Contemporary Lawyer Poets

United States

[The poets whose brief bios appear on this page are either practicing lawyers, or obtained their law degree and pursued other interests.]

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Cassie MacDonald
Cassie MacDonald is a lawyer but is no longer involved in legal work. She now lives in Philadelphia, by way of Portland, Oregon. She received her B.A. from the University of Northern Colorado, her J.D. from Lewis and Clark Law School and returned to Philadelphia to in 1998 to write her family history.

James P. MacElree II
ames MacElree is a Chester County, Pennsylvania Common Pleas Judge. He has, according to an article which appeared in The Legal Intelligencer (Vol. 221, September 22, 1999), been writing poetry since he was seven years old.

Samuel D. Magavern
Sam Magavern teaches law at the University of Buffalo Law School. He was born and raised in Buffalo, graduated from Harvard College and UCLA Law School. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, Salamander, Antioch Review, College English, Mudfish, River Oak Review, and New Press Quarterly. His non-fiction book, Primo Levi's Cosmos, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. [faculty profile] [poetry]

Michael Maguire
Michael Maguire is a Texas lawyer and poet.

Lori L. Mach
Lori Mach grew up in small-town, rural Iowa and graduated from Drake University. She then moved east to attend Yale Law School, where she graduated in 1995. Following graduation, she moved to Philadelphia and became a Philadelphia Lawyer: a public defender. She has been with the Defender Association of Philadelphia for nine years. For the first seven years, she was a trial attorney, handling all types of criminal cases. For the last two years, she has been in the appellate unit. She co-hosts a weekly case-discussion forum for attorneys in the office and coaxes participation through e-mails that attempt to be topical, witty and occasionally, poetic. Because she is a mother of young children, she has no free time or hobbies.

Mach was born 1970. She obtained her B.A. at Drake University, and was admitted to practice law in 1995. [Poem]

Michael Maguire
Michael Maguire, of Austin and Marfa, is a Texas lawyer and poet.

Mary Claire Mahaney

Mary Claire Mahaney was born in 1954 in Warren, Ohio. She received her B.A. from the College of Mount Saint Joseph in 1976, and her law degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1979.She practiced law in Cincinnati and taught business law at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Michigan. She has, for over 20 years, been a resident of McLean Virginia. She is the author of Osaka Heat, a novel, and various short stories, essays, and poems. [Mary Claire Mahaney]

Phillip Mahony
Phillip Mahony spent 22 years on the New York City Police Department. In 2005, he graduated from New York Law School and has now joined a major New York law firm. He is the editor of From Both Sides Now, an anthology of Vietnam War-related poetry.

Ginger Mance
Ginger Mance is a Chicago lawyer. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and in Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (Third World Press, 1987).

William L. Manchee
William Manchee was born on August 22, 1947 at Ventura, California. He was educated at the UCLA, receiving his B.A. degree in 1969. He received his law degree from Southern Methodist University in 1975. He began the practice of law in Dallas in 1976 and now operates the firm, Manchee & Manchee, in Dallas. Manchee served in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1970. He is the author of mystery, suspense and adventure novels including Undaunted (Top Publications, 1998), Brash Endeavor (Research Triangle Publishing, 1998); Twice Tempted (Top Publications, 1999), Death Pact (Top Publications, 1999), Second Chair (Top Publications, 2000), Trouble in Trinidad (Top Publications, 2001), Ca$h Call (Top Publications, 2002), Plastic Gods (Top Publications, 2003). A collection of Manchee's poetry, Case Call Mystery was published in 2002. Manchee is also the author of Yes, We're Open Defending the Small Business Under Siege (Top Publications, 2003) a how-not-to-do-it book for small business owners. [Bio]

W. Adam Mandelbaum
Mandelbaum is a New York attorney, from Oyster Bay, practicing in the fields of criminal and divorce law. He is also the author of The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex (St. Martins, 2000), the first extensive history of psychic spying. His poetry has been aired nationwide on "The Romantic Hours," a syndicated show, and has appeared in various publications and on the web. [W. Adam Mandelbaum Page] [ Dust to Dust"] ["Dark Dreamer"] ["Obituary Orbit"] ["Reflections in a Dead Eye"] ["To a Lady"]

Jordan L Margolis
Born 1954; admitted to law practice in 1979; University of Illinois, B.A.; Northwestern University, J.D.; practices law in Chicago [Margolis curriculum vita] [The Margolis Law Firm] [poetry]

Eric T. Marin
[Eric T. Marin website]

Barry S. Marks
Barry Marks was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 24, 1952. He is now a Birmingham, Alabama corporate lawyer specializing in equipment leasing and specialized financing with Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC. Marks was raised in Miami and spent summers as a youth in the Appalachian mountains in South Carolina. He attended Emory University where he obtained his B.A. in 1974 and in 1976, his J.D. from the University of Florida. In 1985 he obtained an LL.M. in Taxation from Emory University. Marks' poetry has appeared in The Lyric, Folio, Word Wrights, Black River, Poetry Motel, Jewish Spectator, Calliope and other literary journals. He has recently served as President of the Alabama State Poetry Society. [Source: Personal communication with Barry S. Marks] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] [Two Poems]

Walter Maroney
Walter Maroney is a lawyer, poet, short story writer, and novelist (his work in this genre awaits publication). He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. Maroney describes himself as: "Lawyer, poet, failed comedian, dilettante." [Nine Short Poems from the Bible]

Al Marquis
Practicing trial lawyer with the Las Vegas law firm, Marquis & Aurbach for some 25 years; author of Frivolous Cowboy Poetry: "These Here Stories Are All True (Mostly)."

Philip M. Marston
Philip Marston is an Alexandria, Virginia lawyer.

Alicia O. Martin

Esteban A. Martinez
Martinez practices law in Thornton, Colorado. He obtained his law degree earned his law degree from the University of Denver College of Law and a Master's Degree in English from the University of Colorado. His first novel, In Memory of Gods and Heroes, was published in 2002. One of his poems, "Old Addicts," was published in 34 (4) The Colorado Lawyer 27 (2005). He has served as a Colorado Assistant Attorney General and taught legal writing, and law & literature at the University of Denver College of Law. [Esteban A. Martinez] [Esteban's Blog] ["Child of Mine"] ["I Don't Know Any Angels"--hort fiction]

Alys Masek
Alys Masek was born in Los Angeles, California and grew up in various locales in southern California. She graduated from the University of Califonria-Riverside and attended the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco where she lived for many years. Currently she practices environmental law and lives in San Diego. She has previously published her poetry in Noe Valley Review and City Works Journal.

C. Todd Mason
C. Todd Mason is a Memphis, Tennessee lawyer. He is associated with the law firm, Nahon, Saharovich & Trotz. Mason was born in Memphis. Following his graduation from law school he worked as a session attorney for the 102nd Tennessee General Assembly and then returned to the private practice of law. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee in 1996 and is a graduate of the Cecil C. Humpreys School of Law (Memphis).

Leo Masursky
Leo Masursky is in the public defender's office, Tucson, Arizona

Jill Mattoon
Jill Matton is a judge in the Administrative Hearings division of the Colorado Department of Personnel & Administration in Pueblo and has served that office since 1999. Mattoon graduated from the University of Colorado in 1981 and from California Western School of Law in 1984. She previously served in the Pueblo District Attorney's Office from 1985 through 1993, and in 1994, she joined the law firm of Petersen, Fonda, Farley, Mattoon, Crockenberg & Garcia, P.C. Her poem, "Untitled," was published in 34 (4) The Colorado Lawyer 27 (2005).

Joy Maulitz
"Joy Maulitz lives in San Francisco, where she practices criminal law and hosts an author interview program on a community ration station." Rattle No. 27 (Summer, 2007).

David May
"David May is a jazz bassist, entertainment attorney and personal manager for film composers in the Los Angeles area. Her performs regularly with pianist/composer, Geoffrey Aymar, in the original jazz group, aymar/may, as well as with such jazz artists as Barbara Morrison, Sam Most, Ron Eschete, Thelma Jones and Sherwood Sledge . . . . Born in 1956, he is [a] graduate of Augustana College and USC Law School, married, and father of eight children." [Source: David May, Love and the Persistence of Illusion (AuthorHouse, 2005)]

Bill Mayo
William Mayo is an Arkansas lawyer and self-described "avid amateur" poet. He attended law school at the University of Arkansas and was the founder and first publisher of a poetry journal, Poesia. He also founded the Indian Bay Press. Mayo was born in 1953; he was admitted to practice in 1980.


Greg McBride
Greg McBride was born in San Diego, California, in 1945, and left five weeks later to begin a peripatetic childhood following his Army father throughout the U.S. and overseas. McBride is a graduate of Princeton University (1967), a Vietnam veteran (where he served as an Army photographer in 1969), a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center (1974).

A 2003 Jenny McKean Moore Fellow in Poetry at George Washington University, McBride is a former wrestler, and wan Army photographer in the Vietnam War. He retired December 31, 2004 from his position as Deputy Chief Counsel of the Federal Transit Administration, at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

McBride began his non-legal writing in his mid-50s. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Baltimore Review, Potomac Review, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Minimus, and WordWrights. His poetry has also appeared in two anthologies: A Common Bond: Poetry and Prose by American and Vietnamese Veterans of the Vietnam War (Founders Hill Press, 2002) and the Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin, 1984-2001 (Word Works, 2003). His essay on winning a Pennsylvania state wrestling championship in 1963 appears in the autumn 2003 issue of Gettysburg Review.

McBride is editor of The Innisfree Poetry Journal: An Online Journal of Contemporary Poetry. [Source: Personal communication with Greg McBride] [Greg McBride] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] [Poems]

RJ McCaffery
R.J. McCaffery is a second year law student at Georgetown Law School. Since he has not, as yet, graduated and does not hold himself out to be a lawyer, we have decided to give him an 'honorary' place on the website until such time as he graduates from law school which we are confident he will do.

R.J. McCaffery's poetry includes Anchor Ice (2003), The Hymnal Week (2002), and Chaos Theory and the Knuckleballer (2000). We had read his essays on poetry with considerable admiration well before he learned that their author had taken up the study of law.

McCaffery is a graduate of Providence College, and obtained an M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence. His poetry has been published in Ploughshares, New Books, The Atlanta Review, and the online edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature. [RJ McCaffery] [Scoplaw-a blog] [Source: Personal communication with McCaffery]

Wallace McCall
Wallace McCall is a personal injury lawyer practicing in Jupiter, Florida. His first collection of poetry, Armadillo Armageddon and Other Collected Poems was published in 2003.

McCall was born on February 12, 1947 in Greensboro, North Carolina but grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida. He obtained his degree in political science from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee in 1969 and his J.D. from Stetson University School of Law in 1979. [Source: Personal communication with Wallace McCall]

James McCobb
James McCobb is a Portland, Oregon attorney [source: Melody Finnemore, Versus to Verses, Oreg. St. B. Bull. (July 2006)]

Shaunna Oteka McCovey
Shaunna McCovey holds a degree in environmental law and is a staff attorney for the Yurok Tribe in Humboldt County. MocCovey grew up on the Yurok Indian reservation in Northern California. She attended Humboldt State University, and obtain a Master's Degree from Arizona State. Her law degree is from Vermont Law School. McCovey is the author of a chapbook, Swim You Every River, and a collection of poetry, The Smokehouse Boys (Heyday Books). [Native Wiki][bio]["Capitalists?"] ["Conspiracy Theory"]

Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard Law School. His poems have appeared in New Orleans Review, Octopus, Orion, Columbia Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and African American Review. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa. [Three poems] [Two poems]

Thomas W. McDaniel
McDaniel was born in 1946, obtained his undergraduate degree from Rhodes College and his J.D. from the University of Memphis. He is now a lawyer in Memphis.

David McDonald
David McDonald is executive director of the World Press Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota. We discovered his poem, "The Power of Titles" online, and learned that he has another poem that appears in Sidewalks.

Theodore N. McDonald, Jr.
Partner in the law firm, Smith, Gambrell & Russell in Atlanta, Georgia; received his B.A from Davidson College in 1979, his M.S.W. from the University of Georgia in 1982, and his J.D. from Emory in 1987. ["Vanishing"]

Betsy McKenzie
Betsy McKenzie is Professor of Law and Director of the John Joseph Moakley Library, Suffolk University Law School. She is a 1981 law graduate of the University of Kentucky. [Poyetry-a blog]

Patricia McMillen
Patricia McMillen is a lawyer, poet, and musician from Oak Park, Illinois. ["Forgiveness"]

John M. McNally
John McNally attended the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1972) and obtained his law degree from Georgetown University (1976). He was admitted to practice in 1976 and is now a member of the Washington, D.C. law firm, Hawkins, Delafield & Wood. McNally is the author of Northern Lights, a collection of poetry published by Washington Writers' Publishing House in 1977. [For a newspaper article on McNally and other Washington, D.C. area lawyer|poets, see Myra Mensh Patner, "Motions and Meter Lawyers as Poets," Washington Post, March 13, 1980, p. D5]

Jack McEneny

Mark McPherson
Writer, poet, lawyer; received his J.D. from Harvard; author of Your Best Face: Looking Your Best Without Plastic Surgery (Hay House, 2002)(with Brandith Irwin). [Poems]

Mark C. McPherson
Attorney with Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson, Seattle Washington [Mark C. McPherson]

John McVeigh
Portland, Maine lawyer; partner at Preti Flaherty [law firm profile]

Sofia Memon
Sofia Memon lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania where she practices law in the areas of public benefits and language access.  She received her J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law (2000) and a B.A. from New College of Florida (1996).  She was born in St. Petersburg, Florida but was raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She is a second generation Pakistani-American.  [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)]

Allen Mendenhall
Allen Mendenahll is a first year law student at West Virginia University where he will also pursue a degree in English. He was raised in Marietta, Georgia and attended Furman University. His poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Aroostook Review, Tributaries, The Echo, Splizz, and LSR.

Ellen Mendoza
Ellen Mendoza resides in Portland, Oregon. She is an attorney with Legal Aid Services of Oregon for 23 years (as of 2006) and pro tem judge for domestic violence restraining orders (1994-2004). She graduated from the University o Oregon law school in 1982 [source: Melody Finnemore, Versus to Verses, Oreg. St. B. Bull. (July 2006)] ["Coefficient of Friction"]

Darrel Menthe
Graduate of Stanford Law School, 1996.

Myrna Amelia Mesa
Myrna Amelia Mesa is the daughter of Afro-Cuban political exiles from the Bay of Pigs era, a first generation American, and a native of Chicago. She received her BA from Loyola University (Chicago) and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. She is a Masters in Fine Arts degree candidate at Old Dominion University. Mesa is a practicing attorney in the Tidewater Virginia area and serves as a Judge Advocate in the United States Army Reserve.

Kristin Messner
Kristin Messner received a B.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. She attended Pennsylvania State Dickinson School of Law and obtain her J.D. degree in 2001. Messner lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where she practices consumer bankruptcy law with her mother and sister. [Source: Personal communication with Kristin Messner] ["Word"]

Joyce Meyers
Joyce Meyers received her M.A. in English Literature from Syracuse University and her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She practices law in Philadelphia, where she focuses on First Amendment and intellectual property rights law. Her poetry has appeared in White Pelican Review, Philadelphia Poets, Mad Poets Rview, Endicott Review, and Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts. Her chapbook Wild Mushrooms was published by Plan B Press in 2007. She lives in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

George E. Micco
George Micco practices law in Killeen, Texas. He graduated from St. Mary's University School of Law in 1999, and obtained his B.A. from LaSalle University (Philadelphi).

Jeffrey Michelman
Michelman is an intellectual property lawyer with Blumenfeld, Kaplan & Sandweiss, PC, in St. Louis. He received his B.A. from Pennsylvania State University (1964), and his master of engineering from WashingtonUniversity in 1975. His J.D. is from Villanova University (1967). He has a collection of poetry, titled Peanut Butter on Bagel or Breast.

Jan Michelsen
Michelsen is a native of Chicago, attended Bradley University where she received a degree in journalism in 1977. She worked at Bradley University until 1982 as director of publications, when she became director of hospital relations at Indiana University medical Center. She obtained her law degree in 1994 and joined Baker & Daniels in Indianapolis, and then became associated with the Indianapolis office of Ogletree Deakins. Michelsen's verse appears on greeting cards, posters, and even coffee mugs. [Source: Anthony Schoettle, "Lawyer Stirves for Poetic Justice," 22 (29) Indianapolis Business Journal 67A (October 1, 2001)]

C.M. Millen
Cynthia Millen was born on October 28, 1955. She received her undergraduate degree from Bowling Green State University in 1977 and her J.D. from Northern Kentucky University in 1983 where she was editor-in-chief of that school's law review. Millen was an instructor at the University of Toledo College of Law (1983-1984) and guardian ad liteum for the Toledo Juvenile Court (1984-1985). In 1986 she became house counsel for St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo. She has been a full-time poet and writer since 1991. She obtained an M.Litt. from Trinity College (Dublin) in 1997. She resides in Toledo, Ohio. She is the author of Ulster Out Loud! (Project Children, 1994), Symphony for the Sheep (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), Between the Rhymes: A Collection of Poems (H.O.T. Graphic Services, Inc., 1998), The Low-Down Laundry Line Blues (Houghton Miffin Company, 1999), Blue Bowl Down: An Appalachian Rhyme (Candlewick Press, 2004).

Alyce L. Miller
Alyce Miller is a professor in the English department, at Indiana University and an attorney practicing animal law. She teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing courses in fiction and creative nonfiction, and courses in contemporary literature, American literature, women's literature, and screenwriting.

