Student Section: Observations from Law Students
The Greatest
Professor by LIZ HELPLING
I go to an amazing law school and am incredibly blessed to be surrounded by faculty who are the best in their field. They are scholars and practitioners, widely published and widely respected, who are just as captivating one-onone as they are in front of a crowded classroom. They are, in turns, demanding and compassionate. They are brilliant, experienced and eloquent. Every semester, I send my parents and my fiancé a “First Day of School” report, including hyperlinks to the university bio pages for each of my professors. Every semester, they are shocked and amazed by the caliber of the people I am lucky enough to have teach me law. But the most important professor I have had thus far in law school has been a woman from Southwest Detroit working tirelessly to help her community, a woman who bore no label of “Professor” nor was employed by my law school. Her name is Sandra,i and she was my client. I signed up for one of the law school’s clinics after Thanksgiving of my 2L year. The first semester of my second year of law school was brutal. I overloaded on credits to take as many classes as possible. I took four doctrinal classes and one business class, served as a
STUDENT SECTION
teaching assistant for the Legal Writing and Practice program, and worked over twenty hours a week as a research assistant for a professor I admired and feared too much to tell her how stressed I was. Despite how much and how hard I was working, I felt purposeless. I was taking these classes and learning case law and legal principles, but I missed being able to do something. I missed working. I missed going home at the end of the day feeling like I had accomplished something and made a difference in someone’s day. When the Community Enterprise Clinic announced that they had one open spot left for the spring semester, I signed up without a second thought. My clinic partner and I had two clients, both nonprofits located in Southwest Detroit. One matter focused on entity formation, and the other on contract drafting. The day after Michigan had its first “snow day” in several decades, my partner and I traveled to Detroit to visit
50 | Columbus Bar L aw yers Quarterly Spring 2020
