Appreciating Our Professors: Kathleen A. Sullivan

I had some really wonderful professors in law school. I could easily write about a number of them in expressing my gratitude for their influence on my legal career. However, one in particular — Professor Kathleen A. Sullivan — sticks out for me. Kathleen (no one called her Professor Sullivan . . . indeed, she’d have none of it) was one of my professors in the Community Legal Sevices clinic at Yale. I began law school after seven years of Jesuit education (three years at Loyola High School and four years at Loyola Marymount University, both in my hometown of Los Angeles). And while I enjoyed my first semester classes, none of them resonated with me in terms of my educational background and values.

But then I enrolled in the clinic, and all that changed. Kathleen inspired us to embrace the enormity of our responsibility in representing and serving those who could not afford legal representation. Her message was clear: Our clients — those suffering from intense poverty — deserved the respect, dignity, autonomy, and privacy that we all shared. Kathleen also emphasized that our clients deserved zealous advocates who worked tirelessly and ethically to gain justice for them. And she led by example — spending long days in the clinic training her students and serving her clients, despite battling cancer.

Under Kathleen’s tutelage, I was able to connect what I was learning in the classroom with my values in a tangible and meaningful way that helped spark my passion for the law. The experience in the clinic had such a profound impact on me that I enrolled in the clinic each semester thereafter — spending several lunch hours each week at soup kitchens reaching out to potential clients and working tirelessly to give those clients voices in a society and legal system that oftentimes ignored and marginalized them. Kathleen taught each of us lasting lessons about the law and being attorneys. Unfortunately, Kathleen passed away in 2001, succumbing to the cancer she battled — while still teaching and practicing — for many years. But her legacy lives on through her many former students who are now professors and hopefully inspiring their students in their careers in the law.

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