Her poems have appeared in Ascent, New Letters, Witness, River Styx, Seneca Review, Slipstream, Puerto del Sol, Mangrove, and Graffiti Rag. She is the author of more than fifty short stories, with publication in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her first collection of stories, The Nature of Longing, was published by University of Georgia Press in 1994, with subsequent publication in paperback by W.W. Norton in 1995. Her novel, Stopping for Green Lights, was published by Doubleday in 1999. Miller's essays and non-fiction have appeared in Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Fourth Genre, New Letters, Cream City Review, Brevity, The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed), Spirit and Place (Indiana University Press), River Styx, and Creating Fiction (an anthology published by Story Press). Her latest collection of stories, Water: Nine Stories, by Sarabande Press, was published in 2007.

Miller obtained her J.D. from Indiana University School of Law in 2003; her MFA in Writing is from Vermont College, and she has an M.A. in Film and an M.A. in English literature from San Francisco State University. Her B.A. in English is from Ohio State University.

Miller resides in Bloomington, Indiana and Sonoma County, California. Miller was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay area. [Source: Personal communication with Alyce Miller] [Professor Alyce Miller] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] [Wikipedia] [Water--a collection of short stories-- 2007]

Wayne Miller
Wayne Miller was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, studied at Oberlin College, and worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. He received an MFA from the University of Houston and is the author of Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues Poetry Press, 2006).

Robert D. ("Jake") Miller
Assistant U.S. Trustee for the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Washington (Spokane). [Poem--Legal Studies Forum]

Thomas C. ("Doc") Miller
Doc Miller is a criminal defense lawyer; he obtained his law degree from the University of Denver. [See: Thomas C. ("Doc") Miller, "Living With Witches," 35 (9) The Colorado Lawyer 42 (2006)]

Janet T. Mills
Janet Mills serves in the Maine House of Representatives. She was born and raised in Farmington, Maine She received her J.D. from the University of Maine Law School. In 1980 she was elected district attorney, reputedly the first woman district attorney in the northeastern United States. In 1995 she began the practice of law in Skowhegan, Maine with her brother, S. Peter Mills. Mills, who serves in the Maine Senate. Mills has published poetry.

Paul L. Mills
Paul Mills is a 1990 graduate of Columbia University. He obtained his law degree from UCLA. He is a sole practitioner civil rights and criminal defense trial lawyer and poet. Mills, was associated with Fusion Magazine in Boston, and was a Greenwich Village night club and street performer of poetry under the name Poez in the early 1980's. [poezthepoet.com]

Bill Mitchell
Bill Mitchell is a Tampa, Florida lawyer, and poet. [Source: Angela Moore, "Poets Share Their Living Art," St. Petersburg Times, April 13, 2001]. Mitchell was born in 1947; obtained his B.A. from the University of Washington, and his J.D. from the University of California.

Lamar K. Mitchell
Lamar Mitchell is a poet and painter. He is managing member and 'of counsel' to the law firm of Kamark K. Mitchell, LLC. He was educated at Millsaps College in Jackson, Missippi, and attended Harvard University Divinity School and Oxford University in Oxford, England where he was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. He obtained his J.D. from Emory Law School. His law firm is located in Decatur, Georgia

Joseph Mockus
Joseph Mockus is a San Francisco Bay area criminal defense lawyer. He is also a rock 'n roll drummer and a poet. His poetry, as we learned of it, appeared in r-kv-r-y: a quarterly literary journal (2004). Mockus was born in 1952, and admitted to law practice in 1986. He obtained his B.A. from the University of California and his J.D. from Hastings College of Law. [Poems] [Poems]

Sonia Alisa Montalbano
Sonia Montalbano was born in 1969. She obtained her B.A. degree from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and her J.D. degree from Northwestern School of Law. She was admitted to practice in 1997 and now resides in Portland, Oregon where she works as a litigator for Portland's Elliott Ostrander Presto. [Source: Personal communication with Sonia Montalbano; Melody Finnemore, Versus to Verses, Oreg. St. B. Bull. (July 2006)] [Poem--Legal Studies Forumj]

Travis Montez
Travis Montez, a native of Nashville, Tennessee is now a New Yorker and a performance poet. He obtained his law degree from New York University School of Law. Montez is the author of Reluctant Poet (Lulu, 2006). [Travis Montez]

Bel-Ami Jean De Montreux
Montreux obtained a J.D. degree from the University of Utah in 1991. He has published a collection of French poetry titled La Chanson de Bel-Ami. While at the University of Utah, Montreux edited the Utah Foreign Language Review and the Neo-Analyst and wrote for the Daily Utah Chronicle. Montreux practices law at the Montreux Law Offices in Salt Lake. [Source: Personal communication with Bel-Ami Montreux]

Montreux is a former seminarian at the St-Vincent Foundation in Cap Haitian, Haiti. His legal practice consists of complex criminal defense, Constitutional litigation, and Title VII litigation. de Montreux studied at Texas A&M, Westminster College, and the University of Utah. At the University of Utah, de Montreux was editor-in-chief of the Utah Foreign Language Review, senior editor of the Journal of Contemporary Law and the Journal of Energy, Natural Resources, and Environmental Law. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Poèsie I and Rimbaud-Neruda in France, and Le Nouvelliste in Haiti; his poetry appears in several anthologies of Haitian poets.

Jim Moose
Jim Moose is a retired lawyer; he was an administrative law judge in California state service for 37 years. He is active in the Sacramentao Poets group.

Alexandra Moses
Alexandra Moses is sculptor, lawyer and poet. She studied poetry and art at Mills College.

Lois Moses
Lois Moses was born in Philadelphia. She is a 1997 graduate of Temple University School of Law, and has a degree in clinical psychology from LaSalle University. Moses has self-published three collections of poetry: Not Just Another; Black/Woman, Missing Pages; Women Behind the Glass Door, A Timely Trinity. [Lois Moses]

William Mosolino
Lawyer, author, poet, actor; Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania; born September 14, 1933; obtained his A.B. degree from Muhlenberg College and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania; admitted to law practice in 1962.

Jesse Mountjoy
Jesse Mountjoy is a native of Horse Cave, Kentucky and a 1965 graduate of Centre College of Danville, Kentucky, and a 1969 graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law. His first job out of law school—after being admitted to the bar in 1970—was a four year stint as senior trial attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, Regional Counsel’s Office, Cincinnati, Ohio where he tried cases in the U.S. Tax Court. After working with the IRS, Mountjoy moved to Owensboro, Kentucky, where he has practiced tax law in the same firm for thirty-one years.

Mountjoy’s poetry has been published in Open 24 Hours, Wind Magazine, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, Approaches, Adena and The Small Pond Magazine of Literature. Mountjoy claims a fondness for Flaubert’s assertion that “Every lawyer carries within himself the debris of a poet.” He tells us, by way of a paraphrase of Wallace Stevens: If in fact as a lawyer I am a ‘rationalist,’ I have at least abandoned ‘square hats’ for ‘sombreros.’ [Poems--Legal Studies Forum]

Linda Moye
San Antonio, Texas

Sandra C. Muñoz
Sandra C. Muñoz is an East L.A. poet, playwright and civil rights lawyer. Muñoz is the author of Free Metal Woman (Red Calacarts, 2004).

Alicia Nails
Professional fund raiser and events planner; attorney; Emmy Award winning television producer; she resides in Detroit; currently a freelance writer and producer.

Philip Tajitsu Nash
Philip Nash was born on December 3, 1956 in New York City. He is a civil rights activist, lawyer, teacher, and writer. Nash received a degree in Urban Studies and Economics from New York University and his J.D. from Rutgers University School of Law. Nash has written short stories, plays, and poetry. [Source: "Philip Tajitsu Nash," in Notable Asian Americans (Gale Research, 1995)]

Michael Nava
(Michael Nava, a third generation Mexican-American, was born in 1954 and who grew up in Sacramento, California. Since 1986 he has authored a series of mysteries based on a California-based gay Mexican-American attorney, Henry Rios. Four of the first six books in the series won Lambda Literary Awards. Nava attended Colorado College where he obtained his BA degree in 1976. He received his law degree from Stanford University in 1981. He served as deputy city attorney in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1984 and then entered private practice (1984-86). From 1986 to 1995 he served as research attorney with the California Court of Appeals. Nava moved to San Francisco in 1995. [Source of Biographical Information: UCLA Department of Special Collections] [See: Three Poets: James Byers, Michael Nava, David Owen (BON Press, 1975)]

J. Alan Nelson
J. Alan Nelson, former journalist, is a lawyer in Waco, Texas. We found his poem, "String Theory," in Red Cedar Review (vol. 42, 2007). Nelson's work has been published in Cottonseed Digest, Wittenburg Door, South Carolina Review, Wisconsin Review, Pegasus Review, Hawai'i Review, Adirondack Review, and Ilya's Honey.

Nehru Rodriquez Nelson is a lawyer, poet, lyricist, songwriter, jazz enthusiast, and composer. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and currently resides in Cheltenham. He has been writing and performing poetry for over thirty years. He is also currently working on a collection of poetry, tentatively titled The Street is My Father. [Three poems]

Paul Nemser
Paul Nemser is a poet and translator. He is associated with the Boston law firm, Goodwin Procter. [law firm profile]

Robert Newman
Robert Newman is a attorney and poet. He resides in Rogers, Arkansas. [Source: Contibutor's bio, 3 Poeisa 56 (January, 2005)]

Newman was born in 1965. He attended State University of New York at Albany, and received his J.D. from Ohio Northern University. He was admitted to practice in 1995.

Alan Nichols
Alan Nichols practiced law in San Francisco for some 50 years and served as president of the San Francisco School Board and City College of San Francsico. Nichols was born in 1930. He was educated at Stanford and received his law degree from the Stanford Law School. He has taken an active interest in the affairs of Tibet, and has written articles, poetry, a screenplay, and other publications on Tibet. [Alan Nichols]

Robert R. Nielsen
Salinas, California attorney, photographer and poet; born in 1944, obtained his A.B. degree from Stanford University and his J.D. from Columbia University; admitted to practice law in 1971.

Timothy J. Nolan
Timothy Nolan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1954. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1978 with a B.A. in English. He and his wife Kate moved to New York City in 1978 where he obtained an M.F.A. degree in writing from Columbia University, worked as an archivist at the Whitney Museum, and read the poetry slush pile for Paris Review. He returned to Minnesota in 1985 and received his J.D. degree from William Mitchell College of Law in 1989. His poems have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, and Poetry East, and other journals. In 2001, Nolan published an article in the South Dakota Law Review entitled "Poetry and the Practice of Law." [Source: Personal communication with Tim Nolan] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum (2006)][Tim Nolan Reading]

Peter Noterman
Peter Noterman is a choreographer, lawyer, and poet. He resides in the Washington, D.C. area.

Carol Novack
Carol Novack graduated from University of Rochester in 1969, and from New York Law School in 1983. She began her legal career as an associate appellate counsel with the Criminal Appeals Bureau of the Legal Aid Society. She then became an associate for an attorney representing a defendant in the famous Pizza Connection trial (SDNY).  Later, as a solo practitioner, she initiated a constitutional action on behalf of visual artists, prevailing in a seminal first amendment case, Bery v. City Of New York. 

In 2004, Novack obtained her Master's Degree from Hunter College School of Social Work. The title of her mini-thesis was: "Exploring a Dramatic Group Work Approach to Meet the Psychosocial Needs of Distressed, Public-Interest Minded Attorneys."  After obtaining her master's degree, and years of writing little else beside legal briefs and motions, Novack returned to poetry and fiction writing. Before becoming a lawyer, Novack authored a book of poetry in Australia, Living Alone Without a Dictionary (Maker Press, 1974). Her writings have appeared in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Action Yes, First Intensity, Gargoyle, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Diagram, Big Bridge, BlazeVOX, Del Sol Review, 5_trope, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Knock, La Petite Zine, MILK, Orphan Leaf Review, Otoliths, Salt River Review, Segue, and Word Riot. Novack currently teaches lyrical fiction writing and publishes the offbeat multimedia e-journal Mad Hatters' Review. [blog][inventions]

Charisse Carney-Nunes
"Charisse Carney-Nunes, freelance writer and attorney, is a [an] alumna of Lincold University in Pennsylvnaia—the nation's oldest historically Black college, where she was the Poet Laureate of the University for two years. She is also a graduate of Harvard University's JFK School of Government and the Harvard Law School. . . . . [She] resides in Wahsington, D.C. . . ." [Source: Charissee Carney-Nunes, Songs of a Sistermom: Motherhood Poems (Brand Nu Words, 2004)]

Robert H. Nunnally, Jr.
Robert H. Nunnally, Jr. is a commercial litigation attorney from Allen, Texas. He is a graduate of the University of Arkansas (physics) and of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law. Nunnally has been writing poetry for 25 years; is work has been published in various literary magazines. He is the author of verse chapbook, Chess Poems for the Tournament Player.

Nina Nuyorican
Nina Nuyorican was raised in the Hudson Valley (New York) and spent her summers in the Lower East Side with her abuelita). After graduating from Columbia Law School she took up residence in Florida. She is currently editing a collection of poetry and in 2005 became an adjunct professor at Florida State University. Her academic work focuses on human rights, genocide and international adjudication. From 2003 until 2005 she hosted the Dia de los Muertos poetry readings at Columbia University. [blog]

Jamie Nye
Jamie Nye was a lawyer iu the San Francisco Bay area practicing in the area of intellectual property and general commercial litigation when she decided to change careers. She began working at the University of California-San Diego in student services in 2005. She writes both poetry and screenplays.

Jim Nye
Albuquerque, New Mexico; lawyer, poet, & essayist. Nye's collection of Vietnam War poetry, After Shock: Poems and Prose from the Vietnam War (Cinco Puntus Press, 1991) will take those willing to get close to the carnage of war, as close as poetry can take a reader. [Poems]

Shari O'Brien
Shari O'Brien is a lecturer in English at the University of Toledo and a practicing attorney. She obtained her M.A. from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University. Her law degree is from the University of Toledo. She represents neglected and abused children. O'Brien's Uncaged, a collection of poems, was published by Shadows Ink Publications in 2006. She began writing poetry in 2004; her poems have been published in Chaffin, The 13th Moon, Wavelength, Poesia, The Iconclast, Illya's Honey, Blue Unicorn, Crosscurrents, and in the Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Source: Personal communication with Shari O'Brien]

Gloria Catherine Oden
Gloria Oden was born in Yonkers, New York on October 30, 1923. She is a graduate of Howard University (1944) and its law school (1948). She taught at the New School for Social Research (1966), University of Maryland—Baltimore (1971-1996). Before she took up academic life, Oden worked as an editor of technical magazines, scientific and language arts books (1961-1972). Her poetry has been published in various periodicals and is anthologized in Robert Hayden's Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). She is the author of The Naked Frame, A Love Poem and Sonnets (Exposition Press, 1952), and three collections of poetry: Resurrections (Olivant Press, 1978); The Tie That Binds (Olivant Press, 1980), Appearances (SARU, 2003). Oden lives in Cantonsville, Maryland. [Source: Personal communication with Gloria Oden]

Thomas H. Oehmke
Thomas Oehmke (his name is pronounced em-kee) was born on November 13, 1947 in Detroit Michigan. He did graduate work at Michigan State University and obtained his law degree in 1973 from Wayne State University. He was admitted to the Michigan Bar in 1973 and formed the law firm Oehmke Legal Associates in Detroit the year he was admitted to the bar. From 1973 to 1979 he served as political economist and project director for New Detroit, Inc., and beginning in 1978, publisher of the American Law Research Institute (a law book publishing company). He has served on various commissions and conducted seminars and lectured on law and business topics. Oehmke has written numerous texts for legal practitioners and is editor of Herman Hesse, Poetry of Siddhartha (Labyrinth, 1981). He has contributed short fiction and poetry to various journals.

Wilson Reid Ogg
Wilson Ogg is a poet, lyricist, lawyer, arbitrator, mediator, educator, and curator-in-residence of Pinebrook, an historic house and garden in the Berkeley Hills, Berkeley, California. He was educated at the University of California and Boalt Hall School of Law, Berkeley. His poetry is published in anthologies in America and abroad. Ogg was born in 1928. [Homepage] [Wilson Ogg]

Bobbie O'Keefe
Bobbie O'Keefe practices law in Columbus, Ohio. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana and moved to Ohio in 1974. She graduated from Miami University (Ohio) in 1978. She graduated from Capital University Law School in 1992. She is a trained mediator. Her creative writing has appeared in various magazines, and her poetry can be found in the Ohio Poet's Anthology.

Adrian Oktenberg
Adrian Oktenberg was born in Oakland, California in 1947. She has produced a radio show, taught law courses, lectured on women's studies, and owned a bookstore. She was educated as both a poet and a lawyer. She now resides in Northhampton, Massachusetts.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, Drawing in the Dirt (Malachite & Agate, 1997), The Bosnia Elegies (Paris Press, 1997), and Swimming With Dolphins (Bucknell University Press, 2002). Her poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, The American Voice, Women's Review of Books, New Letters and The Devil's Millhopper. [Swimming With Dolphins] [Review of The Bosnia Elegies] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)]

Daniel A. Olivas
Daniel Olivas is a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice specializing in land use and environmental enforcement. He makes his home in the San Fernando Valley with his wife and son. He received his B.A. from Stanford University and his J.D. from the UCLA.

Olivas is the author of five books: Anywhere But L.A.: Stories (forthcoming, Bilingual Press, 2008), Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press, 2004), Assumption and Other Stories (Bilingual Press, 2003), The Courtship of María Rivera Peña (Silver Lake Publishing, 2000); and the children's book, Benjamin and the Word / Benjamin y la palabra (Arte Público Press/Piñata Books, 2005). Olivas is also the editor of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press) and poetry that has appeared in various journals and anthologies. Olivas is a book critic for the El Paso Times and other publications. [Source: Personal communication with Daniel A. Olivas] [Daniel A. Olivas] ["Gato"] ["Western Wallflower"] ["A Good Job"] ["The Hope" & "Writer?"] ["Pico Boulevard, October 1972"] Stories: ["Driving To Ventura"] ["Buridan's Ass"] ["Black Box"] ["Weatherman"] ["Painting"] ["Muy Loca Girl"] ["Third Person Omniscient"]

Danitra Oliver
Associate, Weil, Gotshal & Manges; spoken-word poet

Jim Olsen
Jim Olsen is an environmental lawyer in Traverse City, Michigan.

