A small red die-cast car was dropped on my desk on day one of my poetry workshop with Professor Cooley. Each of the other students in my class received an ordinary household object like mine. Then we were told to jot down whatever ideas came to mind. Professor Cooley did not want us to think too much about what we were writing but to allow our hands to convert thoughts to ink, effortlessly and almost meditatively, regardless of errors in spelling, grammar, and logic. There was only one rule: Do not lift your pen from your page until ten minutes are up.
While my hand ran across the page, my mind ventured to odd and random places. A small car became pavement, and then stone, and then water. One thought after another unfolded into a web of loose associations. When time was up, I did what is sometimes known as “boiling down the soup,” crossing out excess words until I was left with a potent product, a poem, at the bottom of the “pot.” It was not the process of writing but process of erasing that required critical thinking.
Before this workshop, I had always thought of writing as an exercise in addition rather than subtraction. Words included in an essay demanded more thought than words excluded. But I eventually learned that absences can be as important as presences. A single added space between two lines can alter the meaning of an entire poem.
Writing with an eraser, so to speak, was one of my greatest lessons I learned as an English major at QC, and one I have found useful in the various roles I have filled as a law student. Law school has required attention to detail, research savvy, and the ability to identify textual ambiguities—whether in reading Internal Revenue Code provisions for class, drafting trial memoranda and employment agreements for a lawyering simulation, or synthesizing and applying course readings on exams. But it has also required a great degree of creativity, and attention to the white space on the paper. For example, interpreting statutes in my administrative law class involved heavy use of “canons of construction,” or traditional interpretive rules that define statutory analysis. These rules dictate that meaning may be derived from both words chosen and words excluded. Canons like noscitur a sociis (drawing meaning from surrounding words) and expressio unius est exclusio alterius (inclusion of one thing in a class means exclusion of another in that class), have almost a poetic dimension if you squint a little.
A bit about where I am now: I have recently completed my second year at NYU Law School, and this month I will begin rotating through corporate law practices as a summer associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. This past academic year I was an editor of the NYU Journal of Law and Business, where I reviewed academic articles as a member of the submissions committee. In the fall I served as a teaching assistant to Professor Arthur R. Miller in his Civil Procedure course, during which time (and for the prior summer) I updated two volumes of his legal treatise on American civil procedure, Federal Practice and Procedure (Westlaw/Reuters).
As a board member of OUTLaw, NYU Law’s LGBTQ student association, I also continued some of the extracurricular work I began as an undergrad at QC, which involved creating spaces for dialogue on issues concerning LGBTQ members of the Orthodox Jewish community. For example, in October I spearheaded a panel on the groundbreaking Ferguson v. JONAH conversion therapy trial, in which a New Jersey jury found a conversion therapy organization guilty of consumer fraud for claiming it could change (mostly Orthodox) followers of its therapy program from gay to straight.
