Finding Your Own Path

Life sometimes turns out not at all as we planned.  And that can be a very good thing.

Take my life, for example.  As an undergraduate, I had it all planned:  I was going to be a career woman in corporate public relations or a professional writer, living in a large city — Chicago, perhaps — unencumbered by family demands because I decided I did not want children.  Fast forward a couple of decades and here I sit, in the living room of my home in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, a mother of two sons, a lawyer, and a law professor.

How and when did that master plan change?  As I think it must be for most people, there wasn’t necessarily one grand event that put me on a different path.  Instead, it was little choices I made along the way, little, but, as it turned out, significant choices, such that one day I woke up and realized I was in a place that vastly differed from where I thought I’d be. When I think of it, I am always reminded of something author Marion Winik said in her book Rules for the Unruly:  Living an Unconventional Life: “The path is not straight.”

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Recommended Legal Writing Reads from Judge Easterbrook

This past October, as a Judicial Intern at the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, I had the pleasure of attending an informal, reoccurring brown bag lunch held among the court’s clerks. We gathered in a conference room down the hall from the Dirksen Federal Building’s second-floor cafeteria to hear this session’s guest speaker—Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook—lecture informally on legal writing. The judge shared some of his experiences (e.g., his decision-making process*) and his must-read books for legal writers.

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On Opportunity

A good friend of mine once told me that hitting the ball into the sand trap on the golf course should be looked at in one way, and one way only: an opportunity — an opportunity to get better at something that you may not excel at, but nonetheless must be able to master to become great.

Opportunities abound.  Everyone, regardless of profession, has opportunities to do something in this world that is important.  The problem as I see it, is that all too often people are too afraid to see the opportunities in front of them. They figure their ball went into the bunker,  and they have no way to get out.

As practitioners of the law, we have a very unique opportunity to help people.

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