Every Day Learning

Paula Garber

Kathleen A. Sullivan was a lawyer who represented people whom society deemed detestable: parents accused of neglect or abuse of their children, mothers accused of welfare fraud, young people thought to be juvenile delinquents. In representing such people, you would never hear Kathleen grumble defensively about everyone being deserving of legal representation. Rather, she approached every client with humility and empathy, each as an individual who had things to teach her about lawyering, about the world, and about herself.

In fact, this is how Kathleen approached all people and situations around her. Though she was a formidable lawyer and scholar who achieved many significant legal victories in her career, and who taught me much about being an effective advocate, her greatest lesson to me, and what I think of most in remembering her, was her vast capacity for empathy and her remarkable ability to analyze an everyday, ordinary encounter and take extraordinary lesson from it.

I still remember one of our earliest conversations, while I was a law student in her clinic for the first time. We had been arranging carpool logistics for getting to a client appointment. In the midst of this, Kathleen casually mentioned that another student in the clinic had recently received a parking ticket when he had driven to the law school in order to meet a clinic responsibility. Kathleen paused for a moment in thought, then said, "Sometimes I forget how even mundane things like not having parking spaces can make things difficult for the students." Almost to herself, Kathleen went on to muse about how even small disparities in status and privilege (like not having an assigned parking space) can make a huge difference in the practicalities of life. The moment passed, and we returned to the immediate problem at hand. It was so typical of Kathleen, though, that she could take some small piece of information - a student receiving a parking ticket - and use it in an impromptu lesson about the theories of social privilege and the convenience of status, without ever even alerting her students to the fact that a teaching moment had taken place.

Kathleen could always recognize an opportunity to learn from life experiences. One semester Kathleen broke her foot while jogging. During that semester, she was scheduled to teach the Disabilities Clinic. Although her injury was painful and inconvenient, I always marveled at her sincere and frequently expressed appreciation for the insight and empathy she had gained from being a person with an - albeit temporary - disahi1ity.

I also remember a conversation we once had over lunch, early in her treatment for breast cancer, In Kathleen's typically gentle. yet passionate way, she expressed great anger about the health care system. She was not in anyway upset at the treatment she was receiving, however. Indeed, in addition to top-notch oncological treatment, her medical provider had a comfortable waiting room, and arranged for special services for patients. Rather, her anger stemmed from the fact that her own experience of the medical care system contrasted so sharply with that of her clients, who had to 'wait hours in dingy. noisy public rooms for often sub-standard care, Even in the midst of her own serious medical situation, when many of us would he retreating into the safe space of self-pity, Kathleen found empathy for those without her privileges, which provided further inspiration for her work yet to be done.

Kathleen's scholarship was similarly infused with and grounded upon her ability to think creatively and sensitively about what the rest of us might consider small things in life, In one of her early published works, Kathleen wrote about the complexities of the relationship between a clinical teacher and her students.2 Not surprisingly, this article begins with a personal anecdote in which Kathleen meets her clinic students for the first time, and described her feelings of discomfort as her students inquire about her personal life, She then launches into a dense intellectual inquiry into the difficulties and complications of the teacher-student relationship. While other authors may include personal stories to illustrate the thesis of the article, I have no doubt that for Kathleen the cause and effect were reversed.

In one of Kathleen's most recently published works,, she explores the problems inherent in advocates using clients' stories, even for positive uses, a topic that had been of some concern to her for several years. In this piece, she explains that she is indebted to a group of young mothers for raising my consciousness about what it means to shield a client's identity and the problems associated with telling stories based on clients' experiences without seeking their consent. For the last several years, my law students have participated in a joint class with students from a teen parenting class in a local high school. In one class, I had the law and high school students participate in a case selection exercise. The client profiles were based on former clients of my office. As I always do, I changed the clients names and certain details to preserve confidentiality.

Nevertheless one of the high school students believed she had recognized a client on whom the problem was based. The student asked me whether I had gotten permission to use the clients' stories.

For the most part I had not. 3

Many of us in Kathleen's position would have made excuses for not heeding the student's admonition. Perhaps we would have brushed aside the conversation because it was with someone younger and not as well educated. Or. perhaps we would have simply disregarded doing anything as inconvenient and impractical. Kathleen, though, recognized this as a moment from which she would not only learn, but that would ultimately inspire her to alter radically her own thinking on an issue of importance to her work. In this momentary conversation with a teenage welfare mother, the kind of person often derided in the media as beneath contempt, Kathleen saw wisdom and an entirely new way of working with clients.

Kathleen once introduced me to one of her colleagues, a fellow clinical teacher whom she had known for many years. This professor and I fell into a conversation about how we each knew Kathleen, and how highly we both thought of her. Kathleen's friend described her this way: "Kathleen is transformative." I was startled for a moment, because it is not a word that is often used in polite small talk. Then, the rightness of it dawned on me. Kathleen was someone who could make others re-examine their long-held beliefs, turn all one's preconceived notions upside down and see potential in even a hopeless situation. In short, who could influence the course of a life. She did all of this not through harangue and argument, but simply by her generous sharing of her own thoughts and experiences, and her gentle example.

One of Kathleen's colleagues, Jean Koh Peters, has a calligraphed card hanging on her office door that reads, "How we live our days is how we live our lives." I always think of Kathleen as an example of someone who lived not just her days, but every moment, in fullness and honesty. She could take a small interaction in her own life, and see in it the opportunity for her own learning and growth. Kathleen taught her students that the small things matter. Our relationships with others and our everyday experiences are just as relevant to our intellectual and work lives as anything in a case reporter or law journal. Kathleen's most important lesson was to be alert for learning opportunities in every moment, and in every moment I spent with Kathleen, there was something to be learned in her humane and empathic example.

1 Yale Law School. Class of 1997. Many times in the course of writing this, sometimes struggling in vain to capture what Kathleen meant in my life, I often caught myself thinking: "I had better ask Kathleen what she thinks of my including this," and "I hope Kathleen likes it." I do hope that she would have approved of my including some of her private conversations here, and despite her modesty, I hope even more that should would have appreciated what I have said about her.

2 Kathleen A. Sullivan, Self-Disclosure, Separation, and Students: Intimacy in the Clinical Relationship, 27 Ind. L. Rev. 115 (1993).

3 Kathleen A. Sullivan, The Perils of Advocacy: Listening, Labeling, Appropriating, in Hard Labor: Women and Work I the Post-Welfare Era 191 (Joel F. Handler & Lucie White, eds. 1999).