

“I see my identity as a Jewish woman,” she said. She added, without elaborating, that Jewish identity is very important to her family.

When she looks back on her career, Poritz said, she downplays the personal milestones in favor of her public role in defense of the system.

“What I’m most proud of is that in each position I’ve held — whether as attorney, attorney general, or chief justice — I tried to do it as well as I could do it. As chief justice I tried to maintain the quality of a court that had a rather extraordinary reputation.”