This paper grew out of my interest in professional identity formation and the disconnect between what law students are told a lawyer should be and what they are often rewarded for becoming. I examine the ABA’s description of lawyers as “public citizens,” along with scholarship addressing legal education, professional identity, and the pressures that encourage law students to become more cautious and detached as they move through law school.

I largely agree with Professor Kendall Kerew’s argument that public citizenship should be intentionally developed throughout legal education rather than confined to professional responsibility courses, clinics, or pro bono work. Where I depart from that framework is in asking whether students can realistically develop the courage and judgment expected of a public citizen when the law school environment itself can discourage risk-taking and reward conformity.

I ultimately argue that professional identity formation also requires what I describe as “grace”: recognition that becoming a lawyer is an uneven process and that students need room to develop and exercise ethical judgment without disproportionate personal or professional consequences. Without that support, public citizenship risks remaining an aspirational ideal rather than becoming an integrated part of a lawyer’s professional identity.

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For my portion of the brief, I researched whether parents have a fundamental right under the Fourteenth Amendment to obtain a particular medical treatment for their minor children when the state has restricted that treatment. I examined the Supreme Court’s parental-rights jurisprudence alongside cases addressing the state’s authority to protect the health and welfare of minors.

Writing for the Respondents required me to argue that, although parents have constitutionally protected rights concerning the care and upbringing of their children, those rights are not absolute. Our position was that the asserted right should be subject to rational basis review and that the law was rationally related to the state’s interest in protecting minors. I also addressed the alternative argument that the law could survive strict scrutiny if the Court determined that a fundamental right was implicated.

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This assignment focused on translating legal analysis into practical advocacy. Rather than writing for a professor or court, I wrote from the perspective of an attorney communicating directly with the opposing party about a client’s claim.

Using the information gathered during the mock client interview, I developed the factual narrative surrounding my client’s fall, resulting surgery and rehabilitation, lost wages, and continuing pain. I also connected those facts to Georgia premises liability law and explained why the store could be held responsible for failing to maintain reasonably safe conditions for its customers.

I ultimately presented a $25,000 settlement demand that accounted for the client’s lost wages, medical expenses, pain and suffering, and the continuing effect of her injury on her work and daily life. This project gave me experience balancing legal argument with a more direct and accessible style of writing intended to move a dispute toward resolution.

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This paper grew out of my interest in the intersection of elder law and disability rights, particularly what happens when a legal system designed to protect vulnerable adults also has the power to significantly restrict their autonomy. I focused on older adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities because they may encounter both disability and aging service systems while facing guardianship arrangements that can continue for much of their adult lives.

I examine why plenary guardianship can become the default even though Georgia law requires courts to consider less restrictive alternatives. In particular, I look at the quality of capacity assessments, the lack of coordination among service providers, gaps in guardianship data, and supported decision-making (SDM), which allows a person to receive assistance with decisions without transferring decision-making authority to a guardian.

I ultimately propose three reforms for Georgia: formally recognizing supported decision-making agreements, requiring additional training for probate judges on IDD and capacity assessments, and creating a statewide system for tracking guardianship cases and outcomes. Together, these reforms would provide courts with better alternatives and information while bringing Georgia’s guardianship system closer to its stated goal of preserving individual autonomy.

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One of the challenges I encountered while researching Georgia special education law was that many disputes never result in published court opinions. Instead, disputes involving issues like student discipline and Manifestation Determination Reviews may be resolved through administrative proceedings, leaving researchers to work across statutes, agency guidance, administrative decisions, procedural materials, and other resources that are not always easy to find or search.

I created this guide with that problem in mind. Rather than simply compiling sources, I developed a research strategy for someone approaching this area for the first time. The guide explains key special education terminology, identifies relevant federal and Georgia authority, and evaluates practical resources from the Georgia Department of Education, the Georgia Office of State Administrative Hearings, advocacy organizations, and other sources.

I also focused on the practical difficulties of finding Georgia administrative decisions. Because traditional legal research databases may provide limited Georgia-specific authority in this area, the guide discusses alternative research techniques, including using advanced search operators to locate OSAH decisions and searching with different factual, procedural, and diagnostic terms. My goal was to create the kind of resource I would have wanted when I first began researching this area.

