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Law School and the Great Recession

-- By ElizabethOsei - 22 Feb 2021

The Impetus

The Cost of Oatmeal

Before law school, I worked for the Federal Reserve, but not as an economist. Economists said the Great Recession ended in 2010. However, economists probably did not work at Walgreens when I did from 2012 to 2014. One afternoon, as my eight-hour shift was ending, a young woman approached my register with a small girl in her arms. She pointed to a store coupon for oatmeal. “Are these still on sale?” she asked, adjusting the girl—her daughter—on her hip. The coupon had expired one day earlier. The woman’s hair was disheveled. From the way she shifted again, that small girl was heavy. I suggested a store brand, which cost the same. She smiled, thanked me, and said, “Nowadays, every little bit counts.” I smiled back, but then the register flashed that her card was declined. “Sorry, wrong card! I’ll go grab my other one from the car,” she said and bolted past the sliding doors, across the parking lot, and down the main street. I never saw her again, but I recognized in her hurried exit a familiar anxiety.

The Systemic Effect Hits Close to Home

My family struggled too. In the fall of 2009, the financial crisis broadcasted on our television was unfolding at our table. My father lost his job. At a young age, I did not comprehend the consequences of unemployment—how our family of six would get by on my mother’s nursing salary. For me, the essentials in life—a home, food, clothes, and love—were always present. Their cost was apparent only later. My parents are Ghanaian immigrants. They arrived in Queens in the 1980’s on one-way tickets. Their determination to start a new life, and their humility in confronting difficulty, saw my mother take on a second nursing job and sustained my father in a series of administrative temporary jobs. Thanks to them, we made it through, but the recession of the late 2000s wiped out my father’s retirement savings and cracked the foundation of the home my parents left Ghana to build.

Adversity Sparks Curiosity

Later, in college, I began to understand better what had happened to my family—or, rather, why. Economics courses taught that in a global economy marked by increasing interconnectedness, we are moved by more than our individual efforts. For me, these courses became personal reflections, not just material to be studied and tested. Economics helped me understand the market forces that extinguish jobs, or cause credit cards to be declined. But you have to be at register at Walgreens, or around the table when your parents come home exhausted from temporary and second jobs, to appreciate the personal cost of those forces. Based on what I saw and what I studied, I appreciated economics, but developed an appetite for accountability and advocacy.

Curiosity Starts a Career

After college, I found myself in the accountability business. I worked in the Audit Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was my job as a senior auditor to look independently at an institution at the center of the economy with open eyes. I revisited decisions made on behalf of the Bank to determine if the institution lived up to the trust that the public has placed in it. I remember taking immense pride in helping an important institution to be more accountable to its mission. However, at the same time, I did not want to build a career as an auditor. What was missing from economics and audit—what I studied in college and what I did for a living—was the chance to advocate for another person. I could not, and still cannot shake the human costs of the financial crisis and recession. They continue to infuriate me. Families lost their jobs, their homes, their savings and even hope. Banks created useless, worthless financial products, packaged them and sold them as new. This was a scam. This was fraud. Even after dismantling a world economy by deceiving and lying, not a single person was tried. Not a single person was held accountable. And yet, Reddit users who wanted to purchase GameStop? stock, sparks controversy and talks of regulation.

The Start of the Journey

Fairness

If my parents had arrived from Ghana a few years later with even less to fall back on—a second nursing income, temporary work, retirement savings—the woman carrying the girl in Walgreens could have been my mother carrying me. Even with their determination, humility, and few resources, my parents lost almost all they had earned wince coming to the United States. This was all unfair. Fairness is not a concept that fits comfortably in economics, and its scope is limited in audit. But fairness can be the aim of lawyers and judges; at least I think it can be .

A Conclusion of Questions

Fairness is not neat, and is obviously not the same to everyone. And, looking back on my life, I am not certain what fairness would have demanded. A better safety net? Some surer guarantee of stability in exchange for hard work? A promise against anxiety about the basics of life? How? And who pays for them? I came to Columbia Law School not because I knew the answers, but because I was asking these questions. Lawyers seemed ideally, and perhaps singularly situated to apply academic learning to real life, to hold powerful institutions accountable, and to champion fairness for other people. As I continue on my journey of lawyering, I wonder if this still holds true.

This draft seems to me to have served well the job of bringing you to the point of departure for the next draft. That's often what good first drafts do. You've told well the story of how you came by your questions. You can compress that account significantly, and by removing what can be squeezed out you have space to tilt the draft not in the direction of completely open-ended questions, but towards the beginning of answers. Does seeking fairness mean a job lawyering for the CFPB, or the New York State Department of Financial Services? Might it be investor protection litigation? Using the base of understanding you've communicated well here to ground your imagination about what forms of practice might suit you would make this better for the writer, but also more effective in reaching the readers who are your colleagues here.

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