Megan Oltman
Meg Oltman is a New Jersey writer, lawyer, business woman, and poet. She practiced law for 14 years, specializing in family law and civil litigation. [Source: Personal communication with Megan Oltman]

John R. O'Malley
[John R. O'Malley]

Matthew J. O'Neill
Matthew O'Neill is an Albuquerque poet, activist, and lawyer. He was born in 1969.

Terry O'Neill
Terry O'Neill is a New York lawyer and politician. He is reputedly known in Albany as "The One-Man LCA Show," a chronicler in light verse of the political characters and goings-on in New York state government.  He is the author of a collection of children's verse inspired by the adventures of Tom Constantine and the New York State Troopers.  [Terry O'Neill ] [The O'Neil book]

David Orr
David Orr is a poetry critic for the New York Times and Poetry magazine. He is a part-time lawyer and is working on a book about poetry. Orr obtained his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1996 and his law degree from Yale in 2000. [Source: Monica Finch, David Orr—In a Grand Tradition, 77 New York St. B. J. 11 (July/August 2005); Martindale-Hubbell; Princeton Alumni Weekly]

Raymond Zachary Ortiz
Raymond Ortiz was born October 2, 1953 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is an attorney and writer, named for his grandfathers who were both poets at heart. He received his B.A. in English at the University of Notre Dame and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After clerking for the new Mexico Supreme Court, he joined a local firm, first as an associate then as partner. He continues to practice law the Santa Fe firm of Roth, VanAmberg, Rogers, Ortiz, Fairbanks & Yepa, LLP. Recently his practice has primarily been in the areas of real estate, commercial law, real property, family law and Indian law. His poetry and stories have been published in the Southwestern U.S. and in Great Britain. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife Margaret Avila Storey and son Zach. [Source: Personal communication with Ray Ortiz] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum]

Mark Oursler

Carol Elizabeth Owens
Carol Owens is an attorney at the Bullard Law Group in Rochester, New York. She is a graduate of Howard University and Albany Law School where she graduated in 1997. At Albany, Owens served as President of the Black Law Students Association. She began writing poetry as a teenager. [Carol Elizabeth Owens]

Edward Packard
Edward Parkard was born in 1931 in Huntington, New York. He is a lawyer, essayist, poet, and author of children's books. He graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School.

Clemson N. Page
Clemson Page is a Wyomissing, Pennsylvania lawyer.

Lolita Paiewonsky
Lolita Paiewonsky is a graduate of Howard University School of Law, and an Ed.M. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published several small volumes of poetry.

Kimberly Townsend Palmer
Kimberly Palmer was born in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles in 1960 (in what she reminds us was the Year of the Rat and the month of Scorpio) and grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1982, her law degree from the University of Florida in 1985. She is a fourth-generation lawyer. She now lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two daughters. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Adirondack Review, Absinthe Literary Review, Blue Fifth Review, Cenotaph, Charlotte Poetry Review, CrossConnect, Earth's Daughters, Eclectica, Exquisite Corpse, Images InScript, New Laurel Review, The Panhandler, Paumanok Review, Poetry.St Corner, Red River Review, Snake Nation Review, Snakeskin, Stark Raving Sanity, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and Xavier Review. Townsend is the editor and publisher of Truth-the-Magazine. ["Dreams & Wishes & the Plain Truth"] ["Twelve Songs for a Broken Ankle"] ["Love Kills"] [Poems] ["The Defenestration of Prague "] ["Two Summers After the Divorce "] ["The Conductress of Milk"] ["Chin Pu (Mimetic Consumption) "] [Kimberly Townsend Palmer]

Roger Pao
Roger Pao is agraduate of Duke University. His poems have appeared in Allegheny Review, Concrete Wolf, Glass Tesseract, Gumball Poetry, The Independent Weekly, and Poetry Depth Quarterly. [blog]

Michael Parish
Michael Parish is a Wall Street lawyer. His poem, "First Daughter," appears in Ploughshares, Volume 7 (2), Summer, 1981. [Poems-Legal Studies Forum]

Jung E. Park
Jung Park is a Korean American who grew up in a small Mexican border town. She studied at Harvard & Radcliffe Colleges and obtained her law degree from UC Davis Law School. She is currently an improv, sketch and standup comic in the Los Angeles area. Jung is also an actress, writer, poet, psychic, artist, singer/songwriter and lawyer, although she is no longer practices law full-time.

Hardy Parkerson
Hardy Parkerson is a graduate of Tulane Law School (1966). He was in law practice for twenty years and then ventured into law teaching, and signed on with a start-up "university" in Lake Charles as Dean of the College of Law. When the university moved down courtry, Parkerson founded Southern Christan University which has had a law school since 1993.  [The Web Poetry Corner of Hardy Parkerson of Lake Charles, La.]

Nina Parrilla
Cristina Velez writes under the pen name Nina Parrila. She obtained her J.D. from Columbia University. After law school she moved to Tallahassee, Florida where she was an Adjunct Professor at Florida State University teaching a course on Genocide and International Law, and working as an employment discrimination attorney. Currently, she is a Staff Attorney for the Second Judicial Circuit, Leon County, Florida. [Nina Parrilla]

E. F. Pasbach
E.F. Pasbach was born in Chicago, raised and educated in New England, and presently resides in East Providence, Rhode Island where he practices law. His collection of poetry, Perspectives was published in 1993.

Charles Patterson
Charles Patterson, is a partner, at Morrison and Forester, Los Angeles, California. Patterson's collection of poetry is titled, The Petrified Heart (Signal Tree, 2002)(poetry relating to the Vietnam war). Patterson received his undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas in 1963, and his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1966. [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Gary Patterson
Gary Paterson graduated from the Stanford Law School in 1989. He has given up the practice of law and published a book of poetry (whose title and publisher remains a mystery).

Jerry Patterson
Jerry Patterson is a native of Arkansas and a graduate of Harvard. He obtained his law degree from Vanderbilt. He served as an Assistant Attorney General in Arkansas and during the 1950s was a company commander with the 8th U.S. Army in Korea. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Delta and Other Poems (International University Press, 1987). At the time The Delta and Other Poems was published, Patterson resided in the San Fernando Valley, in southern California.

Julia Morris Paul
Julia Paul is a practicing attorney in Manchester, Connecticut. Her poems have appeared in Runes, Connecticut River Review, Broken Bridge Review, Common Ground Review, and Caduceus. One of her poems was performed by the East Haddam Stage Company as part of its 2008 production, Plays and Poetry. Paul is a member of the Connecticut Poetry Society.

Lawrence Lyman Pauley
Lawrence Pauley was born in 1930 in Hamlin, West Virginia. He served in the U.S. Air Force after graduating from high school and attended Marshall University. He obtained his law degree from West Virginia University in 958. He a retired Federal Administrative Law Judge. Pauley is the author of Mud River Talkes: A Collection of Stories in Rhyme (Discovery Press, 2000).

Sue Payne
Sue Payne is a Chicago attorney; her first published poem appeared in The Blue Moon Review; Payne was born in 1953; admitted to the bar in 1985; she obtained her B.A. from Denison University, her J.D. from Northwestern University, J.D; she teaches law at John Marshall Law School .["Mother May I"]

J. Clark Pendergrass
J. Clark Pendergrass practices law in Huntsville, Alabama. He obtained his B.A. from the University of Tennessee and his J.D. from the University of Alabama in 1997. In his undergraduate days he was poetry editory of the Phoenix Literary Art Magazine. We have not determined whether Pendergrass has continued, as a lawyer, to write poetry.

Mary Margaret Penrose
Mary Margaret Penrose is a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law where she joined the faculty in 2000. She received her B.A. degree in history from the University of Texas-Arlington (1989) and her J.D. degree from Pepperdine University (1993), and her L.L.M. from Notre Dame in 1999.

We first learned of Professor Penrose's poetry by way of a poem entitled, "I Said, 'No': For Those Who Would Disallow Me the Freedom to Love," which appeared in 23 Harvard Women's Law Journal 247 (2000). [Mary Margaret Penrose]

Simon Perchik
Simon Perchik is a retired New York lawyer and one of the country's most widely published poets. [Simon Perchik] [poems] [Poems-Legal Studies Forum] [James R. Elkins interview: Simon Perchik] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)]

John Perrault
John Perrault is a New Hampshire teacher, folksinger, musician, lawyer, and Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Perrault was raised in Maine and graduated from Providence College in 1965. He received his Masters degree in Political Science from the University of New Hampshire. He taught school for 10 years and then obtained his law degree from Franklin Pierce Law Center. With John Ahlgren, he formed the law partnership of Ahlgren & Perrault in 1982. Perrault has appeared in concerts throughout New England singing his ballads. His music albums include: Thief in the Night (1977), New Hampshire (1981), Tenants in Common (1984), Country Matters (1988), Country Matters (1995), PLM: Before You Go (1997). [Source: Personal communication with John Perrault]

Perrault's poetry has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Commonwealth, Key West Review, and Poet Lore. His first published collection of verse, The Ballad of Louis Wagner: & Other New England Stories in Verse was published in 2003 by Peter E. Randall, Publisher. Perrault's latest collection of poetry, Here Comes the Old Man Now was published by Oyster River Press in 2005. [Source: Ballad of the Barrister & Personal communication with John Perrault] [John Perrault]

[Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [John Perrault's Poetry] [Barrister Ballader—New Hamphsire Public Radio]

Alice Persons
Alice Persons has a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Oregon. She moved to Maine in 1983 and received her J.D. from the University of Maine School of Law in 1986. She has worked as an English teacher, legal secretary, copy editor, and singing waitress. She now works for a legal publisher and teaches part-time. She lives in Westbrook, Maine with her husband, dogs and cats. She is the author of chapbook titled, Be Careful What You Wish For; her poetry has been published in Animus, Aurorean, Red Owl, Off the Coast and other journals. In 2002 she co-edited A Sense of Place, an anthology of Maine poetry. "Among its other virtues, Maine has a wonderful, vibrant poetry scene," she tells us. She is, with former lawyer and poet, Nancy A. Henry of Gray, Maine, co-editor and publisher of Moon Pie Press. [Wikipedia] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Poems] [Source: Personal communication with Alice Persons] [Two Poems]

Marlene Nourbese Phillip

Kirk Pittard
Kirk Pittard was born January 20, 1973, at San Angelo, Texas. He obtained his B.A. degree from Baylor University in 1995 and J.D. from Baylor in 1999 and is currently an associate at Waters & Kraus, LLP, Dallas, Texas. His practice areas include commercial litigation, toxic torts, pharmacy law, and appellate practice. He is the author of "Withstanding Batson Muster: What Constitutes A Neutral Explanation," 50 Baylor L. Rev. 985 (1998); "Enforcement Procedures for the State Board for Educator Certification and Texas Educators' Code of Ethics," Texas School Administrators' Legal Digest Vol. 17, No. 9, October 2001. [Source: Personal communication with Kirk Pittard]

Kenneth Plaisance
Kenneth Plaisance practiced personal injury law in the New Orleans area. He has been writing poety since the age of sixteen. He is now an entertainer, musician and songwriter. Plaisance was born and raised in New Orleans.

Dana Stangel-Plowe
Dana Stangel-Plowe is a former lawyer; she resides in New York. Her poem, "Assisted Living" appers in Paterson Literary Review (vol. 36, pp, 210-211, 2008-2009). [Dana Stangel-Plowe]

Judith Bluestone Polich
Judith Polich is a lawyer, poet, and co-owner and manager of Heart Seed Bed & Breakfast, a retreat center and spa in New Mexico.

Elizabeth S. (Liz) Poliner
Liz Poliner's poetry and fiction have appeared in Southern Review, Seneca Review, Tar River Poetry, Other Voices, Ascent, and Kenyon Review. She has been a fellow at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is a former editor of Folio and former co-editor of Poet Lore. She is the author of a novel of connected stories, Mutual Life & Casualty (Permanent Press, 2005).

Polinar was born in Middletown, Connecticut, January 28, 1960. She attended Bowdoin College, where she received her B.A. in 1982, and American University where she received an M.F.A. in 1994. She received her legal education at the University of Virginia and obtained her J.D. in 1988.

Frank Pommersheim
Frank Pommersheim teaches at the University of South Dakota School of Law where his specialty is Indian Law. He is the author of Braid of Feathers: American Indian Law and Contemporary Tribal Life (1995) and numerous scholarly articles.

Pommersheim received his B.A. degree from Colgate University, his J.D. from Columbia University and an M.P.A. from Harvard University. Before joining the South Dakota faculty in 1984, he lived and worked on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation for ten years. Pommersheim currently serves on a number of tribal appellate courts throughout Indian country, most recently named an Associate Justice for the newly formed Mississippi Band of Choctaw Supreme Court.

Pommersheim has published three collections of poetry: Snaps: Poetry and Prose From a Family Album (Rose Hill Books, 1994); Mindfulness and Home: Poetry and Prose From a Prairie Landscape (Rose Hill Books, 1997); Haiku For the Birds: And Other Related Stuff (Rose Hill Books, 2002).

He received the University of South Dakota Belbas-Larson Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 and the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center Reconciliation Award in 2000. [Source: Personal communication with Frank Pommersheim] [Frank Pommersheim] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Two Poems] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)]

Ellen Posner
Ellen Posner is a Fairfax, Virginia attorney. She is the author of What's in a Feather?, a first collection of her poetry. [Interview-podcast]

Susan Power
Susan Power is the author of a novel, The Grass Dancer (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994). She is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Power attended Harvard-Radcliffe, and obtained her law degree from Harvard Law School in 1986. After law school she worked as a technical writer and editor, and wrote poetry and short stories. She obtained her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1992. [Wikipedia]

Dennis Powers
Dennis Powers is an Asland, Oregon attorney and professor emeritus at Southern Oregon University. He is the author of The Raging Sea, an account of a tsunami that swept over Crescent City, California in 1964, Sentinel of the Seas (Citadel Press, 2007), poetry, and seven other nonfiction books. Powers is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Denver Law School. He was a full-time business attorney before he began teaching at Southern Oregon.

P.K. Price
P.K. Price is the author of novels, non-fiction, and poetry. She resides on her farm, Tortuga Cay, La Quinta Paloma in Mission, Texas [Source: Susan Fox Rogers, Solo: On Her Own Adventure (Seal Press, 1996)]

Susan Prospere
Susan Prospere was born on March 28, 1946 at Oakridge, Tennessee. Her father, an FBI agent, had various postings and Prospere grew up on the move—New York City, Niagra Falls, Memphis, and New Orleans, among other cities. She attended Millsaps College and Louisiana State University and obtained her undergraduate degree from Mississippi State University. She graduated from Tulane Law School and obtained an M.A. from the University of Houston. Prospere is the author of Sub Rosa, a collection of poems published by W.W. Norton in 1992. [Source: Biography of Susan Prospere, The Mississippi Writers and Musicians Project, Starkville High School] [Norton promo for Sub Rosa]

Prospere's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The American Scholar, Antaeus, and Best American Poetry 1991 (edited by Mark Strand). She lives in Houston, Texas and is now associated with Allen Boone Humprhries, LLP, a law firm in Houston, Texas. Prospere is a member of the the Texas Institute of Letters.

Victoria Pynchon
Victoria Pynchon is a Los Angeles attorney/mediator. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Kalliope, The Ledge, Southern New Hampshire University Journal, and Kudzu: Online Literary Journal. She is the editor-in-chief of R-KV-R-Y: A Quarterly Literay Journal. [Settle Now: Negotiation Blog]

John R. Quinn
Attorney, poet, and stage performer; lecturer at St. John's University School of Law and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. [Source: John R. Quinn, Corpus Juris Tertium: Redemptive Jurisprudence in Angels in America, 48 (1) Theatre Journal 79-90 (1996)] [See also, John R. Quinn, The Lost Language of the Irishgaymale: Textualization in Ireland's Law and Literature, 26 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 553 (1995).

Stella Rebaut
[YouTube video of Stella Rebaut talking about her life as a lawyer] [pt.2] [pt.3] [pt.4]

Burton Raffel
Barton Raffel was born in 1928; he is a poet, fiction writer, critic, translator, editor, and anthologist. He graduated from Yale Law School and spent two years practicing law on Wall Street before taking up his career as an educator, author, and scholar. He is the author of The Mia Poems (October House, Inc., 1968), Four Humours: Poems by Burton Raffel (Calcutta, India: Writers Workshop Publication, 1979), Grice: Poems of Grousing (The Trilobite Press, 1985), Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems (Conundrum Press, 1999). [Wikipedia]

Douglas Rainbow
Douglas Rainbow obtained both his undergraduate and law degree from the University of Minnesota. After law school Rainbow served in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps and was appointed U.S. Claims Commissioner for Southern Thailand. After his JAG duties he entered private practice. Rainbow retired in 2003, moved to Florida, and found that he wanted to continue to work. He served as a real estate specialist for Palm Beach County, and then joined a law firm as a paralegal. He writes, and publishes, short stories and poetry. [Douglas Rainbow]

Robert E. Rains
Robert Rains is a professor of law at the Dickinson School of Law, Penn State University. His published verse includes: "A Slippery Slope," 8 Green Bag 2d 117 (2004); “Out on a Limb," , 82 Orgeon L. Rev. 933 (2003); “Nick-name," 25 Pa. Family Lawyer 121 (December, 2003); “Gerber v. Hickman, A Sperm Aside," 24 Pa. Family Lawyer 57 (July, 2002); “The Case of the Vanishing Law Student," 4 Green Bag 2d 463 (2002); Courting Canine Custody, A Domestic Doggerel," 24 Pa. Family Lawyer 112 (December, 2002); “When You Wish to Be an R," 4 Green Bag 2d 333 (2001).