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Generative AI is entering a profession that has historically been slow to embrace technological change. In this paper, I use ABA Formal Opinion 512 as a starting point for examining how lawyers can incorporate generative AI into their work while continuing to meet their existing ethical obligations.

I focus on three areas of professional responsibility that become particularly important when lawyers use generative AI: competence, confidentiality, and supervision. I compare the ABA’s cautious approach with Richard Susskind’s broader predictions about the future of legal practice, particularly his view that technological competence will increasingly become part of professional competence itself.

Ultimately, I consider whether applying existing ethical rules to generative AI will be enough as the technology becomes more integrated into everyday legal work. Although Formal Opinion 512 demonstrates the ABA’s effort to respond to these developments, I argue that the profession will need to adapt more quickly as AI changes not only how lawyers perform their work, but also how firms structure, supervise, and deliver legal services.

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This assignment required me to take a narrow Fourth Amendment issue and build an appellate argument using a limited set of Georgia cases. The defendant’s vehicle became disabled after striking a deer and was already being loaded onto a tow truck when a deputy arrived. After discovering that the driver had a suspended license and could not provide proof of insurance, the deputy arrested him, impounded the vehicle, and conducted an inventory search that uncovered contraband.

Writing for the State, I focused on whether the decision to impound the vehicle was reasonable under the circumstances. I organized my argument around three considerations: the relationship between the vehicle and the underlying arrest, whether the vehicle could safely remain at the scene, and the effect of the defendant’s preference that someone else retrieve the vehicle.

I ultimately argued that the impoundment was reasonable because the arrest arose directly from the defendant’s operation of the vehicle, leaving the disabled vehicle at the scene presented safety concerns, and the officer was not required to accommodate the defendant’s preferred alternative once lawful impoundment was justified. I used Georgia precedent to distinguish cases in which impoundment was unnecessary or unrelated to the arrest from cases in which officers reasonably exercised their discretion to impound a vehicle.

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This brief was my introduction to writing a full appellate argument using Georgia law. The fictional case involved a real estate developer who brought a defamation claim after a neighborhood resident publicly accused him of bribery and alcoholism. The trial court determined that the developer was a limited-purpose public figure, requiring him to satisfy the more demanding actual-malice standard.

On appeal, I focused on the distinction between a private individual and a limited-purpose public figure. Using Georgia appellate decisions, I analyzed whether infill construction had actually become a public controversy within the relevant neighborhood and whether the developer had sufficiently involved himself in that controversy to change his status under defamation law.

I ultimately argued that neither requirement was satisfied. The limited discussions among residents did not establish the kind of public debate required under Georgia law, and the developer had deliberately avoided publicly inserting himself into the issue. Because he had neither voluntarily entered the controversy nor become a central figure in it, I argued that he should remain a private person for purposes of his defamation claim.

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The Senior Seminar is a capstone course taken during the last year of undergraduate studies. In it, research skills, writing proficiency, and presentation capabilities gained throughout the course of a student’s academic career are honed and expanded. Along with a paper that is thoroughly researched and a minimum of 20 pages, a 30-minute presentation is given towards the end of the semester to members of the campus community. For this project, I chose to study the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981 as a tool for understanding race and class in the city during its transitional period into a post-racial society.

Over the course of six months, the project was formed and re-adapted continuously to create this final product that I am proud of. Hours of archival research, numerous newspaper analyses and discovers, a great deal of books on urban living and conspiracies, and many political think pieces later— the culmination of my college career— have led to the creation of this work that examines the role of economics, race, and politics during the Atlanta Child Murders. A biracial legislature, the city’s Black mecca status, nor Maynard Jackson could protect Atlanta’s poor Black community from the Boogeyman.

