My path to law. Finding a Home in the Law

• Author: Adam Leitman Bailey
• Pages: 14-15

PHOTO COURTESY OF ADAM LEITMAN BAILEY

Opening Statements

MY PATH TO LAW

Finding a Home

in the Law

My Path to Law is a guest column th at celebrates the diversity

of the legal profession thro ugh attorneys’ fi rst-person stori es detailing

their unique and in spiring trajectories. Rea d more #mypathtolaw

stories on Twitter.

By Adam Leitman Bailey

Daily, I wonder from where my

passion against and d isdain for

injustice der ived. The ingredients?

Something rising inside me that

shoots through my entire body and

makes my heart be at faster, com-

bined with a need to help others no

matter how small the ta sk. I real-

ize how blessed I am to be par t of a

profession that feeds my drive, a nd

though I have never been able to fi nd

out what caused it, my childhoo d

provides fer tile ground.

Ripped at age 5 from my home in

Queens and my biological father,

I hit the road with my mother, a new

man and my sister, onward to Los

Angeles to look for work after ma s-

sive teacher layo s that had engul fed

both my parents. By this ti me, I had

already made my fi rst appea rance

in front of a judge in divorce court

and grew used to going fr om hotels

to rental homes, runn ing to escape

the landlords in di erent towns .

Learning in t he car where we were

headed, there were no goodbyes to

friends and fami ly or my home that

I would never see the inside of again.

We fi nally set tled down after

missing kindergar ten. I do not rec-

ommend any New York City child

be transplanted to C alifornia.

Besides being di erent, carrying a

thick accent and being ex tremely

skinny, I was bullied inside and out-

side the home—my contact with my

father was limited t o living with

him at camp in New York during the

summers.

My temporary reprieve al so

involved learning how a new law

works—Proposition 13, promoting

integration, passed i n Los Angeles.

I boarded a bus each morning t o

drive more than an hour ea ch way

to an inner-cit y school. Now, at age

9, on this bus, I used my time to

devour books— especially The Hardy

Boys—and my love for reading had

been ignited. This school a lso pro-

vided free lunch to a ver y under-

weight child, and the bullyi ng ceased

during this time, a s these students

focused on the essential s of life—

food, shelter and surv ival. Although

I had no idea at the time, readi ng

became an import ant skill for suc-

ceeding in the law.

Another important qua lity was

born, as I had to lea rn to become

a leader for the sake of protecting

myself and my sister, a year younger.

I also spoke publicly at a rally for the

fi r st time as parents without politi-

cal or moneta ry power gathered

to protest the three -hour bus rides

taken to and from school. These

gatherings looked very sim ilar to the

ones I attend regularly i n my capac-

ity as a lawyer repres enting or edu-

cating large groups of people.

In seventh-grade English cl ass, I

was introduced to a book about John

Peter Zenger—the reason I have

been giving my entire li fe to wanting

to become an attorney. Zenger was

a newspaper publisher arrested for

seditious libel and saved (acquitted

by a jury) by a top lawyer, Andrew

Hamilton, who used the power of

words to convince a jur y a person

should be able to write whatever

they want about a governmental

o cial as long as the words were

truthful.

At this exact moment, I k new

what I wanted to do for the rest of

my life. And a few years lat er, I was

told it would only be a dream—“only

rich people go to law school.” So I

set a new goal of being a journal ist

until I fi nally met a lawyer, and he

explained how he paid for law school

with loans.

On my birthday, 29 years later, in

the exact location where Ham ilton

went to trial to defend Zenger, I

would join 466 others to celebrate

the publication of my fi r st book on

how to buy a home for fi rst-ti me

buyers with a dedication that r ead:

“To everyone who grew up (like me)

without business-sav vy parents to

teach them the lessons in t his book.”

As a child, the only th ing worse

than moving to a foreign st ate is

moving again another 3,000 m iles

to a new state, New Jersey. At 13

years old, my life was th rown into

chaos again.

The bullying became much worse,

and once again I held my head high

and learned or adapted t o taking the

14 || ABA JOURNAL OCTOBER 2018

“In life, no challenge

became too di cult

for me to handle.

No battle existed that

I could not overcome.”

—Adam Bailey