Greg Rappleye
Greg Rappleye lives near Grand Haven, Michigan. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review (where he won The Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry), River Styx, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Puerto del Sol, The Southern California Anthology, MARGIE: An American Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize XXV: Best of the Small Presses. His work has also appeared on the web at Poetry Daily and on the National Poetry Month Website of the Academy of American Poets. His first book of poems, Holding Down the Earth, was published in 1995. His second collection, A Path Between Houses, was published by The University of Wisconsin Press in 2000.

Rappleye is a graduate of Albion College (1974), the University of Michigan Law School (1976), and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (2000). He is currently Corporation Counsel for Ottawa County, Michigan, and teaches in the English Department at Hope College. He has four children, three dogs, two cats, and is married to the painter Marcia Kennedy. [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] ["A Path Between Houses"] ["From the Vegas Cantos"] [Commentary on A Path Between Houses] [Sonnets at 4 A.M. -- Blog]

Sean Reagan
Sean Reagan has taken a leave from his criminal law practice; his poetry appears in Rattle, Main Street, Rag, Chiron Review, Yankee Magazine, Black Bear Review and other journals; he resides in Worthington, Massachusetts [three poems] ["Theophany"]

Kathee Rebernak
Kathee Rebernak is a writer and corporate communications consultant, and, at one time, was a lawyer. She grew up in Missouri and has been living in New York City since 1995. Her published writing includes poetry, short fiction, and academic articles.

Karl Thomas Rees
Karl Rees is a web developer, technical writer, fpatent agent/attorney, poet, native Texan, and Brigham Young University graduate. [Karl Thomas Rees]

Carl Reisman
Carl Reisman was born, in 1961, at Rochester, New York. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1981 and cooked for a living 1982-93.  He briefly attended and then dropped out of the University of Oregon College of Law, 1984; graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law in 1996.  Since then Reisman has worked as a small-town lawyer. He is now in a solo practice in an office that was once a Phillips 66 service station built in 1932.  His practice is primarily petitioner's worker's compensation. 

Reisman's poetry collections include Kettle (Hot Lead Press, 2005), Staying Home (1989), Bread and It's Shadow (1993), and One Week (1999). He also wrote the introduction to David Reisman's book of dream drawings, Foreign Objects, published by Hornbill Press in 2004. 

Reisman tells us: "My current manuscript is called Home Geography.  The title is taken from a primer I found at a garage sale.  The primer was intended for use in a one room school house and was divided into brief lessons, which gave children such useful instruction as how to find their way home using stars if they were lost at night.  The book was a remarkably kind orientation to living on earth and my collection of poems is intended, in a small way, to pay homage to this gentle approach to education of the human soul." [Personal communication with Carl Reisman, July 1, 2006] [Carl Reisman] [Reisman's website] [Reisman reading at a Law & Poetry conference]

Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter attended Harvard University and received her law degree from Columbia University in 1996. After practicing law in New York City for four years, she took a hiatus from the law to focus on writing. She currently lives in Northampton, MA, she is the Vice President of WinningWriters.com, a comprehensive Internet resource for poets and poetry contests. Her first book of poetry, A Talent for Sadness, was published by Turning Point Books in November 2003. Reiter's poetry is also featured in Miller, Reiter & Robbins: Three New Poets published by Hanging Loose Press. [Source: Personal communication with Jendi Reiter] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] ["Meaning and Nonsense: A Panel Discussion"] ["The Ghost in Love"]

George F. Reitnour
George Reitnour was born in 1957. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania where his family extends back many generations. Reitnour attended Allegheny College and Duquesne University School of Law. After 17 years in private practice, he closed his law office in 2000 and became Vice President of Private Wealth Management at Investors Trust Company. He maintains a website—reitnour.com—promoting poetry and various charitable endeavors. [Source: Personal communication with Greorge Reitnour] [George F. Reitnour] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Lloyd Zane Remick
Lloyd Zane Remick is the author of a collection of poems titled, Live, Love and Learn (song versions of the poems). Remick is a Philadelphia arts and entertainment lawyer. He was born in 1938, at Philadelphia. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his law degree from Temple University in 1962, and his LL.M. in Taxation from Villanova University in 1984. [Zane Management, Inc. bio]

Bessy Reyna
Bessy Reyna is a columnist at the Hartford Courant, editor of El Extra Cultural, and for over a decade has worked as Assistant Reporter of Judicial Decisions at the Connecticut Judicial Department. Reyna was born in Cuba and raised in Panama and came to the U.S. to attend college. She is a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and received her J.D. from the University of Connecticut. Renya's collection of poetry published in the chapbook, She Remembers (Andrew Mountain Press, 1997) won the 1996 Brodine Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, The Battlefield of Your Body (El Campo De Batalla De Tu Cuerpo) was published by Hill-Stead Museum in 2005). [Source: Personal communication with Bessy Reyna] [Bessy Reyna] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)]

Charles Reynard
Charles Reynard is a circuit court judge, 11th judicial circuit, Bloomington, Illinois. From 1987 to 2002, he was state's attorney of McLean County, Illinois. Judge Reynard is a graduate of St. Joseph's College; he received his law degree from Loyola University-Chicago. He is the co-editor, with Judith Valente, of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2006).

Gary Wayne Rhoades
Gary Rhoades was born in 1966. He is a managing attorney at Legal Services of Northern California. He attended the University of Missouri and obtained his law degree from the University of California-Davis. He joined the Legal Services Office in Sacramento in 1993 after he finished law school He moved to the Legal Services Office at Redding as managing attorney in 1997. He is co-host of literary evenings at Carnegie's Cafe.

Paul R. Rice
Paul Rice is a law professor at American University, Washington College of Law. He was born in 1943 and spent childhood summers in Louisa, Kentucky. He received his undergraduate degree from Marshall University, his law degree from West Virginia University in 1968, and an LL.M. (Masters of Law) from Yale in 1972. He was admitted to the West Virginia bar in 1968 and clerked for Judge H.S. Boreman of the Circuit Court of Appeals. He was a lecturer and co-director of the Legal Clinic at Connecticut from 1969 to 1971 and then Associate Professor of Law at Mississippi from 1972 to 1974. He visited American in 1974 and joined the faculty in 1976. Professor Rice teaches Civil Rights, Criminal Law, and Evidence. He is the author of seven professional books and numerous law review articles.

Rice studied poetry at the Washington Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland and has a collection of poetry, largely autobiographical, now in manuscript. He has also written a book, "Grandfather's Admonitions" for his grandchildren. Rice is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Walking Among Shadows:  Searching For The Red Sunfish (Fishing Line Press, 2007) [Source: Communication with Professor Rice; The AALS Directory of Law Teachers 2000-2001] [Faculty Profile]

Robert Rice
Robert Rice has abandoned the legal profession, earned an M.A. in International Affairs at American University, did graduate work in Latin American studies at the University of Florida, and has published several novels including The Last Pendragon, Agent of Judgment, The Nature of Midnight. His short stories and poetry have been appeared in various literary journals.

Jack Richbough
Jack Richbough is a Memphis lawyer.

Steven M. Richman
Steven Richman, a lawyer in Princeton, New Jersey, concentrates his practice in the areas of international law, bankruptcy and commercial and intellectual property litigation. He is former Chair of the Editorial Board of New Jersey Lawyer Magazine, a member of the board of trustees of the New Jersey State Bar Association, and president of the Canadian-American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey. His legal publications include the chapter on "Conflicts" in New Jersey Federal Civil Procedure and numerous scholarly essays on "law and literature" topics, including essays on Edgar Lee Masters, Charles Reznikoff, Sidney Lanier, and William Cullen Bryant.

Richman is an adjunct professor of international business law at The College of New Jersey. He received a New Jersey State Bar Distinguished Legislative Services Award in 2000.

His poetry has been published in various literary journals, and his photography is in various private and public collections. He is currently preparing a book of photography on New Jersey bridges for Rutgers University Press. [Source: Personal communication with Steven Richmond] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Steve Richmond
Steve Richmond obtained his law degree from UCLA in the mid-1960s, but did not, so far as we know, ever practice law. He established the Earth Rose book store in Santa Monica. Richmond has long been associated with Charles Bukowski and is the author of a book about Bukowski, Spinning off Bukowski (Sun Dog Press, 1996). Richmond and Bukowski co-authored several books of poetry, including: Hitler Painted Roses (Earth Books & Gallery, 1966)(Earth Books & Sun Dog Press, 1994), Earth Rose.1. (Earth Books, 1966), Fuck, Hate (Earth Books, 1966), Red Work, Black Widow (Duck Down Press, 1976), Stance 3 (Stance, 1982), Gagaku (Planet Detroit Poems!, 1985), Buk (MaroVerlag, 1984)(with Rainer Wehlen and others), Sisyphus Leaves (Apemantus Press, 1992)(with Douglas Goodwin and others). Richmond is also the author of a 70s collection of poems, Earth Rose (Earth Books, 1974). [My thanks to Pat deTurk, who first alerted me to Steve Richmond's legal background.]

Pat Riggs
Pat Riggs obtained his undergraduate degree from San Francisco State University and his J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1990. After graduating fro law school he worked in the San Diego Public Defender Officer, and in 1994 moved to the Solano County Public Defender Office. He entered private practice in June 1998.

Aaron W. Rigodon
Aaron Rigodon attended the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York. He makes his home in Elmhurst, New York.

Vincent Rinella
Vincent Rinella is an attorney, psychologist, and poet. He has been poetry for the past 30 years. His work has been published in Branch Redd Review and Sixpack, and a collection of his lyric poems, Vincent Rinella is an attorney and psychologist (now semi retired), who has been residing in Wyndmoor and writing poetry for the past 30 years. His work has been published in, among other journals, Branch Redd Review and Sixpack . His book Coterieworks, a collection of lyric poems on set themes dedicated to close friends and intellectual intimates, was published in 1997. He resides at Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania.

Beatriz Alba del Rio
Beatriz Alba-Del Rio is a bilingual poet and lawyer. She has lived in Cambridge since 1982. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines.

Cynthia Nitz Ris
Cynthia Nitz Ris teaches English at University of Cincinnati and works as a freelance writer and editor. Before her academic appointment, she was a civil litigator and legal administrator. Ris obtained her law degree from the University of Michigan. She was co-founder and editor of the local literary journal The Blue Writer. He poems have appeared in Snakeskin and Identity Theory. [two poems]

Rolf D. Ritschel
Rolf Ritschel, an attorney, was born in Germany in 1943, and came to the United States when he was eleven. He resides in Victorville, California. [Rolf D. Ritschel]

T.A. Rizzo

Taiyu John Robertson
Taiyu John Robertson is a criminal defense lawyer who practices Zen Buddhism. He is the author of Always Doing Being We Live Our Lives (Lulu, 2007)(memoir in free verse) and The Only Universe I Have Ever Known (Taiyu John Robertson, 2007).

Lee Robinson
Lee Robinson grew up in the Carolinas and practiced law for over 20 years in Charleston, S.C., where she served as the first female president of the Charleston Bar.  Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies; she received a Poetry Fellowship from the Texas Writers League. 

Robinson is the author of a novel, Gateway (Houghton Mifflin, 1996)(a story of a custody battle told from a teenager's point of view) and a collection of poetry, Hearsay, published by Fordham University Press in 2004.

Lee Robinson is now retired from the practice of law and lives on a ranch outside San Antonio. She and her husband, physician Jerald Winakur, co-teach courses in medical and legal ethics at the University of Texas and the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics in San Antonio. [Personal communication with Lee Robinson] [Lee Robinson] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006]

Paul Roesch
Paul Roesch recieved his undergraduate education at Chadron State College and the University of Chicago. He received a J.D. from the University of Michigan. Roesch has served as special consultant to the Metropolitan Park District and the Tacoma Public School District (Tacoma, Washington), and as legislative consultant to the Washington State Legislature. He has also been engaged in the general legal practice, emphasizing civil and human rights, adoption proceedings, and small business enterprises.

Ruthann Robson
Ruthann Robson is a professor at City University of New York’s Queens College of Law. Her collection of poetry is titled Masks (The Leapfrog Press, 1999); her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Kalliope, Florida Review, Madison Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Conditions, Trivia, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives. She is the author of four books of fiction, including the novels, Another Mother (St. Martin's Press, 1995) and a/k/a (St. Martin's Press, 1997); a short-story collection, Eye of a Hurricane. She is also the author of five books of non-fiction. [Ruthann Robson] [CUNY Faculty profile] [Conversation with James R. Elkins] [Poetry] [Interview] [Notes on My Dying] [Annotated Bibliography] [Essay on Robson and Her Influence] ["Satisfaction of Kimberly Bascomb: An Intervention into the World of Lowell Komie's Fictional Women Lawyers"--a story]

J. Andrew Rodriguez
J. Andrew Rodriguez is the author of Robins Facing South (Red Mountain Press, 2004). He was born and raised near Corpus Christi, Texas, and as an adult lived in Oklahoma, where he studied law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas-Austin. Rodriquez write poetry, fiction, and essays. His commentaries have appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Rodriquez lives in Seattle. ["Mississippi"]

Sojourner Kincaide Rolle
Sojourner Rolle is Santa Barbara, California community activist, mediator, poet, and lawyer.

Barbara B. Rollins
Barbara Rollins presides over misdemeanors, small civil cases, juveniles, and probate in a Texas court. She figured out what she wanted to be at forty, fifteen years ago when she ascended the bench. Before that, with a B. S. from McMurry University, she taught Spanish and English. With an M.A. from Scarritt College she became a Christian Educator in a Fort Worth church. She set type for a publishing company and gained an education as a legal secretary before she got a J. D. from the University of Texas School of Law. While she waits for lawyers to get ready, she writes. Her four book children's series Forensic Crime Solvers will be published by Capstone Press in the spring of 2004. She's researching and writing about pioneer women judges of Texas in a work tentatively entitled She Who Must Be Obeyed. [Source: Personal communication with Barbara Rollins] [Poem-Legal Studies Forum]

Bill Romano
Bill Romano is San Francisco attorney.

Steven Rood
Steve Rood is an Okaland lawyer; he specializes in real estate, business, and publishing matters. He sits on various boards of organizations devoted to literary, ecological, and religious affairs. [Source: Personal communication with Steven Rood] [Poem]

Jonathan Rose
Jonathan Rose is a Miami poet, immigration lawyer, teacher, and editor/publisher of the cultural arts calender, Cultural Newsletter, and poetry editor of Accent: Miami. [Source: Personal communication with Jonathan Rose]

Bob Rosenbloom
Bob Rosenbloom, a lawyer, has had poetry has appeared in the Paterson Literary Review, Edison Literary Review, Poetic Reflections, Identity Theory, and Home Planet News. He obtained his MA in Creative Writing from CCNY in 1975. He is a member of the Delaware Valley Poets. He resides in Bound Brook, New Jersey.

Mordecai Rosenfeld
Mordecai Rosenfeld is a retired lawyer. He is the author of The Lament of the Single Practitioner: Essays on the Law and A Backhanded View of the Law: Irreverent Essays on Justice.

Menachem Rosensaft
Menachem Rosensaft is a lawyer, poet, activist, director & editor-in-chief, of the Holocaust Survivors' Memorial Project of the World Jewish Congress.

Gary Rosin
Gary S. Rosin is the author of Standing Inside the Web (Bear House Publishing, 1990). His poems and short stories have appeared in various literary and poetry magazines and anthologies, including Arrowsmith, Buffalo Press, Concho River Review, Crosscurrents, Houston Poetry Fest, i.e. magazine, New Texas, RE Arts & Letters and Sulphur River Literary Review. His poetry, prose and photography can be found on his web-page, 4P Creations. Rosin is a Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law, in Houston, Texas. [Source: Gary Rosin, personal communication, January 16, 2008][See, Brenda Sapino Jeffreys, Wordsmiths at Work: Love and Lure of Language Motivate Lawyer-Poets, Texas Lawyer (2007)][Gary Rosin]

Christine Ross
Christine Ross previously worked as an attorney in private practice, an editor for a legal publishing company, and as a professional law librarian. She is a life-long resident of Illinois and now resides in Peoria. She writes short stories and poems.

Peter CL Roth
Peter CL Roth is Senior Assistant Attorney General, State of New Hampshire. ["Cardinal Points"]

Mitchell J. Rothenberg
Mitchell Rothenberg practices law in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduate from the University of Maryland School of Law in 2006. He obtained his undergraduate degree from George Washington University in 2003. His creative writing includes poetry and fiction.

Carole Rouin
Carole Rouin is an attorney/mediator, and writer of nonfiction books and articles. Her poems have appeared in Pearl. She has been practicing law for the past 15 years.

Thomas Ruffin, Jr.
Thomas Ruffin, Jr. is a Washington D.C. lawyer, poet-playwright and activist.

Nedra Ruiz
Nedra Ruiz was born on November, 25, 1948 in Stockton, California. She earned a master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State university and spent a year studying acting at the American Conservatory Theater. She studied mime and performed various roles in small theaters in the San Francisco bay area.

Ruiz obtained her law degree from Hastings College and was admitted to the California bar in 1976. She began her legal career with the Mission Community legal Defense. She is married to a lawyer, Laurence Lichter and has three children.

She worked, at one time with the well-known, and sometimes flamboyant criminal defense lawyer, Tony Serra. Most recently, Ruiz represented Marjorie Knoller, the San Francisco lawyer who was tried for 2nd degree murder after her dogs attacked and mortally mauled a neighbor. [Source: San Jose Mercury News, March 19, 2002]

Ross T. Runfola
Ross Runfola is an attorney, sport sociologist, performance artist, and journalist. [Interview] [poems]

Lawrence Russ
Lawrence Russ has served since 1986 as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Connecticut, and since 1988 as the chief construction counsel to the State of Connecticut Department of Transportation. From 1986 to 1990, he served as Chairman of the Connecticut Bar Association's Committee on Arts and the Law and from 1986 to 1989 as Director of the Connecticut Arts Law Conference, an annual day-long event held at Yale University which was selected in 1991 by the Young Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association as a Model Attorney Outreach Project.

