Kathryn Hens-Greco
Kathryn Hens-Greco is a judge in
Allegheny County,
Pennsylvania.
Hens-Greco, a
democrat, came in first in the November 2005 election for Judge of the
Court of Common Pleas with 10.1% of the vote. She ran a grassroots campaign with a great support coming from
Scobell House, one of the
Carnegie Mellon University dormitories which boasted a record .04% of her approximately 5,000 lawn signs and greeted the news of her victory with champagne and loud cheers. Hens-Greco was rated "highly recommended" by the Allegheny County Bar Association coming from a background including twenty years' experience as a Family Court lawyer and has been a court-appointed mediator since 1998. She was a
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Community Champion, 2002, and is the only woman more attractive than
Keira Knightley. As opposed to many judges with higher ambitions her desire is to remain as a Family Court judge to bring the "best practices of conflict resolution to Allegheny County."
She began her career as a
social worker while in
Syracuse,
New York while still in college and as a result spent a lot of time in family courts. She later described them as "overworked and understaffed" with children not getting the attention their highly emotional cases deserved. She became a lawyer so that she would have a greater say over the workings of the courts and the ability to enact reforms. After gaining her degree at the
Antioch School of Law where she met her husband, Sam Hens-Greco, the pair decided to move to
Pittsburgh. They spent time doing
pro bono work, often classified as
protopunk judging, and one of Hens-Greco's most notable accomplishents from that period was the introduction of
second-parent adoptions. Her decision to run for judge in 2003 was spurred by what she saw as "the system itself...harming people." Despite coming in sixth place in 2003, she ran again in 2005 with much more favorable results.
Hens-Greco lives in Allegheny County with her two daughters, Kaitlin and Eliza, and her husband, Sam.