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I thought of law school as a way to express my commitment to social and economic justice—and also to make a buck. When I got there, it seemed that many more of my peers were focused on doing well than on doing good. I found kindred spirits at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, the oldest student-run legal aid clinic in the country. There, law students could handle civil cases for clients who couldn’t afford lawyers. The work suddenly made real the abstractions of book learning.

In one early case, I represented the Jean-Pierres, a poor Haitian family with three small children living nearby, in Somerville. They were behind on their rent, the landlord had turned off their heat, and the family was using its oven to warm the house. They were about to be evicted. They were confused and vulnerable, and they needed help. Their English wasn’t very good, my Creole was nonexistent, so we communicated in broken French. Haltingly, I learned about their struggles in Haiti and in Boston, their determination to make it in Massachusetts, their love for their family and America.

Their case was pending in the Somerville District Court before a notoriously difficult—and famously pro-landlord—judge. I was as nervous as the Jean-Pierres, so I prepared exhaustively. I filed my motions and counterclaims and won a stay of the family’s eviction until trial. The case then went to trial, which was unheard of in a landlord-tenant dispute. I made my opening statement, presented my evidence, cross-examined witnesses, and argued that in Massachusetts, you can withhold your rent if the conditions of tenancy have been violated. I showed how the faulty appliances, sporadic utility service, poor insulation, and general unresponsiveness of the landlord were chronic and justified my clients’ withholding the rent. We won, and the judge grudgingly ordered the largest payment to a tenant in the history of that court at the time. My clients never collected, but they remained in their home and stabilized their lives. I will never forget the look of relief on their faces and the pride they felt as immigrants in a system that would vindicate those who were most vulnerable. That, I felt, was why I was in law school—the secular extension of everything I had learned in church. And I was touched, during my first campaign for governor, when one of the daughters of the Jean-Pierres called after all those years to wish me well.

When I joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after my clerkship in Los Angeles, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to put social justice into action. The organization and its legal giants—Thurgood Marshall, Spotswood Robinson, and the man who hired me, Jack Greenberg—cast a long shadow over American law. In law school we had studied their strategies and admired their courage, and we were awed by how they confronted the most important issues of their time. Now I was part of that tradition, and I was nervous. My assignment was the death penalty docket. I honestly could not say at first how I felt about the death penalty. Knowing the signature cruelty some killers showed their victims, I was not automatically opposed. I wasn’t sure I could be an effective advocate for such unsavory characters. Is this what social justice was about?

Not long after I started, I was given my first case to handle on my own. It arose the way they all did—as an emergency with an imminent execution date. The defendant had been convicted of first-degree murder, had lost all of his appeals, and was within days of electrocution. An attorney in Montgomery had agreed to challenge his sentence and filed a petition in the Alabama trial court. In less than twenty-four hours, the case was heard and rejected by both the trial court and the Alabama supreme court. The only recourse was an appeal to the federal courts, and the lawyer called LDF for help. I gulped.

I prepared the necessary petitions and sent them to my new cocounsel in Montgomery, who filed them the next day. The federal judge ordered an emergency