For his poetry, Russ has received the Academy of American Poets Award, the Gutterman Prize for Poetry, and four Hopwood Writing Awards from the University of Michigan, where he was chosen as a Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in the Humanities. Russ received a Master of the Fine Arts degree in writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was selected as an Honorary Writing Fellows in Poetry by the faculty members of the Writing Program. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New York Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Parabola, Chelsea, and Image; and in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse. Russ has been a runner-up for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and a finalist in the competitions for the National Poetry Series and the Walt Whitman Award. A chapbook of his poems, The Burning-Ground, was published by the Owl Creek Press in 1981.

Russ has performed and discussed poetry at elementary schools and universities, art museums and galleries, churches and synagogues, parks and prisons; in urban festivals and performing arts series; on television and radio. As a performer and director, Russ has read his own works and staged and performed work by other writers for the Michigan Poets-in-the-Schools Program, Ear Inn in New York City, the Kalorama Culture-in-Residence Series in Washington, D.C., the Connecticut Commission on the Arts' "Investing in Dreams" Program, the New Haven Park of the Arts Performance Series, and many other series and programs.

Russ has served as a member of the Literature Committee of the Governor's Council for the Arts in the State of Michigan; as Vice President and Trustee of the Connecticut Advocates for the Arts; Board Member of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven; member of the Advisory Board for the Akus Gallery of Eastern Connecticut State University; and as Chief Consultant for the International Poetry Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In 1987, a the request of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Russ drafted a bill for an "Act Concerning Art Preservation and Artists' Rights, and, with lobbyist Brian Anderson, led a successful two-year campaign for passage of the legislation by the Connecticut General Assembly.

Russ has represented and counseled scores of artists and arts groups as a private attorney, and as a volunteer attorney for the Chicago Lawyers for the Creative Arts and for the Connecticut Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (for which he acted as Director of Legal Services from 1986 to 1991). [Source: Personal communication with Larry Russ] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Fred C. Russcol
Fred Russcol is "of counsel" to the law firm, Castro & Remer, in White Plains, New York.

FredSara Littlecrow-Russell
Sara Littlecrow-Russell is a graduate of Hampshire College and Northeastern University School of Law. She is an attorney, political activist, and mediator from the Bear Clan Anishinaabe Metis. Her legal practice focuses on indigenous women's health, domestic violence, and restorative justice. Her poetry has been featured in Red Ink, The Massachusetts Review, American Indian Quarterly, Meridians, Cream City Review, Race Traitor, Survivor, Femspec, and in Winona LaDuke's All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. ["Wounded Knees"] [two poems]

Steve Russell
Steve Russell was born on February 10, 1947 at Bristow, Oklahoma. He received his B.S. and J.D. degrees at the University of Texas-Austin, completing his law degree in 1975. Russell obtained a Master of Judicial Studies at the University of Nevada-Reno in 1993. He is now an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Russell has authored numerous scholarly articles focusing on criminal justice, American Indians, and colonialism.

Russell practiced law from 1975 to 1978 when he became an Associate Judge on the Austin Municipal Court. From 1980 to 1982 he served as Presiding Judge of that court and from 1982 to 1994 as Judge of the Travis County Court.

Russell is married and has four children. He lives, with his family, in Bloomington, Indiana. [Source: Personal communication with Steve Russell]

Carl Russo
Carol Russo is a Northampton, Massachusetts attorney. He is also a photographer founding co-director of the Florence Poets Society. 

Leslie Hayes Russo
Leslie Russo practices law with the firm Otway Russo in Salisbury, Maryland. She received her law degree in 1986 from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. She is on the Board of Governors of the Maryland Trial Lawyers Association (MTLA) and has authored various legal publications. She writes children's literature and poetry. She resides in Salisbury, Maryland.

Jim Ryals
Jim Ryals is a La Canada, California lawyer and writer.

Jan Ryan
Jan Ryan Plays keyboards and provides background vocals for the band, Island Schmyland.

Deborah Sanchez
Deborah Sanchez was, as of 1991, a lawyer in the Los Angeles city attorney's office. [Source: Washington Post, May 28, 1991]

Steve Sanderfer
Steve Sanderfer is a Dallas attorney, poet, and city councilman.
[Dallas News article] [Steve Sanderfer Homepage]

James Sanders
James Sanders is an Atlanta lawyers; graduate of the Duke Law School and is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group.

David Sanua
David Sanua practices workers’ compensation law specializing in appellate work. His offices are located in Brooklyn, NY. He was formerly a senior attorney at the New York State Insurance Fund, the state's worker's compensation carrier. He lives in Brooklyn. Sanua graduated from Cardoza in 1991. His poem, "The Terminus Station," appears in Cardozo Studies in Law & Literature, Vol. 10, p. 61 (1998).

Mike Sauntry

Ellen Sazzman
Ellen Sazzman is a lawyer whose poetry has been published in Rockhurst Review, Potato Eyes, Soul Fountain, and the California Quarterly. Sazzman was born in 1951, admitted to the bar in 1977. She attended the University of Chicago where she obtained her B.A. degree, and Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, for her J.D. [Source: Personal communication with Ellen Sazzman] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Judy Scales-Trent
Judy Scales-Trent was born in 1940. She obtained her B.A. in 1962 from Oberlin College, her M.A. from Middlebury College in 1967, and her J.D. from Northwestern in 1973. She is a professor of law at Buffalo. Her poetry has appeared in Life Notes, Doubt Stitch: An Anthology on Black Mothers and Daughters, Sacred Journeys, and SAGE. She is the author of Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, and Community (Pennsylvania State Un iversity Press, 1995). [Law School profile]

Michael Schein
Michael Schein is the author of Just Deceits, a historical courtroom mystery. His poetry and other work appears in Slow Trains, Chrysanthemum, The Ledge, Penitalia, Pontoon 8 & 9 (Floating Bridge Press), American Drivel Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, RockSaltPlum, rains from the ground up, Runes, Lilies & Cannonballs Review, American Atheist, Drash, The November 3rd Club, and an anthology, The Art of Bicycling (Breakaway Books, 2005).  Schein is Director of the LitFuse Poets' Workshop, a former board member of the Washington Poets Association, and the former Executive Director of Tieton Arts & Humanities. He is also a volunteer speaker for the ACLU-WA, specializing in national security issues. [Michael Schein]

Eugene Schlanger
Eugene Schlanger—so far as we know—is currently deputy general counsel for Nomura Hold America, Inc, in New York. (Nomura is the U.S. operation of a large Japanese securities firm); former branch chief in the enforcement division of the New York regional office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His poetry has been published in Western Humanities Review, American Scholar and Sewanee Review. He attended State University of New York at Stony Brook and received his law degree at St. John's University. He wrote his first poem while he was a high school student at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Schlanger now resides in Suffern, a New York City suburb [Source: Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2002] [NY Times, Feb., 2004]

Steve J. Schleicher
Steve J. Schleicher is attorney in Kansas City, Missouri; author of a collection of poetry, Touch the Sky; resides in Leawood, Missouri.

Doc Schneider
Doc Schneider is an Atlanta lawyer, songwriter, and singer. [Doc Schenider]

Michael Schneider
Michael Schneider, a former lawyer; he resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including 5 AM, Atlanta Review, Paper Street, and Pittsburgh Magazine. He is a member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, and lives on Pittsburgh's historic South Side. Schneider is the author of a chapbook titled, Rooster (Main Street Rag Pub. Co., 2004).

Romaine S. Scott, III
Romaine Scott is with Haskell|Slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama. His practice focuses on business, real estate and commerical litigation. He obtained his law degree from Cumberland School of Law, Samford University in 1980, and his B.A. from Washington & Lee in 1974. He is the author of several legal articles. Before he became a lawyer, Scott was a newspaper reporter. He is actively involve in the creative arts industry as a composer, usician, and music producer.

Williard R. Scott
Williard Scott was counsel to the Scot Paper Company. He resides in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Ron Self
Ron Self was born at Columbus, Georgia in 1947; he has been practicing law for over 30 years and is currently president of the Georgia Poetry Society. His work has appeared in the Atlanta Review and The English Journal and in local anthologies. Self obtained his J.D. from the University of Alabama in 1976. He practices law in Columbus, Georgia.

Junichi P. Semitsu
Junichi Semitsu is the current director of June Jordan's Poetry for the People, a creative writing program for the political and artistic empowerment of students, and a visiting faculty member in the African American Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he served as a judicial clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and then as an associate at a law firm in San Francisco. [Source: Personal communication with Junichi Semitsu]

R. Perry Sentell, Jr.
R. Perry Sentell, Jr. is Professor of Law Emeritus, at the School of Law, University of Georgia. He is the author of "Torts in Verse: The Foundational Cases," 39 Ga. L. Rev. 1197 (2005) [Faculty Profile] [Georgia General Assembly Resolution]

Gregory C. Shaffer
Gregory Shaffer is a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin. Shaffer was born in 1958, received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1980 and his law degree from Stanford in 1988. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1990. He practiced law in France from 1988 to 1995 and then joined the Wisconsin faculty. Shaffer is the author of Forest Poems which was published in 1998. [Source: Personal communication with Gregory Shaffer] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Thomas L. Shaffer
Tom Shaffer is professor emeritus at the Notre Dame School of Law and works as a volunteer supervising attorney in the Notre Dame Legal Aid Clinic, where he is again active as a Hoosier lawyer. Shaffer was Dean of the Notre Dame Law School from 1971 to 1975. He has published eighteen books (including one, with James R. Elkins, the creator of this website) and hundreds of articles. Besides Notre Dame, he taught law at Washington & Lee, University of Maine, University of Virginia, Boston College, and U.C.L.A. Shaffer was born in Billings, Montana and now resides in Niles, Michigan. [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Mark Shaw
Mark Shaw is a former criminal defense lawyer; he owns and operates Cricket's Books and Gifts in Sausalito, California. He is the author of various books and is a poet.

Rob Shepard
Rob Shepard graduated from Texas A&M in 1986 where he majored in philosophy. He is an attorney in Austin, Texas.

John Woolslair Sheppard
John Sheppard practiced law in Lee County Florida for thirty-six years before retiring. He is the author of three collections of reflections in verse: Views from the Sunset and ThyWord by Legacy Publishing and Reflections published by Strathmoor Books.

David Shine
David Shine is a corporate lawyer in New York City. He is a graduate of Columbia University and NYU School of Law. His poetry has appeared in Poetry East, Georgetown Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Paper Street Press, Full Circle Journal, and Sarnac Review. [David Shine]

Evie Shockley
Evie Shockley (B.A., Northwestern; J.D., Univ. of Michigan; Ph.D., Duke) grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and a Shockley is a graduate fellow of Cave Canem (1997-99) and a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective. Prior to pursuing the Ph.D. in English, she clerked for Judge Nathaniel R. Jones on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and practiced environmental law at Sidley & Austin in Chicago for four years. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing (poetry) and is at work on a scholarly project concerning the relationship between race and innovation in African American poetry. Shockley's new full collection, a half-red sea was published by Carolina Wren Press in September, 2006. [Source: Personal communications with Evie Shockley] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)] [Shockley reading three poems at a Law & Poetry Conference] [Interview]

Joshua L. Shuart
Joshua L. Shuart obtained his B.S. from Kansas State University (1998), his M.A. from Kansas State in 2002, and his J.D. from the University of Kansas School of Law in 2005. His poems have appeared in the Indiana Review.

J . Robert Shull
J. Robert Shull, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, obtained degrees from the University of Virginia and Stanford University. He is employed at a non-profit children's advocacy center in New York City. His first poetry was published in storySouth. He is the author of Emotional and Psychological Child Abuse: Notes on Discourse, History, and Change, 51 Stanford Law Review 1665 (1999) ["The Little Room"] [Two Poems]

Erich M. Shultz
Erich M. Shultz is Memphis lawyer, sometimes judge, and poet. [source]

William Shutkin
William Shutkin is President of New Ecology, Inc. ("NEI"), founded in 1999 to spearhead sustainable development in distressed urban communities in New England. Shutkin is a lawyer, social entrepreneur, teaches in the Environmental Policy Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. He has authored articles and essays on environmental law and policy, and is the author of The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, which won the 2001 Best Book Award for Ecology and Transformational Politics from the American Political Science Association. He is also a published poet.

Shutkin obtained his A.B. from Brown University and an M.A. and J.D. from the University of Virginia. He completed doctoral studies in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Shutkin was a law clerk to Chief Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Vermont.

Benjamin Shryock
Benjamin Shyrock was born, 1978 in Statesboro, Georgia. He was educated at Georgia Southern University, where he received a B.A. degree in 2002. He received a Masters in Theological Studies form Duke University in 2004. In 2008, Shryock received his law degree from Marquette University Law School. He practices immigration law in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the International Institute of Wisconsin. Shryock is the author of suspense, fantasy, psycho-thrillers and poetry. [Personal communication with Benjamin Shyrock, July 16, 2009]

Edward Siegel
Edward Siegel is a Jacksonville, Florida lawyer; author of Just Like a Lawyer: The Best and Verse of The Law in Rhyme and Limerick (Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, 1993). He was born, January 15, 1931 at Asbury Park, New Jersey. He obtained his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Florida and was admitted to practice in Florida in 1955. From 1957 to 1990 he was with Adamas, Rothstein & Siegel, a Jacksonville firm.

Fred Simmons
"Fred Simmons, was born in Los Angeles, California in 1928, and is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA, B.A. with major in English Literature in 1952 and an L.L.B., later Juris Doctor, J.D. in 1958). Mr. Simmons served as a naval officer during the Korean War, and since 1958 he has been a practicing lawyer in Los Angeles. Mr. Simmons has been Certified as a Specialist in Taxation and also in Estate Planning, Trusts, and Probate. He has written and lectured nationally on Tax and Estate Planning for the wealthy. His legal practice, he says with some embarrassment, involves 'specializing in fine print and loopholes, and has, sadly, only served to make rich men much richer and myself rich in the process.' His poetry, which he thinks of as an escape from his real work has been published in national magazines." [backcover, Fred Simmons, Contemporary Urban Haiku (Xlibris, 2002)]

Simmons has published a second book, King David (Xlibris, 2004), a play in prose and verse about a young shepherd boy who becomes King of Israel.

Marvin Singleton
Marvin Singleton was born in Kansas. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale, his Ph.D. in English from Duke University, and his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He practiced law in Canada, and is a subject of a profile by Philip Slayton in his book, Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada's Legal Profession (Penguin/Viking Canada, 2007). Singleton has been imprisoned since 2004, fighting extradition to Canada. Philip Slayton reports that Singleton writes what he calls, "prison poems" and that he, Singleton, thinks highly of them. [Law and Money: My Truman Capote Moment (Philip Slayton)]

Caitlin Sislin
Caitlin Sislin attends U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and obtained her undergraduate degree from Stanford University. She has worked with Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic, and Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger and has published articles in the Ecology Law Quarterly. Her poem, "The Nation Waits," appears in Imagining Ourselves, an anthology of women's art and writing published by the International Museum of Women.

David Skeel
David Skeel is a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina (B.A. 1983) and the University of Virginia (J.D. 1987). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Kansas Quarterly and elsewhere. He has written on poetry and poetry-and-law for Legal Affairs, Wallace Stevens Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications; he served as an advisory editor of Boulevard in the 1990s. He also is the author of Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From (Oxford, 2005) and Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton, 2001).

Margaret Crouse-Skelly
[Margaret Crouse-Skelly]

Wendy Sloan
Wendy Sloan is civil rights attorneyand poet in Stuyvesant Town, New York.

D. Beecher Smith
D. Beecher Smith, a Memphis, Tennessee attorney, writer, and poet was born in 1949. From 1991 to the present he has been a member of the law firm, Rice, Smith, Bursi, Veazey, Amundsen & Jewell, where he heads the firm's Tax and Probate section. Smith attended Memphis Central High School, graduating in 1967. He received his B.A. degree from Millsaps College in 1971 and his law degree from the University of Tennessee in 1974. Smith is the author of Recovering My Sanity, a collection of poetry and three horror-suspense stories (Zapizdat Publications, 1996). Smith was named the MidSouth Writers Association poet laureate in 1996 and their prose writer of the year for 1998. From 1994 to 1995 he served as president of the Poetry Society of Tennessee and in 1995 was name poet laureate of the society. Smith also writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. [Source: Personal communications with D. Beecher Smith]

Smith served as the personal attorney for Elvis Presley during the last 11 months of his life and continues to represent the Presley estate. Smith is now a solo practitioner. [Source: Personal Interview, Beecher Smith, December 18, 2002] [Photo] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] ["Passing Fancy"] [D. Beecher Smith]

Daniel Smith
Daniel Smith is a poet, painter, and translator, and owner of Canonymous Press. He attended the University of Iowa, where he received an MFA in Comparative Literature, a J.D. degree, and an M.A. in Library & Information Science. His first book of poems, Minims, was published in 1993, and his second, Stone to Weather, is now in progress. Smith has also published essays and literary translations, and has served in various editorial capacities for journals, including Exchanges: A Journal of Translation, Modern Poetry in Translation, Periplus, and Écritique.

Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith is a law professor at the University of Memphis. He began writing haiku in 2000.

Linda L. Smith
Linda Smith is a Lecturer in the Humanities in the Honors Program at the University of Toledo. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Ohio State University; she earned both her Ph.D. in English Literature and her law degree from the University of Toledo, and is now a non-practicing member of the Ohio Bar.

