What better place than the Law School to witness how a pipeline works. At its entrance every fall stands a cluster of nervous, aspiring lawyers; from its egress every spring emerges a group of accomplished, idealistic attorneys ready to take on the world. During the three years that students labor to learn along this passage, remarkable things happen. Lots of them.
Just ask alumni. In this issue, BC Law Magazine offers feature articles about successful graduates Paul Callan ’75 and Mel Robbins ’94, a legal tag team at CNN (“The Odd Couple”); Daniel Polsenberg ’82, a respected appellate lawyer in Nevada (“The Go-To Guy”); and León Rodriguez ’88, chief of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (“Guardian of the Melting Pot”). To a person, these alumni talk about how the formative lessons of the Law School endure in heir lives and careers. Rodriguez, for one, says his legal training helped prepare him for the toughest job interview of his career, the withering questioning last year during congressional oversight hearings for his current post.
And they are not alone. In another story, we learn how BC Law School gave Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby ’05 the legal backbone to bring charges against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, a stunning decision after a spate of unrequited deaths at the hands of law enforcement in black communities across the country. “The foundation of everything I learned was at BC, especially about being a prosecutor,” she says in the article “The Imperturbable Marilyn Mosby ’05.”
Elsewhere, Alexander Chai joins other recent graduates in expressing the value of the Semester-in-Practice program or a first Tax class or Professor Robert Bloom’s Criminal Procedure course (“2014 Grads Score on the Jobs Front”). Carl Takei ’07 (in Class Notes) applies knowledge acquired from BC Law’s criminal justice clinic when authoring American Civil Liberties Union reports on abuses in immigration detention facilities.
Articles about students Andrew Haile ’15 (“The Solution Seeker”) and Taisha Sturdivant ’16 (‘“God Bless the Child That’s Got Her Own’”) provide another perspective: What it’s like in the pipeline today. Before graduating in May, Haile speed-walked through law school, earning public interest fellowships, internships, and a top law school student honor, the St. Thomas More Award. Sturdivant is another quick study, busily running for student office, organizing panel discussions, and doing community work, all in the service of giving back.
Every law school is its own pipeline, of course, but there is something refreshingly worthy in the pursuits of those who travel Boston College Law School’s.
Vicki Sanders, Editor
vicki.sanders@bc.edu
Photograph by Adam DeTour