In 1982, Atlanta stood trial against the world and was found not guilty of alleged racially-motivated killings, conspiracy, and official violence surrounding the Atlanta Child Murders. From July 1979 to May 1981, Atlanta found itself in the midst of a murder frenzy. Thirty Black children, teens, and young adults from ages 4 to 28 became victims in a succession of murders. These victims fit the same profile: primarily boys, relatively young, belonging to poor or working-class families, and Black. Fifteen years after the Civil Rights Act, a series of killings in the Atlanta area with victims who looked the same and came from the same areas struck a chord within the Black community; the obvious conclusion was that the killer must be a member of the Ku Klux Klan or another White nationalist organization attempting to undo the steps towards equality that Atlanta’s Black and White citizens had undertaken in the preceding years. The Black mecca had become the most dangerous city for Black children.

Legally, the case ended in 1982 with the trial and conviction of Wayne Williams; socially and culturally, however, the case was never closed. Every few years the case of the Atlanta Child Murders resurfaces and captures media attention: 1985’s The Atlanta Child Murders miniseries and James Baldwin’s book The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 2000’s film Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?, and CNN’s 2010 The Atlanta Child Murders documentary. With every resurgence, however, viewers found themselves no closer to discovering the truth of the Atlanta Child Murders than they had been in the 1980’s. Once again in 2019, the uncertainty of Wayne Williams’s conviction and the Atlanta Child Murders has surfaced, and individuals, media outlets, and local government are re-examining their findings from the case. From Netflix documentaries, to podcasts, to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms reopening the case in early 2019, there is a new organized effort to find who killed Atlanta’s youth.

This research is not about Wayne Williams. Instead, I argue that the murders of 1979 to 1981 act as a vehicle for understanding the social and political state of Atlanta during its tenuous transition into a post-racial, progressive New South. An analysis of the Atlanta Child Murders cannot be conducted without the examination of class, conspiracy, and race, because the primary victims in this case, poor African-Americans, became casualties to both a rampaging serial killer and a local government acting in its own best interest.

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Beyond comparing the structure and purpose of their declarations, this paper considers an important difference between Stanton and de Gouges: how broadly each woman understood the equality she advocated. I examined the tension between Stanton’s work as an abolitionist and the racist rhetoric she later used when the expansion of voting rights to Black men preceded women’s suffrage. In contrast, I considered de Gouges’s more universal approach to equality, including her opposition to slavery.

The paper ultimately recognizes the complicated legacy of Stanton’s advocacy. Although her rhetoric and actions surrounding race deserve criticism, her work was also instrumental in the American women’s suffrage movement. Comparing Stanton with de Gouges allowed me to consider how two women could challenge the exclusion of women from political life while approaching the meaning and limits of equality differently.

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This paper explores Luce Irigaray’s theories on language, gender, and women’s autonomy, with particular attention to the criticism that some of her work can be interpreted as essentialist. Rather than taking Irigaray’s language at face value, I considered how her use of mimesis can function as a form of resistance by reflecting male-centered language and ideas back onto themselves.

I was especially interested in Irigaray’s critique of phallogocentrism and the idea that men have historically been treated as the standard while women are defined in relation to them. The paper ultimately considers her argument that women’s autonomy requires more than gaining access to systems originally created around men. It also requires women to develop identities and ways of thinking that do not depend on men as the point of reference.

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My Education 225: Digital Literacies course has culminated to this final event: the PSA project. For this project, I created a public service announcement about a topic related to any social issue of my choice, with the only restriction being that the PSA can be no longer than one minute. I decided to go with the idea of ‘reading past the headlines.’ I got this idea from scrolling through Twitter one day and seeing an article about click-bait news articles from the 1800’s. Click-bait is not a new phenomenon; yet, it seems that media outlets (even reputable ones) have more recently begun to lose their credibility in the face of click-bait articles, news over-saturation, reader fatigue, skepticism, and competing news sources.

With quick news, hot topics, and rigid political alignment, keeping up with current events has become a task for many individuals in my generation. We are digital natives, so we are used to getting quick, fragmented information and working with it to create something larger (think: celebrities and millionaires being found on six-second streaming platforms). Netizens, active participants in the online community of the Internet, believe for the most part that the headline’s purpose is to summarize an entire story rather than to capture the reader’s attention, but media sources simply want clicks. According to this study, only 4 in 10 Americans report that they delved deeper into a particular news subject beyond the headlines within the last week. Additionally, it found that those adults with a cell phone that connects to the internet are much more likely than those without one to find news through social media. Social media is an easily accessible tool that we tend to think of as harmless, but doesn’t our ignorance turn it into a malicious tool?

