Superlatives!
Comments (13) My kind… and prone to hyperbole… professor wrote me this letter for a scholarship app. It’s nice to know that, no matter how crazy you are, you’ve got some people who’ve got your back. (This is a law-school equivalent of getting a Super-Star sticker in elementary school. Makes you feel great!)
Dear Scholarship Committee:
It is with great enthusiasm and pride that I write to recommend Kate Kelly, one of the two or three finest progressive students I have had in two decades of teaching, to you for the Davis-Putter Scholarship. In a time of far too much intellectual complacency and political resignation among young people, Kate Kelly is a diamond in the rough: she has a powerful and live intelligence, insatiable curiosity, surpassing political energy and courage, and an absolute fearlessness in her approach to politics and life. She is perfect for this award since it is certain that she will put all of her brilliance and progressive commitment as a lawyer to work for social justice, political change and the empowerment of popular movements.
What’s more is that Kate has traveled to a place of radical commitment from a deeply conservative environment. She grew up Mormon in a very conservative Republican environment and came to her passionately radical politics through many years of questioning, inquiry, study, reflection and activism. Unlike students I know who grew up in a liberal milieu for whom having progressive politics is just a surface question of adopting a certain language and attitude, for Kate progressive politics is a deep and utterly transforming intellectual and ethical force in her life. She is an activist through and through.
Even more impressive is that Kate remains a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and contributes actively to a radical anarchist publication on-line called The Mormon Worker. In other words, she has not abandoned her religious community but is determined to bring her progressive politics to it.
A radical Mormon? Perhaps you are puzzled; certainly I was when I first met Kate. This was last fall in my Constitutional Law course. Although she was a transfer student in a class of more than 100 unfamiliar peers, she spoke regularly with extraordinary lucidity and passion about how the Constitution must serve the democratic aspirations of all the people and not the demands of the few. Not a few times I noticed other students taking notes when she made arguments in class.
Then early one Saturday morning (while I am sure all of her classmates were sleeping) Kate attended a national conference on war powers at Georgetown Law School where I had been invited to speak. I learned that day that she is passionately anti-war and had done a lot of both legal and activist work to promote torture accountability. Moreover, I came to learn that she had campaigned enthusiastically for Ralph Nader in the last election cycle.
Kate is a brilliant law student. At the close of our semester in Constitutional Law, she was selected to defend her views in front of the class in a mock-Supreme Court confirmation hearing. She spoke candidly about her view that education and healthcare should be deemed fundamental Constitutional rights. While this would obviously not aid her in a campaign to get on the Supreme Court in the current environment, it is refreshing to know that the next generation of lawyers will have members with such imagination and dedication.
I know that Kate is a newly elected co-chair of American’s National Lawyers Guild chapter, and has actively been involved with the chapter promoting things such as Students Against the Death Penalty Day on campus. Her commitment to social justice sparkles and I am confident that she will continue to make significant contributions to various important social movements throughout her life, both as a citizen and as a lawyer. I highly recommend her for the Davis-Putter Scholarship and cannot wait to see the role she comes to play in our society. She will make you—and me—very proud.
) of AU’s National Lawyers Guild chapter. They do a lot of amazing work, but one of the things they are famous for is wearing these [lovely] green caps & doing legal observation at protests to make sure the cops are not doing anything shady/illegal. We take notes, video & pictures of interactions between protesters & the police.
