Formative Years

I'm from Maine.  I grew up in Bath and attended public school at Morse High.  I'm from a middle class family and among other things my parents instilled in me a sense of hard work and responsible spending.  When my sister and I were 14, we operated a dog sitting business on our property.  A couple years later I got my first job working for non-family at Spinney's Seafood where I learned to pick a lobster. Academically, I was not the most serious student in high school.  I had little respect for liberal arts studies, and considered classes like math, science, and drafting more important.  After high school, I went to Northeastern University and studied at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

Zoom Flume Rapid - Arkansas River, CO

Astronomy or radiology An open source footprint calculator Combining GIS with Google Earth to raise awareness about environmental destruction

Activism

Market Activism

Cell Phone

Clothing and Shoes

Search Engine

Financial Services

Places I've Been

From January to April 2005 I had the opportunity to live in St. Thomas, USVI. I worked as a bar back at Tickles Restaurant and as a deck hand on the M/V Leylon Sneed. This picture is the sunset from my uncle's house on Fortuna Bay. I enjoyed my time here immensely, but couldn't stay on a beach forever. I interviewed over the phone for a position at NCI and accepted their offer

In May 2005, I left my parents house in Maine and drove across country to San Francisco, CA. On the way, I stopped in the Badlands, SD and took this picture.

I started exploring the Bay Area soon after my arrival and quickly ended up at Point Reyes Lighthouse. There are a lot of great reasons to live here, but for me, Point Reyes is one of my favorites

People I Use to Work With

Adam Burkett Albert Brown Ana Arash Boostani Camilla Berg Dan Bell Kelly Costa Kelsang Aukatsang Liz Roberts Melinda Kramer

Michael Kwan Molly Doyle Oz Paul Peggy Duvette Sarah Rutherford Stephen Lamm Tricia Powell

Activities I Do

Favorite Books

Mess with the Law

Application Essays

"At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things."
~Ted [Edward J.] Hughes

My politics were ignorant, and my education did not help. That description summarizes my political and academic history throughout the first 24 years of my life. I grew up in a family where working hard, paying the bills, and living within one's means were emphasized; if I managed these tasks, I could achieve the American dream. My academic background in American history supplemented this impression by emphasizing the pioneers, the entrepreneurs, and the presidents. Freedom in America meant having the freedom to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps; accordingly, failure resulted from a lack of self-discipline. In addition, history that focused on our nation's accomplishments and not its crimes had convinced me of American exceptionalism. While I did not identify myself as such at the time, I now realize I was politically conservative until my mid-twenties.

My conservative worldview began to unravel when, independent of my engineering courses, I read Natural Capitalism by Lovins, Lovins, and Hawken my sophomore year of college. This book opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about engineering and about the disingenuousness of public debate regarding both the economy and environment. This book encouraged me to contemplate problems differently: for example, rather than focusing on the design of an efficient pump—as traditional engineering education stresses—engineers should instead concentrate on eliminating the need for the pump altogether because a holistic design simultaneously bypasses multiple inefficiencies. With this paradigm, people no longer have to choose whether to favor the economy or the environment. Both were possible.

Over the next three years, I became disillusioned with traditional definitions of progress in engineering curricula and work. An efficient pump was too shortsighted, as was an efficient jet engine. With graduation approaching, I half-heartedly applied to a few Fortune 500 companies, but I ultimately decided a fulfilling career did not necessarily correlate with a high-paying salary and benefits. Instead, I opted to find socially meaningful work. A year later, I ended my search in Sausalito, where I began working for the author of the book that opened my eyes four years earlier.

Natural Capital Institute invited me to work on the cutting edge of the social justice and environmental restoration movement. The premise of the project on which I've worked the past two years is this: mainstream media spends an exorbitant amount of time discussing two pillars of our society, government and business, but pays scant attention to our third pillar: civil. Our project, WiserEarth, aims to pay tribute to civil society's current successes and serves as a platform to organize future success. Of all the important work being done in civil society, I profess the most interest in organizations that combine local organizing with legal understanding. One example of this is The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund's Democracy School, which educates citizens about authoring a local constitution to protect their rights, including the right to stop corporate pollution practices. Because of my own desire to fuse organizing with legal knowledge in my career, I seek to understand techniques of community organizing, the history of corporate personhood, and the capacity of the modern judicial system to favor the protection of individuals over corporate interests.

