[3] McDonald was one of the first eleven judges elected by the United Nations to serve on the Yugoslav Tribunal[4][5] and went on to become its president between 1997 and 1999,[3] the only woman to occupy the position since its founding in 1994.
[12] McDonald has spoken about her mother's refusal to accept prejudice and discrimination, which include her confrontation with a racist landlord who wanted to evict Frances from her apartment when he learned her children were African-Americans.
[13] At the 2004 Horatio Alger Award short biographical film, McDonald also spoke about an incident where a taxi driver apologized to her mother for the unpleasant smell in his car because a previous passenger had been an African-American.
[19] After graduating from Howard Law, McDonald accepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York.
[20] For the next three years, McDonald canvassed Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to assist local residents and lawyers with issues involving school desegregation, equal employment, housing, and voting rights.
In 1967, she served as the lead LDF staff attorney in a successful action against a major company for its discriminatory seniority system, which was the first significant plaintiff victory under Title VII since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act.
The firm's largest success came in 1976 when the McDonalds won a case against a multinational company and its union on behalf of 400 black workers for $1.2 million in back wages.
Her first venture into academia was running the Legal Aid Clinic and teaching Trusts at Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University.
She told the defendant, during the highly publicized hearing in a courtroom that included robed Klansmen, "You are not entitled to a judge of your choosing but one who will be fair.
At the time, Daniel Hedges, United States attorney for the Southern District of Texas,[23] praised her for "not permitting her civil rights background to cloud her judgment as a federal judge.
She served as special counsel to the chairman on human rights for Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc.[17] In February 1993, the community of nations, through United Nations Security Council Resolution 808, decided to establish a war crimes tribunal to prosecute persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991.
The Department of State submitted her name to the United Nations as a judge to the newly formed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which had been created by another Security Council resolution in May 1993.
[28] McDonald's and her colleagues' rulings on all these issues played an important part in establishing precedents for the Tribunal's practice and procedure.
[citation needed] The Tadić trial lasted almost a year during which Judge McDonald and the panel she presided reviewed hundreds of documentary evidence and heard from numerous witnesses.
In May 1997, Tadić was found guilty of committing crimes against humanity, namely, persecution on political, racial and/or religious grounds, and inhumane acts; violations of the laws or customs of war, namely, cruel treatment.
The ICTY's findings in the Tadić case were significant in that they proved under international law the Serb policy of "ethnic cleansing" and set a precedent for further prosecutions.
[citation needed] Third, was to secure changes in the rules relating to pre-trial procedures because of the increasing number of detainees and the length of trials.
[citation needed] Thus, the Rules of Procedure and Evidence were amended to provide for stronger case management by the judges during the pre-trial phase of the proceedings.
The late Antonio Cassese,[45] her colleague and the first president of the ICTY, wrote in the War Report that she "is the best that America can offer: she is straightforward, direct, intelligent and hard-working; .