Smith is is the author of Annie Dillard, a literary biography about the contemporary writer and nature mystic, and has taught writing and literature at the college level for 24 years. She has conducted retreats and classes in spirituality and mysticism at the Chiara Center at Lourdes College and at various churches in Northwest Ohio.

At the University of Toleda Honors Program, Smith advises students, performs a variety of administrative duties, and teaches a Great Books course spanning three thousand years of world literature. She also developed and teaches an Honors seminar on the topic "Theodicies Ancient and Modern: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People." Smith has been involved in a number of programs designed to help individuals suffering grief and loss. She has facilitated workshops and support groups for cancer survivors and for those who have lost loved ones to death and suicide.

Smith and Toledo-area spiritual director, Susan Lowrey, have worked together on a number of projects involving writing and the struggle to deal with grief and trauma. They jointly developed and conduct regular sessions on "The Art of Heartbreak, the Poetry of Pain: A Beginner's Writing Workshop for Those in Grief, Loss, and Pain" in the Toledo area. They recently contributed a segment on writing and poetry therapy for a CD-ROM on "Coping with Cancer" produced by the Medical College of Ohio. They have also worked together on programs to help medical residents learn better ways to deliver bad news to their patients and to deal more effectively with their own loss and grief reactions.

Smith and Lowrey also make presentations to support and bereavement groups on the use of poetry for healing. On September 17 of last year, one week after the terrorist attacks, they initiated the "Poems for Peace Project," issuing a global call for poems about the attacks and a vision of world peace. At this date, over 800 poems have been received from 35 American states and six foreign countries, from poets ranging in age from 8 to 89 years. [Source: Personal Communication with Linda Smith]

Marcus A.J. Smith
Marcus Smith was born in Houston, Texas, in 1936. obtained his J.D. from Loyola University-New Orleans in 1983 and admitted to the Louisiana State Bar that same year. He had earlier obtained his Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin (1964). Since 1972 he has been a professor of English at Loyola University-New Orleans. He has taught courses on: introduction to poetry, contemporary poetry, literature and justice, literature and film, semiotics professional writing, 18th century British fiction, modern American fiction, world literature

In 1962-1964 he was editor of Choice (a Madison, Wisconsin poetry magazine), and from 1973 to 1978 he served as editor of New Orleans Review.

His poetry in the 1960 and 70s appeared in Choice, Targets, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Idea, Midwest, Southern Humanities Review, The Far Point. One of his poems, "Terminal Ward," appears in John W. Corrington & Miller Williams (eds.), Southern Writing in the Sixties: Poetry 59-60 (Baton Rogue: Louisiana Universtity Press, 1967).

[Note: It was John W. Corrington, the English professor/novelist/poet/lawyer/ screenwriter/TV daytime dramas writer that prompted my interest in lawyer/poets and the creation of this website.]

Melinda Smith
Melinda Smith is a lawyer for a software company in Canberra and Washington, DC. She has been writing poetry for publication since 1996. Her first collection of poetry is 'Pushing thirty, wearing seventeen' (Ginninderra Press, 2001).

Donna Snyder
Donna Snyder grew up in Twitty, Texas, near the Oklahoma border. She attended the University of Texas, worked on a Navaho reservation, and was involved in legal projects in New Mexico. She works for the El Paso County attorney as a mental illness advocate.

Scott Snyder
Scott Snyder was born in New York and grew up in New York and Southern California. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of California-Berkeley, in 1984. He obtained his Masters degree in Political Science in 1986 at the State University of New York at Albany. In 1990, Snyder earned his J.D. from Lewis & Clark Northwestern School of Law and became a member of the Oregon State Bar in 1990. His poetry has appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review and other literary journals. He is also a musician and singer; his CD, "Water, Rock and Sand" can be previewed at CD Baby. [Law firm website]

'Annah Sobelman
'Annah Sobelman is the author of a collection of poetry titled, The Tulip Sacrament (Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1995).

Kimberly Sobie
Kimberly Sobie graduated from law school and obtained a degree in tax law. She practiced as a tax lawyer for almost ten years, and then worked as a manager at a hedge fund of funds. Sobie is now a personal and business coach, Reiki Master teacher, and certified hynotherapist. [Kimberly Sobie]

Sarah Sohn

Michael Sowder
Michael Sowder is is originally from Ohio and grew up in Birminngham, Alabama. He is a professor English at Utah State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, an M.F.A. from Georgia State University, and his J.D. from the University of Washington. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Alabama. After obtaining his law degree Sowder clerked for a federal judge, and worked as a lawyer for several years in Atlanta before becoming an academic.

Sowder's collections of poetry include: The Empty Boat (Truman State University Press, 2004), A Calendar of Crows (New Michigan Press, 2001), and Cafe Midnight (with Margaret Aho)(Blue Scarab Press, 2003). His critical study of Walt Whitman, Whitman’s Ecstatic Union: Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass was published by Routledge in 2005. [Source: Personal communications with Michael Sowder] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poet Lore, Green Mountains Review, Cutbank, The South Carolina Review, Poem, Southern Poetry Review, and his essays have appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

Sowder now teaches creative writing and American Literature at Idaho State University, in Pocatello, Idaho. [Michael Sowder] [News article]

Roy G. Sowers
Roy Sowers grew up in North Carolina around horses and cattle. He graduated from North Carolina State University and raised cattle for about almost a decade when he decided to become a lawyer. He practiced law until 1999 when he retired due to health reasons. He relocated to Lander, Wyoming, and resettled. Sower's poetry is anthologized in Wyoming's Cowboy Poets (Jean Henry-Mead & Peggy Simson Curry eds.).

W.T. Spadaro
W.T. Spadaro retired from the practice of law in December, 2000. Since then he has served as a consultant for the design of disease surveillance systems and for bioterrorism and health law projects. He holds a B.S.C.E from the Newark College of Engineering (now the Newark Institute of Technology), an M.Eng. from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a J.D. from New York Law School. In 1998 he received a Postgraduate Certificate in Writing from the Vermont College of Norwich University, where he studied poetry and the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber. His poems have been published in Bastard Plan, Salonika, Lungfull!, Medicinal Purposes, and The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks. [" Who Has Seen Infinity?"]

Edmond B. Spaeth, Jr.
Edmond Spaeth is a jurist, now retired. His poems have appeared in the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

Robert E. Sparrow
Robert Sparrow is a partner in the Kew Gardens, New York law firm, Sparrow, Singer & Schreib; graduate of Columbia Law School, a lawyer since 1957; served as the President of the Queens Criminal Courts Bar Association (and was named its lawyer of the year in 1993); born in New York in 1935. Sparrow's practice focuses on criminal defense law.

Sparrow has been a licensed pilot, a certified scuba diver, a nationally ranked handball player, and sometimes visitor to exotic places. [Source: Robert E. Sparrow letter to James R. Elkins, dated June 30, 2005][Photo, used by permission, October 12, 2005]

Gerry Spence
Gerry Spence, born in 1929, is a Wyoming lawyer known throughout the United States for his high profile clients and his way with juries. Spence is a prolific writer, and has recently published a magnificent book of photography and poetry under the title Gerry Spence's Wyoming (St. Martin's Press, 2000). [Gerry Spence] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Sheila M. Parrish-Spence
Sheila Parrish-Spense, a co-author of A Trilogy of Poetry, Prose, and Thoughts for the Mind, Body and Soul, is an an attorney, writer, educator and ommunity activist.  She is an active participant in poetry marathons and slams and her poetry and prose has appeared in various publications. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and North Carolina Central University Law School; she studied law at the University of Exeter Law School, Exeter, England.

Jacqueline St. John
[See: Jacqueline St. John, "Restraining Order," "A Mother's Advice to her Children," and "White Rain," 35 (9) The Colorado Lawyer 41, 43, 48 (2006)]

Maxwell L. Stearns
Maxwell L. Stearns was born at Bangor, Maine, on December 2, 1960. he obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and his J.D. degree from the University of Virginia in 1987. He was admitted to the bar in 1987, and is now a professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 1992. He previously practiced law as a litigation associate with Palmer & Dodge in Boston, and Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz in Philadelphia, and served as a judicial clerk for the Hon. Harrison L. Winter, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Stearns teaches Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, Federal Courts, and a course on public choice and public law, for which he has published a book Public Choice and Public Law: Readings and Commentary. He received the 1995 Outstanding Faculty Publications Award for "Standing and Social Choice: Historical Evidence," which appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Most recently, Stearns has published Constitutional Process: A Social Choice Analysis of Supreme Court Decision Making. His sonnet series appears in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 48, p. 195 (1995).

Jean Stefancic
Jean Stefancic is a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. ["The Lawyer Speaks of Rivers"]

Gary Stein
Gary Stein is a Bethesda, Maryland lawyer and poet whose poems have appeared in Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, Prairie Schooner, Folio, Wordwrights!, and Blue Sofa Review. Stein holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and also writes short stories and reviews.

Gene' Stephens
Gene' Stephens received her J.D. from DePaul University College of Law and her B.A. from the University of Michigan. Stephens is the author of Rebirth, a collection of stories and poems, and is currently working on her second collection of poetry. Her poetry appears in the 2004 Chicago Poetry Fest Anthology. ["My First Man (for Daddy)"]

Glen Stephens
Glen Stephens is a retired lawyer; he resides in Riverside, California. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School.

Catherine Baker Stetson

Terry Stevenson
Terry Stevenson is a graduate of Loyola-Marymount School of Law in Los Angeles. He is a Senior Assistant City Attorney for City of Burbank specializing in employment and construction law. He has been writing poems since high school. His poems have appeared in Electrum, Poetry/L.A., Rattle, Spillway and ONTHEBUS and in various anthologies: Shards, Off-Ramp, Corners (all published by the Pasadena Poets), The New Los Angeles Poets (Bombshelter Press), Truth and Lies that Press for Life (Artifact Press, Ltd.), 13 LA Poets (Bombshelter Press), and So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2003). [Source: Personal communications with Terry Stevenson] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Robert G. Stewart
Robert Stewart is an attorney with AterWynee LLP in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1973 and obtain his law degree ten years later from the University of Puget Sound Law School. He is a member of the Oregon Patent Law Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association. He write both fiction and poetry.

Andrea Stumpf
Andrea Stumpf received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1984 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1987 (where she was an editor on the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law). She is now senior counsel at Teleglobe Communications Corporation in Reston, Virginia. She was previous associated wtih Morgan, Lewis & Bockius and Sherman & Sterling in New York City (and Paris). She clerked for Judge Frank M. Johnson, who severs on the 11th Cirucit Court of Appeals, Montgomery, Alabama. She was admitted to practice in Pennsylvania in 1990, in New York and Paris in 1994. [poetry]

Jay Surdukowski
Jay Surdukowski is from New Hampshire. He studied studio art and political science at Bates College in Maine. At Bates, his paintings and installations were shown at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Bates College Museum, and the Chase Hall gallery on campus. He is (as of summer/2005) in his final year at the University of Michigan Law School where he served as president of the Law School Student Senate and founded Term of Arts, an annual show of law student art. He also raised funds for revival of the law school's literary journal. He is currently the Managing Editor of the Michigan Journal of International Law. Surdukowski's note, “Is Poetry a War Crime? Reckoning for Radovan Karadzic the Poet Warrior” was published in the Michigan Journal of Internation Law in its Winter, 2005 issue. His recent summers have been spent at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Before law school Surdukowski was a Truman Fellow in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Surdukowski is a Truman Scholar and a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow. He is the recipient of a Bates College Phillips Fellowship to Rwanda, and a University of Michigan Law School Dean's Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Bogg, The Iconoclast, Frogpond, Diagram, and the New Yinzer.

Michael G. Sutin
Michael Sutin is a partner in a Santa Fe law firm, Sutin, Thay & Browne. He was admitted to the New Mexico bar in 1959 and has been a member of the law firm of Sutin, Thayer & Browne from 1959 to present and served as managing partner of the firm from 1971 to 1983. His first book of poems, Voices from the Corner/Voces del Rincon, a one-person anthology centering on northern New Mexico's multi-cultural tensions, was published in 2000 by Pennywhistle Press of Santa Fé. Sutin's most recent collection of poems, Naked Ladies on the Road was published in 2005 by Sunstone Press in Santa Fe. [Source: Personal communications with Mike Sutin] [Michael G. Sutin] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Naked Ladies on the Road]

James W. Symington
James W. Symington was born in 1927. He is the former U.S. Chief of Protocol and author of A Muse 'N Washington: Beltway Ballads and Beyond (Raleigh, North Carolina: Pentland Press, 1999). His papers are housed at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri-St. Louis. [Wikipedia]

Curt Sytsma
Curt Sytsma is Des Moines, Iowa lawyer. He is the author of The Rhyme and Reason of Curt Sytsma, Political & Social Commentary by the Barrister Bard (Des Moines: C.S.S. Publications, 1982).

Nkechi Taifa

Douglas L. Talley
Doug Talley obtained his B.F.A. degree in creative writing from Bowling Green State University in 1976. After a summer spiritual quest in the Grand Tetons he hitchhiked to Salt Lake City and joined the Mormon Church (doing his mission work in Rome from 1978 to 1980)

He obtained his J.D. degree from the University of Akron School of Law in 1984 and serves as CEO of Millennial Assurance Services, Inc. He is author of a book of poetry, The Angel Voice of Irony (Cato Properties, 2001), described as a sonnet sequence about his religious conversion; his poetry has appeared in The American Scholar, Midwest Poetry Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Hellas, and other journals. He resides in Akron, Ohio. [source]

Jeff Talmadge
"Jeff Talmadge was born in Ulvade, Texas, and spent his earliest years under the twin spells of rock 'n roll and folk music. He was deeply influenced by Townes Van Zandt and John Stewart—and intrigued by the growing music scene in Austin. At Duke University, he won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Award, seeing publication of several of his pieces. He went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina." Talmadge is also a practicing lawyer. [Jeff Talmadge Singer Songwriter Homepage]

Ron Talney
Ron Talney was born in 1936 in Canada, but imigrated to the United States at an early age. He has lived most of his life in Oregon, and now resides in Lake Oswego, Oregon. He is the author of three collections of poetry, The Anxious Ground (Press-22, 1974), The Quietness That Is Our Name (Bohematash Press, 1978), and most recently, The Broken World (Stone City Press, 2006). He tells us: "I first published poems about 40 years ago and have been at it ever since."

Talney, now retired, does pro bono work for the local ACLU chapter. During his years of active private practice he focused on trial work, and spent the last years of working life doing legal aid in Salem, Oregon, where he supervised the senior law program and was coodinator of the volunteer lawyer program. He has also done pro bono political asylum representation in the Rio Grande Valley, South Florida and Portland, election observation in El Salvador and Arizona, as well as human rights assessment in Haiti, and consulting for the National Legal Services Corporation.

Talney graduated from Portland State University (1960) and Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College (1966). He was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 1966. He has two living children, one of them, an attorney doing criminal defense work in the State of Washington. [Source: Personal communications with Ron Talney] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)] [Words That Make Us Friends—commentary]

Emmanuel P. Tangas
Emmanuel (Manny) Tangas is a Canadian, a member of the Washington state, and is presently, Senior Business Development Manger for the Xbox console, in Microsoft's Home and Entertainment Division. He resides in Seattle.

Tangas was born in 1966 in Banff, Alberta. His parents were Greek and Russian immigrants. He was raised—mostly—in Kamloops, Bristish Columbia. He did undergraduate work at the University of British Columbia, and came to the United States to study law, first at thomas M. Cooley Law School, and then, obtaining his J.D. from Gonzaga University. He was admitted to practice law in the United States in 1996. After graduating from law school he worked for a 4-lawyer Seattle firm for two years, and then a mid-size firm for two years. He then joined a large multi-national firm to work on the Microsoft anti-trust litigation, before taking on his present work with Microsoft.

He has been writing poetry since grade school. He tells us, "[t]he skills need to critique and analyze poetry have served me well in my legal and business professions." [Personal communication with Manny Tangas, March 20, 2005]

Frank E. Taplin, Jr.

Adam Tarleton
Adam Tarleton received his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and studied law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as editor in chief of the North Carolina Law Review. Tarleton was born in Durham in 1979. His poems and reviews have appeared in Poet Lore, Carolina Quarterly and the Hudson Review.

Laura Ymayo Tartakoff
Laura Ymayo Tartakoff is an adjunct associate professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University and has taught law and literature at Case Western Reserve University. Her legal work focuses on constitutional law, civil liberties, and Latin American legal issues.

Tartakoff was born in Cuba and grew up in Puerto Rico. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University (1975), an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (1976), an M.A. in International Affairs from the Fletcher School in 1976, and a Diplomé (M.A.) from the Institute of Advanced International Studies at the University of Geneva in 1978. She obtained her law degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1990, and she served as law clerk to the Honorable Frank J. Battisti, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

Tartakoff is co-editor of Poetry and Politics: Selected Poems of Heberto Padilla (1974) and author of three collections of poetry, all published in Madrid, Mujer Martes (Playor, 1977), Entero Lugar (Editorial Betania, 1994), and Intimo Color ( Editorial Betania, 2002). Her poetry has not been translated for publication in English She has lived in Europe and Latin America and taught in Paris and Geneva. [Source: Personal communication with Laura Tartakoff]

Richard L. Taylor
Richard Taylor is Professor of English at Kentucky State University. He obtained his J.D. degree from the University of Louisville. Taylor is the author of several collections of poetry including: Bluegrass (Larkspur Press, 1975); Earth Bones (Gnomon Press, 1979); In the Country of Morning Calm (Larkspur Press, 2001); Stone Eye (Larkspur Press, 2001); Braintree: Fifteen Poems (Scienter Press, 2004). He was poet laureate of Kentucky from 1999-2001 and is also an antiquarian book dealer in Frankfort, Kentucky. [Source: Personal communication with Richard Taylor] Laura Ymayo Tartakoff [Richard Taylor] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

John Teeter, Jr.
John Teeter, Jr. is a professor of law at St. Mary's University. [John Teeter, Jr. -- faculty profile]

John Teising
[John Teising]

Paula Adams Tennant
Paula Adams Tennant was born in 1913. She graduated from high school during the Depression, served in the Navy during the war, and attended law school on the GI Bill. She became a member of the California bar and took up the practice of law. She was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Alaska, and then served as a district attorney in California. She served on the California Youth Authority Board, the parole authority for juveniles, and in 1970, was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon to serve on the U.S. Board of Parole and in 1983 was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve on the U.S. Parole Commission.

