Michele LANGER

LANGER Michele Age 76, of Philadelphia, PA. Died on Wednesday, November 20, 2024. She is survived by her husband, Alan Cohen; daughter, Lara Langer Cohen (John Patrick Leary); granddaughter, Louisa Langer Leary; and four siblings. Michele succumbed to Alzheimer's disease, the cruelest disease possible for a person who loved thinking-cogitating, as she liked to say, which better describes the roving, deliberative quality of her thought. The daughter of an intermittently employed physicist and an artist/school bus driver/scientific illustrator, Michele grew up mostly in Arlington, MA. One of five wildly smart siblings, she was smart in different ways: she didn't share her family's gifts for math, music, or sports, but she was fascinated by people, social structures, and language. Michele went to Bryn Mawr College on a full scholarship. She loved its rituals and its rigor, and it was there that she was set up on a blind date with her future husband, a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, Michele traveled around the U.S. as part of a team evaluating the Office of Equal Opportunity's Legal Services Program, and she subsequently entered University of Chicago Law School. She began her career as a lawyer at Mesirov, Gelman, Jaffe, and Cramer before joining Toll, Ebby, and Gough, eventually becoming a named partner. She was drawn to law because she liked building arguments and solving problems, and of course, she wanted justice done. If the case involved improbable scenarios and characters, so much the better. Michele did not suffer fools gladly, but no one would take you more seriously. She held strong convictions about most things, big and small, and was prepared to argue them indefinitely. It is not the Langer style to have a favorite anything, but she had a wonderful way of relishing particular details of a song, movie, or book, almost always for some reason that would make you see them differently. Having grown up without nice clothes, one of Michele's chief delights, once she became a lawyer, was being able to buy the clothing she wanted. She had tremendous style, and she dressed for herself: when faced with a trying occasion, she would wear a particularly great outfit "for the entertainment value." Michele was a voracious reader, an ambitious cook, a gleeful critic of the New York Times Vows section (which she called "Mergers and Acquisitions"), and, beginning in her mid-40s, a dedicated student of Italian. Although she would always deny achieving any fluency, the animated conversations she held while traveling in Italy and her shelves of books in Italian indicated otherwise. The one bright spot in Michele's illness has been Yanique Brown, who began working with her as an aide in 2017 and has cared for her since then with extraordinary understanding and skill. We are so grateful to Yanique for all she has given to both Michele and to us during these years. Services will be private. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the Free Library of Philadelphia (https://freelibrary.org/support/) or the Pennsylvania Innocence Project https://painnocence.org/donate).