Angela Autier-Chanot ’19. remembers wanting to pursue law since she was young, out of a sense of justice and a desire to have an impact. “I couldn’t accept unfair situations,” she said.

Already a practicing lawyer in France, Autier-Chanot first came to Fordham Law through the Legal English Institute before pursuing her LL.M. in 2018. She’s now started her own Paris-based firm focused on employment law, including cases related to gender discrimination in the workplace.

But her career journey was not without its hurdles, she said, including the difficulties of juggling her career and parenthood after the birth of her first child. Despite feeling that motherhood had made her a better lawyer, there were practical issues standing in her way—like childcare. She found an American Bar Association study that confirmed this was a common issue: 46 percent of women lawyers have stated work-life balance and the lack of support for family and child caretaking responsibilities as one of the main reasons why they leave the profession.

“There was no support whatsoever for women lawyers like me, who are ambitious but who also care about their children and want a more balanced life,” said Autier-Chanot. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues and reinforced the isolation faced by women lawyers when they become mothers, said Autier-Chanot. “And that was my ‘aha’ moment.”

Autier-Chanot came up with the idea for My Little Law Firm, combining a child day care center and a co-working space designed for women lawyers. The idea is still in the early stages of development, but Autier-Chanot is confident the center would be a valuable resource for working mothers.

“I have a daughter, and if she was to be a lawyer, I would not want her to go through what I’ve been through,” says Autier-Chanot. “That’s why I would like to improve the condition of women in the legal profession. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do—make things better for the next generation.”

t’s a situation to which nearly any New York attorney can relate: Khasim Lockhart ’18 was stuck in traffic on his way to work. As his stress level rose, he navigated Manhattan rush hour driving while calling—hands-free, of course—into his office at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, where he is an associate, to manage his morning schedule.

Then Lockhart remembered a recent discussion on stress management he’d had with the students in his Peer Mentoring & Leadership course at Fordham Law. “My class topic was on stress and how to make stress your friend,” said Lockhart, an adjunct professor at the Law School. “So, rather than getting down on myself, I remembered the class I’d taught.”

Lockhart’s leadership mindset hasn’t helped him only in traffic. Now a fifth-year associate, he is already serving on firm committees. As the chair of the firm’s racial justice task force, he—as a midlevel associate—leads biweekly discussions attended by firm leaders.

Lockhart credited his leadership mindset in part to what he learned at Fordham Law: “Fordham always told me yes.”

ordham Law’s motto, ‘In the service of others,’ is how I was raised,” said Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly ’89. “We were taught that no matter what type of law you practiced, an attorney is there to be of service to others.”

As a young girl, Donnelly often accompanied her father, Patrick Galligan, a court officer at the Nassau County Courthouse, to work. At her inauguration in January 2022, Donnelly said, “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine [that] one day I would be the district attorney in the same courthouse where my father worked.”

As a Fordham undergraduate (Class of 1986), Donnelly majored in English and minored in philosophy. Inspired by her father’s career, she seriously considered becoming a police officer. However, he would remind her of the positive impact of the attorneys in public service she witnessed as a child at the courthouse. With his encouragement, Donnelly shifted course and applied to law school.

Sadly, Patrick passed away before Anne’s law school acceptance letters rolled in. Donnelly credits her mother, Barbara Galligan, for helping her remain focused on pursuing her legal education despite her own and her family’s profound loss.

s a young boy in Brooklyn, long before he would ever swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, Jerry Nadler ’78 already believed in the power of law to fight discrimination.

Nadler vividly recalled reading about a court ruling when he was 12 or 13 years old. “The police beat a confession out of somebody, and the Supreme Court upheld the decision,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘There’s a lot wrong with that, and when I get older, I’m going to fix that.’”

To right the wrongs he saw, the young Nadler believed the best way was to “get into politics and get into positions of authority.” So he set himself on a path to achieve just that. His first foray into electoral politics came when he was voted president of his senior class at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. By the time he was in college, he had become a fixture within his community, leading neighborhood groups, forming block associations, and working on political campaigns.

ast August, Afrika Owes ’24 headed to the meeting room of Fordham Law’s chapter of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) to do some straightening up. “I’d just come back from the diversity, equity, and inclusion picnic and wanted to get the office ready for the new semester,” said Owes, BLSA’s president for 2022–2023. But her work was quickly interrupted when she came across a dusty binder deep in a file cabinet.

“I assumed it was an old photo album, but when I started looking through it, I saw that it contained the founding documents of Fordham Law’s BLSA,” she said.

Noticing the dates on the documents, she realized that the group’s 50^th anniversary was approaching. “I couldn’t believe that we were totally unaware,” she said.

By Elaine R. Friedman

Aleezah Merali ’23, a third-year student in the Criminal Defense Clinic, recalls her indelible first visit to Rikers Island to meet with a client. She and the rest of her team, two Fordham Law students and a student in the MSW program at Fordham, had driven to the jail complex together to meet with their client, who had been charged with a felony, incarcerated, and denied bail. After passing through various checkpoints at the jail complex, surrendering all their personal items—including their smartphones—along the way, the group then waited, amid corrections officers in riot gear, to meet their client for the first time.

After a four-hour wait—an unusual occurence caused by a basketball game being filmed for an event led by a reverend in the community—the group was taken to a small room, where the legal team members crowded together on one side of the glass partition. Soon after, their client walked in on the other side of the glass, breaking into a huge, spontaneous smile. “He didn’t know us,” said Merali. “He didn’t know we were coming. He was thrilled to have so many people come to visit him.”

By Erin DeGregorio

aculty are the heartbeat of Fordham Law. They share ideas freely, collaborate with one another and with students on key areas of the law, and foster open academic discourse that transforms students into the legal leaders of tomorrow.

One key goal of Fordham Law’s FORWARD campaign has been to raise philanthropic support that advances faculty members’ scholarly endeavors—which, in turn, aids students in their education, research initiatives, and post-graduate experiential learning opportunities. Students have the opportunity to build their résumés and network as research assistants—not to mention maintain lifelong relationships with their mentors after graduation.

“By supporting the faculty, donors ensure that we can provide the highest-quality teaching and ensure a first-rate experience for our students both in and out of class,” said Joseph Landau, associate dean for academic affairs. “We are fortunate to have a faculty that cares deeply about good teaching.”

By Paula Derrow

hen Lauren Heather, LL.M. ’22, and Edward McLaughlin ’22 logged into Zoom for a special getting-to-know-you session of their Information Law class in the spring of 2021, the two students were barely acquaintances—they had never even talked. Professor Olivier Sylvain hoped to remedy the distance of remote learning and help his students bond by asking everyone in the class to present something to “show-and-tell.” Heather decided to bring some law-related notes on privacy and libel written by her great-grandfather John T. Loughran ’11, who had been chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals from 1945 to 1953.

As soon as Heather began speaking, McLaughlin’s ears perked up. “I remember Lauren telling us that her great-grandfather had held this position and graduated from Fordham Law in 1911, and I got confused—I thought, ‘Wait, are the two of us related?!” laughed McLaughlin, now a law clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Claire Eagan of the Northern District of Oklahoma.