So, law school?

I am interested in the day-in, day-out, tireless work as a public defender who spends her time with community members trying not to drown as they navigate the legal system. I am interested in the people who are scared to face trials so they take plea deals, in the mothers who mortgage their houses to pay for their children’s defense costs, and in the families who absorb the resulting trauma for generations to come. I am interested in how the everyday, routine objections and ruling of a court can so profoundly impact the health of not only a person, but of an entire community that is impacted from a single ruling on a single day in a single courtroom.

I, like many people, witnessed a wrongful conviction happen. In the aftermath, I questioned my entire understanding of the systems that govern us. We all know about wrongful convictions and hear about some poor man in a faraway state who served 20 years in prison for something he didn’t do, as if a wrongful conviction is an unfortunate anomaly that only lives within the realm of news headlines and the eventual Netflix docuseries.

But to go through that experience firsthand, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of an anomaly a wrongful conviction actually is. How many innocent people take plea deals because they are intimidated by a trial? How many documents proving innocence are not admitted by the courts? And even more disturbing, how many people fall into the murky grey area of “well he could have done it, so that’s good enough for us. Let’s wrap this up and go get lunch.” It all seemed horrifyingly routine for everyone else in the room.

No matter how much I loved my work before, it was clear to me that I could not go back to the way things were. My decision to step away from my design career and pursue law school has been a long journey of small, but quietly brave decisions. It isn’t quite as cinematic as me waltzing into the office proclaiming “I QUIT!” and getting a 179 on the LSAT like Elle Woods did so easily in Legally Blonde.

Instead, it has been a multiple year journey of letting go and making space for what I need to do. It started with me stepping away from my design business, shifting my priorities as a professor from being focused about perfect design execution to actually helping young humans who are struggling, and studying for the LSAT in any free pocket of time I could find. I waddled into my first LSAT seven months pregnant, tried again in earnest a few months later when I had been up all night with my newborn, and then finally made the difficult decision to leave my professorship in order to give myself the time needed to secure an LSAT score I am proud of and assemble my application with care.

This moment is the culmination of many courageous moments: of being a new mother who is scared and vulnerable wanting to not only make the right decision for herself and the world, but also for her son; of being a professional who has metaphorically made it and could go so much farther doing what she does best; and of being an observer who cannot live with herself by continuing a life on the sidelines when so much is at stake.