What Clients Taught Me that I Couldn’t Have Learned Alone

I applied to work in legal research at a time when all eyes were on the police.

My hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, had become a national case study for the consequences of overpolicing, and I realized how little I knew about the legal systems meant to prevent such harm. My first research project, which I began during a separate internship in healthcare data science, focused on understanding the interactions between law enforcement, victims of violence, and healthcare workers in emergency spaces. While research allowed me to formalize my conceptual understanding of certain gaps in our legal system, I grew increasingly interested in litigation as a means to work directly with the affected stakeholders and establish precedents that might shape those systems moving forward. This led me to my postgraduate job in economic consulting, where I was able to apply my academic background in a setting where I could observe what attorneys actually do in litigation and arbitration disputes.

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The Anatomy of a Defense: How Criminal Justice Led Me to BC Law

17 minutes. That is how long the prosecution claimed it took our client, an engineering student visiting the U.S. from a war-torn country, to attempt a homicide and flee. When I mapped the cell-tower pings, calculated the distances, and cross-referenced the surveillance timestamps, their argument collapsed. Physics, it turned out, would be our best defense.

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Why I Came to Law School: Health Care Through a Legal Lens

As a Black woman, I’m cognizant of the structural racism and sexism implanted within the U.S. healthcare system. As a pregnant-capable person, of the growing limitations surrounding reproductive health. And as a close relative of a recovering alcoholic, of the stigma and inaccessibility of care shrouding some patients, particularly harm reductive care. Life experience and professional engagement have deepened my investment in healthcare justice. As such, I’m focalizing my desire to practice through a bioethics lens with the hope of improving patient safety, health outcomes, and patient autonomy through health law and policy. 

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Six Important Things I’ve Learned About Law School: A Note to Future Students

As a third-year law student in their last semester of school, I find myself reflecting on the last 2.5 years at BC Law. As my fellow 3Ls can probably relate to, law school flies by so quickly—its imminent end feels jarring, and it’s hard to comprehend you have the skill set to both take the bar and to don the title of attorney. 

Remarkably, since I started law school, so much of what I learned about the legal world and myself came from experiences outside of the classroom. I didn’t expect this to be my reality when I was sitting in my law school orientation back in August 2023. Now that I can see the “light at the end of tunnel,” I find it fitting to share with you future law students a few of the myriad of my lessons learned and beliefs instilled in me throughout law school.

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Opening Doors with Alumni: Meet Joshua Williams

There are numerous roads to law school, and no one-size fits all path to a successful legal career. Follow along with our series highlighting BC Law students and how they got here! 

Previous entries: Sara Womble (Winston Salem, NC); Elias Massion (Nashville, TN); Samina Gagné (London);Alvin Synarong (Murfreesboro, Tennessee); Ruchita Jain (Edina, Minnesota); Nicole Bauer (Michigan);Carlos Robles-Cruz (Puerto Rico); Taha Din (Naperville, IL); Timothy St. Pierre (Brunswick, Maine); Tobias Wilcken Jørgensen LLM ’25 (Denmark); Leena Assad (Dracut, MA).


Name: Joshua Williams

Hometown: Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands

Educational Background: Bachelor’s degree in marketing from Saint Leo University in 2020; master’s degree in management from Harvard University in 2022

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The Opportunity Cost of Early BigLaw Recruiting

It’s your first semester of law school at BC Law. It’s been just a few weeks since orientation, and you’re trying to get your footing. Torts makes sense, because slapping someone is obviously a battery. Contracts feels manageable too; you think about your apartment lease, or your brother’s offer to buy you McDonald’s, to think through offer and acceptance. Law Practice is a bit frustrating because you’re expected to learn the Bluebook on the fly. And Civ Pro? You have no idea what’s going on there—but that’s a problem for later.

Meanwhile, you’re figuring out how to be a law student. Do you take notes like you did in undergrad, buy color-coded notebooks to handwrite in class, or type a near-transcript of everything your professor says? When do you start outlining—and what even is an outline? Will you sound stupid if you go to office hours to ask about Twombly? And then there’s the club fair. Should you apply to that 1L Representative position for the Law Student Association? Or for the Business Law Society? Both would look great on your resume. But not too many commitments so soon—you still need time to read your cases, pour hours into over-detailed briefs, and prepare for class. Maybe one club application and casual involvement in the others will be enough for now.

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Discovering Advocacy Before the Courtroom: My Journey to Law School

One Monday morning in the summer of 2022, I was greeted at work by my boss eagerly telling me today I would be meeting the defendant in the self-defense case I just started working on. After anxiously waiting until lunch, I watched with surprise as a young boy—barely five foot seven and still sporting a baby face—walked through my door and told me he was just seventeen yet was being tried as an adult for second-degree murder. 

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How My Grandmother’s Escape from Persecution Helped Me Discover My Own Path

Ilovik, Croatia, is a sparsely developed island with a compact area of just five square miles. With only 60 permanent residents and a modest influx of expatriates each summer, Ilovik’s way of life is characterized by its isolation and limited resources. The idyllic beauty of the island belies the history and complex legal struggles of many of its inhabitants. I have spent most of my childhood summers visiting my Baba, Croatian for grandmother, in Ilovik. During these visits, as I listened to Baba’s poignant recollections of her time on and off the island, I discovered my calling to pursue a career in law.

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A Sit Down Chat with BC Law Legend Professor Bloom

Generations of BC Law alumni have found common ground in relating their experiences with the institution’s most revered fixtures, names like Hillinger, Brodin, Blum, and Katz. This week, I had a chat with Professor “Bob” Bloom, an alum himself and a remarkable legal educator whose one-of-a-kind style has left an indelible mark on any student privileged enough to take his courses (BC Law Magazine published a lengthy Q&A with him last spring; read that here).

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