Tennant's collections of poetry include: Paula Adams Tennant, who writes under the name ADAMS, lives in Northern California. She served in the Navy during World War II and studied law after the war. She held various positions as a prosecutor and in 1970 was appointed to the U.S. Board of Parole. In 1983 she was appointed to the U.S. Parole Commission. She is a resident of northern California.

Tennant's published poetry include: Passion of Creation, The Two Headed God, Moon of Reflection, Sheaves of Silence, and Conversations with Keith all published by Lost Coast Press (Fort Bragg, California). [Source (of biographical information): Guide to the "A Few Good Women" Oral History Collection, 1938-2000, Penn State University Archives, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University]

Miles Tepper
Miles Tepper is a lawyer, musician, artist, actor, and poet. Born in the Bronx, New York, he attended the High School of Misic and Art and received his B.S. degree in 1966 from City College (New York). He went on to Harvard Law School where he obtained his J.D. in 1969. He has practiced law for over 30 years in various capacities: law clerk to the late Hon. John R. Bartels, United States District Judge, Eastern District of New York; private practice in New York City; Assistant U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of New York (serving as Deputy Chief, Appeals, 1979-1980; Chief, Civil Division, 1980-1985); and for some 20 years solo practice in New York City.

Tepper credits, for his move into poetry, his wife, Susan Tepper, a published poet and fiction writer, and Simon Perchik (a fellow lawyer/poet), and the late Jude Peet of Australia, the founder of Poesmplace.

Leonard B. Terr
Leonard Terr was born, April 26, 1946, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He attended LaSalle College, where he obtained an A.B. degree in 1967. He obtained an A.M. degree from Brown University in 1968, and his Ph.D. from Brown in 1971. He studied law at Cornell University and obtained his J.D. degree in 1975. Before taking up the practice of law, he was an instructor in English at Brown University (1968-1971), assistant professor of English at Wayne State University (1971-1972), and assistant professor of English at Elmira College (1972-1973). After completing his law studies Terr was law clerk to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Claims (1975-1976) and then joined the law firm, Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan in Washington, D.C. in 1976.

A collection of Terr's poetry, titled Sitting in Our Treehouse Waiting for the Apocalypse was published by Ithaca House in 1975. He is also the author of: Foreign Corporations: Reorganizations, Liquidations, and Similar Transactions (Bureau of National Affairs, 1977)(with Gordon O. Pehrson, Jr.), The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology (Harper & Row, 1978), Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood & Womanhood (Fortress Press, 1985), The Magnificat: Musicians as Biblical Interpreters (Paulist Press, 1995). [Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002]

Terr's master's thesis was on "Shaftesbury and the Augustan Compromise," A.M. thesis, Brown University, 1968 (focusing on 18th century English literature and the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713)). His Ph.D. thesis was titled, "Tragic Satire from Jonson to Pope: The Vituperative and Elegiac Phases, and Their Relationships to the Neoclassical Pictorial Tradition," Ph.D. dissertation, Borwn University, 1972 (1968)(2 vols.). [Source: OCLC, World Cat database]

Marjorie Tesser
Marjorie Tesser, a former civil rights lawyer, is a poet. She co-edits The Mom Egg, a literary journal, and is co-editor of Browery Women: Poets, an anthology. Tesser attened the State University of New York at Albany and obtained her law degree from Brooklyn Law School.

Euell Thomas
Euell Thomas is a 1996 graduate of Hendrix College and a 2005 graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder, School of Law. He has been published in the Colorado Lawyer, The Springfield News-Leader, and The Southwest Standard. Before attending law school, he was active in Slam Poetry events. Euell resides in Denver, Colorado. [See: Euell Thomas, "Freddy," 35 (9) The Colorado Lawyer 49 (2006)] [Source: Personal communication with Euell Thomas, 04/20/07]

Lynne Thompson
Lynn Thompson was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Her parents were born in the Windward Islands, West Indies. She received her B.A. from Scripps College and a J.D. from Southwestern University School of Law. She is an is an attorney, and serves as Director of Employee and Labor Relations at UCLA. She has published two chapbooks of poetry, We Arrive By Accumulation (SeaMoon Press, 2002) and Through A Window. Her poems have appeared in Runes, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry International, Voices From Leimert Park, Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies and, Blue Arc: An Anthology of California Poets. Her first collection of poems, Beg No Pardon, was published by Perugia Press in 2007.

Tom Thompson
Tom Thompson is Gila County, Arizona lawyer. [Source: Sally Simmons, "Lawyering at Street Level," Arizona Attorney 12 (November 2004)]

Kit Thornton
Kit Thornton is a graduate of the College of Law, West Virginia University. After law school he worked in the Public Defender's office and is now Deputy Director of the State Supreme Court of West Virginia where he is the director of the "Courtroom of the Future Project." Thornton also chairs the Law and Technology Committee for the West Virginia State Bar, and teaches law and technology at West Virginia State. He is also a motorcyclist. His first published poetry appeared in Sillhouette magazine. [Two Poems]

[A footnote: Kit Thornton, when he was a law student at West Virginia, was insistent that the creator of this website learn the "new technology" and not go the way of the plow horse retired to pasture. Thanks, Kit. Jim Elkins]

Michael T. Thorsnes
Michael T. Thorsnes is retired, of counsel, Thorsnes, Bartolotta & McGuire, San Diego. Thorsnes, before serving as national finance co-chair and poet laureate for the presidential campaing of John Kerry was recognized as one of the "100 Most Influential Lawyers in California" by the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Thorsnes was born at La Joalla, California, January 3, 1943. He obtained his B.A. from San Diego State College in 1965, and his law degree from the University of San Diego in 1968. He has served on the Board of Trustees of the University of San Diego. Thorsnes's law firm bio indicates that he "published an anthology of predominantly Irish poetry under the pseudonym of Rowdy O'Yeats" and "is also working on a one man show on Yeats" and "a second book of original poetry." [Source: Law firm bio & Martindale-Hubbell]

Maureen Thorson
Maureen Thorson is a Washington, D.C. lawyer. She was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1978, and obtained her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 2000, and her J.D. from Georgetown University. She was admitted to practice law in 2003. She runs a press, Big Game Books. ["History of Time"] ["The Blue Ox"] [Big Game Books] [blog]

Jan Tissot
Jan Tissot is a graduate of Seattle University Law School; thirty years experience as a criminal defense investigator (Seattle); published four books of poetry, including Crow Speaks (Lohan Publications, 1991), Kali Yuga (Writers Workshop-Calcutta, 1993). He is also the author of a novel, Keiki (Parhelion, 2002).

Robert B. Tolins
Robert Tolins was born on January 5, 1952 in San Diego, California. He received his B.A. degree from Cornell University in 1974 and his law degree from Boston College in 1977. He was an assistant district attorney in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1978-1980) and then litigation supervision for the Boston Public Housing Authority (1984-1990). He moved to Lowell, Massachusetts where he was a civil and criminal lawyer from 1990 to 1998. Diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, he retired from the practice of law at age forty and took up writing. His novel, Unhealthy Boundaries, was published by Dry Bones Press in 2000. His poetry and short stories have appeared in various journals. [Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002]

James A. Toupin
James Toupin is General Counsel of the United States Patent and Tradmark Office. Toupin was born in San Fracisco and graduated from Stanford University. He obtained his law degree from the Boalt Hall School of Law at theUniversity of California-Berkeley. His poems have appeared in Raven Chronicles, The Classical Outlook, Windfall, Loch Raven Review, and Umbrella. He is the co-translator of the Selected Letters of Alexis de Tocqueville (University of California Press). [US Patent and Trademark Office Executive Bio] [poems] ["A Defense of Solitaire"]

Saul Touster
Saul Touster is professor emeritus and retired director of the Legal Studies Program at Brandeis University where he founded the Humanities and the Professions Program in 1981 to develop seminars on law and literature for judges to share and reflect on career and ethical issues. This widely acclaimed program expanded over the years to include judicial educators, teachers, lawyers, doctors, public officials, and leaders in the fields of business and health care.

Touster obtained his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1946, and his J.D. from Harvard in 1948. After law school, he practiced law in New York City, and in 1955 joined the faculty at SUNY-Buffalo School of Law as a professor of law. After several years of university administration, he joined the Brandeis faculty in 1979 to direct t he university’s undergraduate education in law. In 1982 he was named the Joseph M. Proskauer Professor in Law and Social Welfare in the Brandeis Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare. Since his retirement in 1993, he redirected his interests to the study of the Holocaust during which he discovered significant documents which became the basis for his publication of A Survivors’ Haggadah (Jewish Publication Society, 2000) and the Treatment of Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust, 1945-1948: Dilemmas of Law, Care and Bureaucracy (Brandeis University, 2000).

Touster has over the years been writing and publishing poetry in a variety of little magazines. A collection of his poetry, Still Lives and Other Lives, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1966. [Poems—Legal Studies Forum]

Alby Tramposch
Alby Tramposch was born in New York City. He is a lawyer with the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. He has also practiced patent law. He noted, on a web-site no longer available, that

Tramposch is also a playwright and has produced, under the pseudonym, A.A. 'Papa' Talbert, a collection of illustrated children's poetry, Papa's Poems: A Celebration of Fun for Kids of All Ages, an interactive CD-ROM.

Shane Truett
Shane Truett received his BA in English in 1999 from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He was a criminal defense attorney with Monks Law Firm in Durham, North Carolina after graduating from North Carolina Central University School of Law in 2006.

Alison M. Turner
Alison Turner is a partner in the firm, Greines, Martin, Stein & Richland, in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from UCLA School of Law in 1984. She joined Greines, Martin, Stein & Richland in 1990. She obtained her A.B. from Radcliffe College. Her poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review,
Hudson Review, Nimrod, Margie: American Journal of Poetry, Santa Monica Review, and other journals.

Jeff Turner
Jeff Turner is a lawyer, poet, and human rights activist; he resides in Dallas, Texas.

Ron Turner
Ron Turner is a Nashville, Tennessee lawyer, and former city councilman. In pursuit of his theological interest, he obtained a Master's degree at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is currently a professor of criminal justice at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee. Turner is the author of a book of poetry titled, My Father My Sons and Me In Between (1997). [Ron Turner]

Michael Tusa, Jr.
Michael Tusa is an attorney, poet, and adjunct professor at LSU-Shreveport.

Christopher Dinwiddy Tussling
Christopher Tussling is a Philadelphia lawyer. His poem, "A Law Reviewer Reminisces," appears in Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (1992).

Ann Tweedy
Ann Tweedy grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. She completed her undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr College and received her law degree from University of California-Berkeley (Boalt Hall). She has been writing poetry since she moved to the West Coast in 1996. Her poetry has been published in Rattle, Clackamas Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Drag King Anthology, Pedestal Magazine, Awakenings Review, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, Stringtown Review, and other journals and magazines. Tweety teaches at California Western School of Law and divides her time between San Diego, California and Skagit County, Washington. [Source: Personal Communication with Ann Tweedy] [Ann Tweedy website] ["A Cyclist's Peripheral Vision"] ["Martin Luther King Day"] ["domestic violence"and other poems] ["life without descartes"] ["word games"] ["rearrangement"] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum] [Poems—Legal Studies Forum (2006)]

Beth Understahl
Beth Understahl's's poetry has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry, The Formalist, and Faultline. She obtained her law degree from Fordham University School of Law in 2006. She has an M.F.A from the University of California-Irvine.

Mark Unger
Mark Unger resides in San Antonio, Texas. [Mark Unger]

Azhar Usman

James Michael Valenti
James Valenti is an attorney in private practice and an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Roberts Wesleyan College. He is the author of Poetic Justice: Legal Rhymes and Riddles, 13 J. Paralegal Educ. & Prac. 149 (1997).

Sandra Del Valle
Sandra Del Valle spent ten years as a civil rights attorney for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City and currently teaches at the CUNY Law School.

Xianchun J. Vendler
Xianchun Vendler received her undergraduate degree from Beijing University in 1983. She is also a graduate of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, the University of Texas-Austin (where she received her Ph.D), and from Loyola Law School-Los Angeles (where she obtained her J.D. in 1995). She is now a Deputy Attorney General in the California Department of Justice. Vendler is the author of You Zi Xin Zhong De Ge (a collection of poems in Chinese and English) published by World Affairs Press in 2003.

Darrell Vienna
Darrell Vienna was born in 1946 in Los Angeles, and is now a resident of Sierra Madre, Calfiornia. He describes his principal buisness as "lawyer and writer." He obtained his law degree from Loyola Law School. He began practicing law in 1994 and gave up the practice of law in 1997. He was, in some earlier life, a professional rodeo rider and show horse trainer.

Donald H. Vish
Donald Vish is a Louisville, Kentucky lawyer, poet, and photographer; graduate of Bellarmine College (1968) and obtained his law degree from the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law (1970); author of Prideful Violets: Poems & Musings (2001) [Middleton Reutlinger—law firm profile]

Anne Reynolds Voegtlen
Anne Voegtlen practices with Heller Ehrman in Seattle. Voegtlen's poetry has appeared in Poetry magazine, CALYX, Kalliope, and in a collection entitled Night Dive: A Collection of Poems (submitted for an M.F.A. dissertation, Warren Wilson College, 1995).

Carol Waities
[Source: Philadelphia Inquirier, March 21, 2004, p. LO5][Lawyer in Lindenwold]

Harry Waitzman
Harry Waitzman grew up on a farm in Rockland County. He served in Naval Air Corps during World War II.  He received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an L.L.B. from Columbia Law School, and practiced law for thirty-five years. He then obtained his M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1993. His work has appeared in Tikkum, Seattle Review, Mudfish, Lumina, Slipstream, and Abiko Journal. He is the author of two chapbooks, Seven Views of Hudson's River (Alms House Press, 1987) and Skunk Cabbage (Box Turtle Press, 2004).

Cheryl Walker
Cheryl D. S. Walker is a member of Bryan Cave LLP's Banking and Business Finance and Entrepreneurial, Technology & Commercial Practice Client Service Groups, and the co-leader of the Commercial Practice Business Response Team. Ms. Walker drafts and negotiates loan transactions and counsels new and emerging businesses on issues related to business organization and operation. Walker is the co-author of Missouri Secured Transactions Under Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code and a poetry chapbook, Silence Isn't Quiet (River King Poetry Press). Her poetry has appeared in St. Louis Muse (St. Louis Urban League), Break Word With The World (Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville), Drumvoices Revue (Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville), Eyeball Magazine (First Civilizations, Inc.), and When the Lions Roar (Washington University).

Walker obtained her B.S. degree from University of Missouri-Rolla, in 1986 and her J.D. from Washington University in 1990. [Source: Personal Communication with Cheryl Walker]

George M. Wallace
George M. Wallace is Pasadena, California attorney and currently a partner in the firm of Wallace & Schwartz. Wallace & Schwartz is a two-attorney firm with a mixed litigation practice emphasizing professional liability defense (mostly on behalf of veterinarians), insurance coverage issues, general business litigation, and civil appeals. [blog: A Fool in the Forest] [an article about Wallace]

John E. Wallace
John E. Wallace is a former staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th and 6th Circuits. His poem, "Unpublished Opinion Twelve-Hundred," appeared in 6 Green Bag 2d 331.

Joni M. Wallace
Joni Wallace grew up in Moab, Utah, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. She graduated from the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1990. After law school she clerked for United States District Judge Richard Matsch in Denver, Colorado. She practices law in Tucson, Arizona in the areas of post-conviction relief and appellate review in capital cases.

Wallace received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 1998 and was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the Arizona Commission on the Arts in 1999. She has twice been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and her work has been published in numerous journals. Her first chapbook of poems, Redshift, was published by Kore Press in 2001. She currently teaches writing workshops through the University of Arizona Poetry Center and in the state’s correctional facilities. [Poems] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum (2006]

Tonya M. Evans-Walls
Tonya Evans-Walls, an intellectual property lawyer, has joing the law faculty at Widener University. Evans-Walls attended Northewestern University and received her law degree from Howard University where she served as editor-in-chief of the Howard Law Journal.

Manning G. Warren III
Manning Warren was born at Dothan, Alabama on August 20, 1948. He was educated at the University of Georgia (1966-67) and University of Alabama (where he received his B.A. in 1970) and received his J.D. degree from George Washington University in 1973 (and was admitted to practice that year).

Warren is presently a professor of law at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, University of Louisville where he teaches securities regulation, corporations, and EEOC law. [Source: Martindale.com]

Warren's poem, "An Evening in a Meadow" appears in the American Bar Association Journal, vol. 65 (9)(September 1979), p. 1430. [Manning Warren Biography][Poetry]

Michael Walls
Michael Walls is a labor lawyer in Atlanta. His poems have appeared in a New York Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Many Mountains Moving, Free Lunch, and Cumberland Poetry Review. His chapbook, The Blues Singer, was published by the Frank Cat Press in 2003. [J. Michael Walls]

Anne Waters
Anne Waters is a research associate at the State University of New York. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Purdue University and received her law degree from the University of New Mexico Law School. Her undergraduate work in philosophy was done at the University of New Mexico and she obtained Masters' degrees in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis and at Purdue University. Waters is the founder and President of the American Indian Philosophy Association, Associate Editor of the Value Inquiry BookSeries for Editions Rodopi, an international press. [Anne Waters]

Christopher Watkins
Christopher Watkins resides at New Paltz, New York.

