Dawn Clark Netsch (September 16, 1926 – March 5, 2013) was an American professor of law at Northwestern University and an Illinois politician. A member of the Democratic Party in the United States, she served in the Illinois State Senate from 1972 to 1990, and as the Illinois Comptroller from 1991 through 1994. In 1994 she was the first woman to be nominated by a major political party to run for Governor of Illinois. She co-authored the legal textbook, State and Local Government in a Federal System. Early career She was born Patricia Dawn Clark in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father, William Keith Clark, was a manufacturer of building materials until his business failed during the Great Depression. Her mother, Hazel Dawn Clark (née Harrison), was a social worker. Netsch graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern University in 1948. She was selected for membership in Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society in her junior year. She then attended the university's law school, where she was the first woman to earn the school's Scholar’s Cup for the highest grade-point average in the first-year class. When Netsch graduated in 1952 she was the only woman in her class. When she joined the Northwestern Law faculty in 1965, she was the school’s first female faculty member. She worked on Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign and then at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling. Returning to Chicago, she was in private practice from 1957 to 1961 and then joined the staff of Gov. Otto Kerner. In 1969, she was elected to serve as a delegate to the 1969—70 Illinois Constitutional Convention, at which the fourth and current Constitution of Illinois was drafted. Illinois State Senator In 1972, she was elected to the State Senate as a Democrat, first representing the 13th district, then the 4th district. Together with state representatives Abner Mikva (later Congressman, Chief Justice of the Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and Counsel to President Bill Clinton), Paul Simon (later U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate), and Anthony Scariano, she was part of the "Kosher Nostra" of clean, independent Democrats in the General Assembly who were a thorn in the side of the Republican and Democratic machine politicians for years. For a decade, she was the chair of the Senate Revenue Committee. Illinois Comptroller In 1990, she ran for and won the Democratic party's nomination for Illinois