The education necessary for my career choice cannot be developed at many of our respected institutions of higher learning. Just as my undergraduate university refused to challenge accepted engineering doctrines, most law schools will encourage me to accept the "settled" doctrines of our judicial system—or those continually affirmed through stare decisis. The historian, Howard Zinn, affirmed this pattern among traditional educational programs when he wrote about the origins of some of these most respected institutions,

These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system—the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians—those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.
~A People's History of the United States

Thus far, my knowledge of our legal system has been gleamed through my independent and informal study of our courts and our laws; however, my work with MoveOn.org informs my knowledge of and experience with one method of grassroots organizing. Last fall, I actively volunteered in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections. Passionate about the goals and work I was doing, I extended my commitment this winter, organizing a council of volunteers in Marin that sought to contact our media or influence our representative on critical issues such as health care, energy independence and foreign policy.

I cannot profess to have chosen my career trajectory when I was two; instead, I began to forge the path at twenty-two. A series of epiphanies, both small and large, gradually deconstructed my worldview while simultaneously creating a new one. I now emphasize the importance of community instead of the pioneer, the value of empathy instead of hegemony, and human rights instead of property rights. The intersection of community organizing and the judicial system is a specialized field not emphasized by many schools and I would be honored to refine and build upon my skills in these areas at New College School of Law.

Saul Alinsky, the community organizer from Chicago, understood that grassroots participation was essential to affect change: "To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics." A plethora of historical examples, including a post-Civil War study of the United States, illustrate this principle. The reformers of the Progressive Era, for all their short-comings, tempered the ambitions of the moneyed interests from the Gilded Age, and civic engagement continued to grow almost uninterrupted in the United States until the 1960s and 1970s. This level of community involvement ushered in the civil rights movement, women's liberation, and the golden age of the American middle-class. Now, after forty years of civic decline, a small group fights simply to maintain the gains made decades ago. If reformers ever hope to see a true progressive agenda, it must be on the back of a civically reengaged America. I appreciate that this fact has not been lost on New College, and my future legal work will always be coupled with civic engagement.

I was immediately drawn to guerrilla law because of its ability to unite civic and legal activism. This niche within the legal community addresses my interest to combine politics and litigation skills to expose the systemic problems within the judicial system. I hope to learn more about the inequities in our justice system and how to use legal techniques to confront and correct them. This work will be daunting and frustrating at times, but I am disillusioned with the status quo of most American institutions. As I began considering a legal education, I learned that dissatisfaction with the legal system is an entire school of thought: critical legal studies. Now I was truly intrigued with what a law education had to offer.

For me, critical legal studies represents the opportunity to change how people think about justice in much the same way natural capitalism provides the opportunity to change how people think about another societal pillar: business. At a young age, I started to recognize the symptoms of a broken economic system—pollution, deforestation, and extinction—but it was not until a few years ago that I started to understand the causes of these symptoms such as market subsides, consumerism, and misinformation. Much more recently, I became aware of elements including disenfranchisement, mandatory minimums, and the death penalty that indicate a broken legal system. However, I only have a hint of their causes. My nascent education on this topic has suggested that the broken economic and judicial system is one the same—a symbiotically reinforcing system.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund uses rarely applied aspects of our legal system to create an effective model of civic engagement. This organizing model uses the backlash of the corporate state to do the organizing for them. Their Democracy Schools educate local citizens on the history of English common law, including how it got into our Constitution, and how that system now usurps their right to a republican form of government. I want to use my legal background to educate and organize local communities in their fight to maintain their rights above those of a corporation.

I've been called an idealist, and I think it was an accurate description. But I believe in reformation, not revolution. Change without revolution requires understanding the judicial system as it is today but pursuing opportunities to make it better. Saul Alinsky was aware of the importance of understanding the current system: "That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system." Idealism tempered by realism is necessary for any successful movement. My formal and informal study at New College would be focused on gaining more of both.