William A. Watson
William A. Watson is the author of a collection of poetry titled, The Cemetery Hollow Anthology: The Poetry of William A. Watson (2004). Watson is reputedly the poet laureate of Middlesboro, Kentucky. He is an attorney and a former FBI Agent. Watson is a 1951 William and Mary graduate.

William D. Webb
Willam Webb is located in Gardner, Kansas. His poem, "Who Sayeth?" appears in 61 ABA J. 1435 (1975).

David Weinberg
David Weinberg is a poet, performer, writer, graphic artist, and former lawyer. He was a founding member of the Oak Cliff Circle of Poets in Oak Cliff, Texas and the author of Dead Man's Shoes, a collection of poetry that has undergone numerous printings.

Jesse Weiner
Jesse Weiner, a New York City poet, is coeditor and publisher of Salonika. Weiner is a graduate of SUNY Old Westbury and Harvard Law School. His poetry has appeared in Arshile, the New York Quarterly, Wormwood Review, Mississippi Mud and other magazines. His books include Animadversity and The Critique of Language, In Harm's Way (with Victor Asaro), and About These Last. [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] ["Finding Love In The All-Night Grocery"] [untitled] ["Salonika"]

Steve Wessels
Steve Wessels is a family law attorney in Sacramento, California. [law firm & poetry website]

Terry Wetherby
Terry Wetherby is a Louisville, Kentucky lawyer by way of the West coast. She received her Master of Arts degree from California State University in 1973 on the basis of a collection of poems titled Junctures: Poems. Her first poetry chapbook, Black Roses: Poems was published in 1974 in San Francisco by Aisling. Another short collection of poetry (which was co-authored with Sevrin Housen), Golden Gate Poems, was published in San Francisco by Western Gate in 1975. Wetherby edited an anthology of women's poetry titled New Poets, Women: An Anthology (Les Femmes Pub., 1976). She is also the author of Conversations: Working Women Talk About Doing a "Man's Job" (Les Femmes Pub., 1977).

Robert George Wetmore
Robert Wetmore, a native of New Milford, Connecticut, practices law in Wallingford, Connecticut. He was born on July 11, 1952. He graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1974. Wetmore's poetry has appeared in various small press journals. He has recently published a collection of his poetry, Old Thoughts, New Directions (Publish America, 2005) [The Poetry Cove--a selection of Wetmore poems]

Bob White

Betty-Lynn White
Betty-Lynn White is an attorney, poet and published songwriter. She resides in Westport, Connecticut. She is general counsel for R.T. Vanderbilt Company, Norwalk, Connecticut. White was born in 1951. She was admitted to the bar in 1977. She obtained her B.A. from Gettsburg College, and her J.D. from New York University.

Mary Jane White
Mary Jane White was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Reed College. She attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and studied law at Duke University and the University of Iowa. Her poetry and translations have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Crazy Horse, and Russian: The Modern Period, an anthology of translations. Her first book of poetry, Starry Sky to Starry Sky was published in 1988 by Holy Cow! Press. She practices law in Waukon, Iowa.

Robert M. White
Robert White is an Albuquerque, New Mexico city attorney and poet.

Wendy A. White
[law firm bio] [See: Douglas Fruehling, Wendy A. White: Lawyer Finds Solace, Compassion, Release in Poetry, 16 (2) Washington Business Journal 19 (1997)]

Robert Whitehill
"Born in 1947 in North Carolina, Whitehill moved as a child to Lubbock, Texas, where he stayed through his college years. His parents, both of them children of Jewish immigrants, were themselves extremely assimilated. . . .

As an undergraduate at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Whitehill found his first Hebrew conversational partner in an Israeli Arab fellow student. At the age of twnety-one, he took his first trip to Israel, spending two months in an intensive language school at the University of Texas in Austin. While working toward his law degree, he also sat in on Hebrew classes and completed an MA in English literature. A few years later, to relieve the tedium of an appellate hearing—by now he was working in a civil court—he picked up a pen and wrote his first Hebrew poem. It was accepted for publication by Hadoar." [Michael Weingrad, The Last of the (Hebrew) Mohicans, 121 (3) Commentary 45 (2006)]

James R. Whitley
James Whitley holds degrees from Cornell, Boston, Harvard, and Northeastern. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Caribbean Writer, Mississippi Review, Poetry Midwest, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Xavier Review. He is the author of two chapbooks, Pieta (Pudding House Publications, 2001) and The Golden Web (Wind River Press, 2003), and two collections of poetry, Immersion (Lotus Press, 2002)(selected by Lucille Clifton as the winner of the 2001 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award) and This is The Red Door (forthcoming in 2004)(winner of the 2003 Ironweed Press Poetry Prize).

Whitley was born in Mount Vernon, New York and grew up in New York City with three younger brothers and three younger sisters. He now lives in Boston, Massachusetts where he works as a staff attorney with the nonprofit organization Community Catalyst that focuses on health care justice issues.

[Poems--Legal Studies Forum] ["Postcard From Orbis Tertius" (after Borges, Wittgenstein)] ["Nights of Gin and Ashes"] ["Tuber"] ["Poetics"] ["The Golden Web"] ["Ontogeny, a haiku series"] ["Chai Tea, Raw Sugar"] ["Take Away This Hunger That I Might Save My Soul From Further Diminution"] ["This Too Shall Pass"] ["Bodily"] ["Seasonal"] ["Adamantium"] ["Your Thumb Print on My Forehead"] ["Champagne for One"] ["Pumpkin Cheesecake for One"] ["How the Whale Got Her Throat (after Kipling)"] ["Cast Away"] [Three Poems] [Poems]

Stephen B. Wiley
Stephen B. Wiley is the author of a collection of poems titled, Hero Island (Oasis, 2005). He resides and practices law in Morristown, New Jersey, where he was born and raised. Hero Island is his first book.

Charles D. Williams
Charles Williams practices law in Munfordville, Kentucky. He was born in 1948. He obtained his A.B. from Duke University and his J.D. from the University of Kentucky. His collection of poems, Asparagus Seems Deaf was published in 2006 by Harmony House Publishers.

Day Williams
Day Williams is the author of 100 Sonnets (Days Rays, 2008). Williams is also a photographer and a painter.

Marni Williams
Marni M. Williams is from Chester, Pennsylvania. She obtained her B.A. from Penn State University and her J.D. from Temple. She practied corporate law and served as a prosecutor in Philadelphia. She is the author of My Little Book of Poetry: Marni Speaks, Marni Seeks Truth (2003). [Marin N. Williams]

Norman Williams
Norman Williams is the author of One Unblinking Eye (Swallow Press, 2003)(The Waywiser Press, 2003) and The Unlovely Child: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)(1984). He received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, the I. B. Lavan Award, and an Amy Lowell Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, New England Review, and New Criterion, among other periodicals.

Williams represented himself in the eponymous case of Williams v. Vermont, 472 U.S. 14 (1985), which resulted in the refund of millions of dollars of unconstitutional motor vehicle taxes by the State of Vermont. He lives with his wife, daughter and son in Burlington, Vermont, where he works as a litigator for Gravel and Shea. [One Unblinking Eye] [A Short History of the Perverse, review of One Unblinking Eye] [Poems--Legal Studies Forum] [Law Firm bio]

Susan Settlemyre Williams
Susan Williams is a retired real estate attorney and holds an MFA degree in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her poetry has appeared in Mississippi Review, 42opus, Sycamore Review, Marlboro Review, diode, Shenandoah, storySouth, Barrow Street, Cream City Review, DIAGRAM, Calyx, and Aethlon, and other journals. Her chapbook, Possession was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007. Williams is associate literary editor of the online journal Blackbird, which regularly features her author interviews and book reviews.

Williams obtained her law degree from the University of Richmond (1984), and was senior real estate attorney for Circuit City Stores at the time her of retirement in 1992. She lives in Richmond, Virginia. [Source: Personal communication with Susan William, 2.25.05]

Rhonda Williford
Rhonda Williford is a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board and lifelong resident of the Washington, D.C. area. Her chapbook, One Wide Sky, was published by Argonne Hotel Press in 1997. Her poetry has appeared in various poetry journals. [poems] ["The Flight of the Ancient Woman"]

Richard R. Wilson
Richard R. Wilson is an attorney with Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson. He obtained his B.A. from Yale University, and his J.D. from University of Washington school of Law. [Richard R. Wilson]

Ronaldo Wilson

Warren Barrios Wilson
Warren Wilson is an Oakland, California lawyer and poet. His brother, Lionel Wilson, was mayor of Oakland. Wilson was born in 1921. He is a graduate of the University of California and has a J.D. degree from Hastings College of Law. He was admitted to law practice in 1953. Wilson is the author of a small collection of poems, Touch Stones in Poetic Verse (The Barrios Trust, 2000). [Sources: Cicero A. Estrella, "Oakland portraitist searches for the essence of subjects," San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2004, p. E1; "Meet a new bronze friend in downtown, Oakland Tribune, February 2, 2004; Lawyer Locator, martindale.com]

Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a southern California teacher, lawyer and writer. Her poetry has appeared in Crescent Moon Journal, Triplopia, T-Zero: The Writer’s Ezine, Poems Niederngasse, Mindfire Renewed, Loch Raven Review, and the London Red Cross Insomnia Project.

Ronna Wineberg
Ronna Wineberg was born in Chicago and educated at the University of Michigan and the University of Denver College of Law. Her collection of short stories, Second Language, was published in 2005. Her stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Colorado Review, So To Speak, and other literary journals. Wineberg received a fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Atherton Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded residencies to the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and has taught writing at New York University and elsewhere. Since 2000, Wineberg has been the fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. She also has worked for Legal Services, as a public defender and in the private practice of law. [How I Became a Writer]

Jeanne Winer
Jeanne Winer has published both poetry and short stories in various journals. She has practiced as a criminal defense lawyer for over thirty years, currently in Colorado. [See: Jeanne Winer, "How I Ended Up In Law School," 35 (9) The Colorado Lawyer 50 (2006)] ["Slow Song"]

Kathleen Winter
Kathleen Winter is a Santa Rosa, California lawyer. Her poems have appeared in Parthenon West Review, Ekphrasis, caesura, The Poetry Broadside Series: The Making of Peace, and have been published by So to Speak and the Sonoma County Transit "Poetry on the Bus" program. Winter obtained her B.A. from the University of Texas-Austin and her M.A. from Boston College. She graduated from the University of California-Davis School of Law in 1995 and lives with her husband near Glen Ellen, California.

Mary Winters
Mary Winters is a poverty lawyer in New Jersey. She obtained her degree from Northeastern University School of Law. Her poetry has appeared in academic journals and small press collections since 1992. She is the author of A Pocket History of the World (Nightshade Press, 1996) and chapbooks, Grace Itself Invisible: Poems (Pudding House Publications, 1994), It Was a Perfect House: Poetry (Scars Publications, 1994), City: Poetry (Scars Publications, 1994), Staple It Down: Poems (New Spirit Press, 1995), and Winter Prayers (Scars Publications). Winters was the "featured poet" in Pudding 36 (May 1998) and her poems have appeared in Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. ["Party Animal"] [Two poems]

Richard Wirick
Richard Wirick is a writer and lawyer. He practices law in Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in the Indiana Review, Northwest Review, Texas Review, Oxford Magazine, Berkeley Review and other publications.  Wirick's poetry has appeared in Epoch and Indiana Review. He is the author of Many an Incense Bearing Tree, a collection of travel essays and two collections of short stories, Fables of Rescue (Routledge, 2004) and So Slow is the Rose to Open (2005). He is also the author of One Hundred Siberian Postcards (Telegram Books, 2006).

Katherine Wise
Katherine Wise is the author of "Transcending the Body Politic," a poem that appeared in the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law (Vol. 3: 1, 1995) while she was a student at the Ohio State University College of Law.

Warren Woessner
Warren Woessner was born on May 31, 1944 in New Brunswick, New Jersey and grew up in Woodstown, a farm town in southern New Jersey. His father was a chemist. Woessner received his A.B. degree in 1966 from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1971. Before taking up the practice of law he was a senior research scientist (1972-1981) with Miles Laboratories in Madison, Wisconsin. He is a founding partner of Schwegman Lundberg Woessner. (SLW), a Minneapolis-based law firm specializing in intellectual property law. SLW has more than 60 attorneys and represents Fortune 500 companies and major universities. The law firm web-site notes that Woessner "is a registered patent attorney and founding shareholder of SLW, practicing in chemical, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, medical treatments, diagnostics, and agricultural and food chemistry."

Bruce McMarion Wright
[Bruce McMarion Wright]

Raechelle Yballe
Raechelle Yballe was born in the Philippines, and now lives in Akron, Ohio.

Debbie Yee
Debbie Yee is a trusts and estates attorney and poet in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, Debbie's poems have appeared in Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women, Barn Owl Review, OCHO and MiPOesias.  Yee graduated from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1998, where she obtained her undergraduate degree in 1995. Yee was born and raised in Sacramento. [Debbie Yee] ["Mabel and Laureen" & "Notes to Man, to Fish"]

Monica Youn
Monica Youn is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and an adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. Youn graduated from Princeton in 1993 and from Yale Law School in 1998; she obtained a Master's degree at Oxford. A Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, her collection of poetry, Barter, was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. Youn's poetry has been published in Paris Review, AGNI, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Fence, LIT, Poetry Review, and other journals. Youn was raised in Houston, Texas. [Monica Youn] ["Titian's Salome"] [Dispatches :: Journal]

Billie Jean Young
Billie Jean Young is a lawyer, poet and performer. She was educated in Choctaw County schools and holds degrees from Selma University, Judson College, and Samford University's Cumberland School of Law. She teaches at Mississippi State University-Meridian. [Billie Jean Young]

Michael Youth
Michael Youth was born in 1974. He received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He has published two short volumes of poetry and is a founding mmember of The Motorcycle Poets.

Harry Youtt
Harry Youtt practiced law for twenty years, in New York and Cleveland, specializing in constitutional and intellectual property issues. He moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and is now a poet, writer, and drama critic. He teaches writing at the UCLA Extension Writer's Program and information design at the University of California-Irvine.

Youtt recently served as moderator and a featured poet in "A Day of Poetry Against the War" in Los Angeles, California and is serving as Poet-in-Residence at the Philosophical Research Center in Los Angeles. His current collection of poetry, entitled What My Father Didn't Know I Learned from Him is published by Trafford Press.

Youtt began his career as a litigation attorney, primarily in New York City. In 1967, he graduated from Northwestern University's School of Law, where he was an editor of the law review and a member of the school's National Moot Court team, which was a finalist in the annual national competition in New York. Except for a four year stint as Director and chief trial lawyer of the Legal Aid/Public Defender's Office of Cleveland, Ohio, his twenty-year practice focused upon constitutional law, intellectual property, and motion picture litigation, as well as white-collar crime. In Cleveland, Youtt served for several years as an adjunct professor at the Cleveland State University Law School. Throughout his practice, Harry was active in the teaching of continuing education seminars for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, Northwestern University's summer short-course program, the Practicing Law Institute, and the New York State Bar Association.

Youtt's legal work now focuses on intellectual property and electronic media. He conducts workshops for university and medical librarians on techniques for negotiating software and Internet content licenses and has served as advising counsel to the National Writers Union in the landmark case of Teasing v. New York Times. He also has represented the National Writers Union and the Writers Guild of America before the National Commission on Uniform State Laws committee during the drafting of the proposed uniform statute on digital licensing.

For the past thirteen years, Youtt has been an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers Program where he co-teaches a popular fiction writing course with his wife, Judith Bragger. Youtt and Bragger have also taught courses via live video conferencing at the Palm Springs Virtual University.

Youtt works as a consultant with corporations in video conference techniques, as well as internet and intranet applications, multimedia, presentations and strategic communications. He teaches courses in Information Design and Writing for Convergent Media and Multi-media in the Design and Digital Arts Program at the University of California, Irvine. Youtt, one of the pioneers in distance learning, developed UCLA Extension's original online courseware system. He was the writer and content designer for the pilot website for the ABC/David Kelley series, "The Practice." He created and taught a UCLA Extension course on computer-based nonlinear fiction writing.

With his wife, Judith Prager, he conducts seminars and courses on creativity at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, California and is coordinator of community education at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. He is currently (2003) at work co-writing the script for a feature film based on the life of the biofeedback pioneers Elmer and Alyce Green. [Harry Youtt] [The Wide Lake of Poetry: An Essay] [Writers need changing skills for New Media] [Source: Personal Communication with Harry Youtt]

Daniel Zampino
Daniel Zampino is Marblehead, Massachusetts, lawyer, poet, and sculptor.

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas
Alfred de Zayas, Harvard Law School '70, member of the New York and Florida Bar, practised commercial law in New York in the firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and family law in Florida. He worked 22 years as a lawyer for the United Nations in Geneva, where he was President of the UN Society of Writers 1990-2005, and remains Editor-in-chief of the UN literary journal Ex Tempore.  He has been visiting professor of international law at DePaul University (Chicago), University of British Columbia (Vancouver), University of Trier (Germany), Universidad de Alcala de Henares (Madrid) and the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales.  At present he is professor of international law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy.  He has published poetry in English, French, German and Spanish.  One of his German poems "Beglueckt" was translated into Chinese and published in a literary journal in Shanghai.  In 2005 he published the first English language translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Larenopfer, a cycle of 90 poems dedicated to Rilke's homeland Bohemia and hometown Prague, as a bilingual edition with commentary (published by Red Hen Press). [Source: Alfred de Zayas, personal communication, March 29, 2006] [Wikipedia] [Alfred de Zayas] [Personal Website]

Edwin Zimmerman
Edwin Zimmerman is a Washington, D.C. lawyer. [Zimmerman poems]

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