The more complex an issue, the less likely it is to be read thoroughly by the public. The Washington Post cites this as a reason why most news agencies use simple messaging as effective messaging in titling their articles. Memes, retweets, and shares seem innocuous but prove to be detrimental in the long run. Whether we know it or not, our opinions and news cycles are shaped by what we and our friends share, meaning we should be more diligent in how we select what we share and retweet. For example, I chose to include an article, “Marijuana Contains ‘Alien DNA’ From Outside Of Our Solar System, NASA Confirms,” to further demonstrate how misleading headlines can be because the article actually breaks down user statistics and the discrepancies between links that are shared and how often they are actually clicked and read.

Ultimately, I chose to create a reenactment of scrolling through my Twitter feed to combine my ideas of the necessity of reading articles rather than trusting the title along with just how little the information we spread and re-tweet is actually being processed.

Throughout this project, I realized my ideas struggled to fit into the parameters of time. The first draft I delivered to the class was terrible; it was missing sound, awkward to sit through, and ran past the time limit. People could not understand the message I was trying to present until the very end, and it was difficult to understand even then. The ‘next-to-final’ draft I submitted was not much better in my opinion; it was perhaps even more awkward because of the texting sounds I added over the silence, which served as a staccato to punctuate the elapsed time rather than bring the viewer into my phone with me. The final draft was better than the rest, but I still have my reservations about it. I overlaid music, amplified the texting, and attempted to add contextualization at the beginning to ground the audience into my work. Overall, I think that maybe I attempted to put too much into a short project. The contextualization was helpful, but if only the audience had enough time to read it. I saw the same text on screen for at least three weeks, so I read it quicker because I already knew what it said. The audience did not have the same advantage.

Lessons for next time would include honing in on an even more specific topic rather than attempting to take on an overarching idea— for example, reading past the headlines in politics or focusing on one particular social issue instead. I was much happier with my results on the other projects assigned in class, but I chose to write my reflection about this project because it reminded me that I am not going to be perfect at everything that I do. This project humbled me. I’m okay with what I did, but I would have preferred if this were my first draft rather than my final. That can’t be changed, but I’m happy that I at least finished.

Plus, I passed!

I created Despair! at the Discothèque for ART 160. It is a twelve-panel mixed-media piece that allowed me to experiment with color, materials, and different artistic styles. The individual panels incorporate acrylic and watercolor paint, ink washes, Conté crayon, collage, and other materials, with several drawing inspiration from artists including Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Close, and Pablo Picasso. I chose the title Despair! at the Discothèque because I loved the contrast between my expression and the vibrant colors surrounding it. This was my second-to-last project for the course and one of my favorite results.

Six Pieces project challenged me to draw objects found around the art room while experimenting with value, tone, and composition using only black-and-white materials such as pencil, graphite, and Sharpie markers. I intentionally chose fun subjects so I could play with negative space, unusual shapes, patterns, and different levels of contrast to create more interesting compositions from ordinary objects.

An Art Room Cacophony combines random objects in the art studio, including a model skeleton, a papier-mâché egg, and pieces of driftwood, into one black-and-white composition. I deliberately chose objects with unusual and overlapping shapes to experiment with negative space and create a sense of visual confusion. Without color to immediately separate the objects, differences in value and tone help define each form while still allowing the shapes to blend together and play tricks on the eye. I chose the title because the finished piece feels like a cacophony of random forms that become more recognizable the longer you look at them.

This project uses pen and acrylic paint to tell the story of a warrior torn between love and duty. The story begins with her mother and aunt reminding her of the responsibility she is expected to uphold. She later finds her love on a mountain, where their hands meet and their contrasting colors blend to create a new color, symbolizing the love they create together. In the final panels, the warrior chooses to fight for that love. I incorporated pop-out elements and the unfolding accordion format to make the physical construction of the piece part of how the story is revealed.