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.