First Essay Followup: Notes from the Southern District of Florida

-- KristenQuesada - 06 Jul 2025

I initially drafted Parts I and II as a stream of consciousness journal entry on June 25 after I wrote my first ever draft of a court order. I jotted down the core ideas of Part III on June 9 after I finished reading Siddhartha.

Report & Recommendation

I felt really demoralized about the academic aspect of my first year of law school. From being uninterested in a lot of the subject matter, to hating the way law is taught, to trying so, so hard yet feeling like my grades didn't reflect my effort. I was disillusioned by the end, questioning almost every day if I'd made the right choice. My final essay for Law & Contemporary Society displayed the crux of my newly developed cynicism about the law and my future in it. I wrote its first draft one sleepless night at 4am: I'd been sobbing for hours and begging chatgpt to show how to go forward on this path I think I hate, emailing TPS about whether I should leave law school and go get a PhD? in Classics (he didn't respond), and struggling with this feeling of constant stress, overwhelm and exhaustion that all stemmed from the life I've seemingly chosen.

But today, for the first time since I started law school, I have rediscovered the reason I'm doing all of this. I thought justice couldn't possibly be found in a law firm, let alone big law. And maybe it can't be. But for now, based on everything I've seen in my internship, I'm actually kind of excited to learn that answer for myself.

I was assigned what was supposed to be a simple task a couple weeks ago. My judge had dismissed a case but retained jurisdiction over this one post-dismissal issue. The Plaintiff moved for that post-dismissal issue, and my judge sent it to a magistrate judge to handle the fact-finding and come back to him with a Report & Recommendation. My job was to simply adopt that R&R and put it in our own language as an order from this Court.

When I first read everything, I genuinely was floored, as in what the hell am I looking at. It was a case that had records spanning three years, contractual nuances I didn't understand, and overall dealt with a complicated set of facts. That day, I texted my best friend that I didn't want to be a lawyer anymore and told my mom I didn't want to clerk; my brain couldn't stand how complicated and therefore "boring" this all was. I felt stupid and discouraged. The next day, though, something clicked, and I was looking at the R&R with a raised eyebrow once I finally understood what was going on. I felt in my gut that something wasn't quite right, but I hesitated since I'm not even a second-year law student, who am I to disagree with this magistrate judge with X years of experience? But I brought it up anyway. My clerk was suspicious at first, but when he read it for himself he saw my point and asked me to write a memo with both sides. So I did!

What was supposed to be an easy checkmark to rid a case from the docket became a topic of lively debate nearly every day in chambers. Lunches with our judge devolved into discourse on the specifics of this issue, where we'd all sit side-by-side reading the relevant documents line-by-line. By the end, my judge wholeheartedly agreed with the position I'd held from the start and tasked me with writing the order that would overturn the R&R. In his 16 months on the bench, this will be his first time declining to adopt an R&R. And that was because of me!??!!?!? So, I––not even a baby lawyer––just drafted this eleven-page order that my judge will sign his name on.

It's a ridiculous case and the motion was over sale proceeds, but it's a family dispute and because of my gut feeling the plaintiff will get an order disbursing more than $450,000. Like. What if I didn't have a careful eye? Or, what if I noticed but didn't give a shit and just did as I was told? Isn't this what it's all about? I'm realizing justice isn't just the Court's role; it's also every attorney's, even in the most banal of civil disputes. And justice demands attention and care. So today, for the first time in law school, I feel like I've actually found a way I can pursue justice and feel fulfilled in that pursuit. On top of that, it was the most satisfying feeling to "crack the case" and have that aha moment after initially struggling so much to even get a grasp of what was going on. After a 1L of questioning my decision to go to law school, I am, at last, excited and proud to become a lawyer.

Where Justice Lives

In my few weeks at the Southern District of Florida, I've witnessed a 79-year-old man get sentenced to die in prison for his role in a $1B+ healthcare fraud scheme; spoken to a jury who shockingly loved every second of their duty on a month-long trial because they understood the tremendous weight of justice it held; seen court interpreters three-way relay each line spoken in the courtroom to a defendant from English to Spanish to an indigenous Mayan language with fewer than 500,000 speakers and back to English in the name of due process; watched a lawyer who misfiled a case get mad at my judge for his own error that is going to result in his client being deported to Russia; and observed my judge, day in and day out, do his job with the utmost candor, humility, discernment, and kindness.

I am so thankful to be interning under a figure who knows and understands this system, the import of his position, the lives affected by even the most frivolous case about contracts, and who endures witnessing courtroom clowns (they were really bad lawyers) spat over the span of a three-day trial––not because the case merited it––but because he believed the client deserved his day in court after three years of fruitless litigation. Even with eyes open to corruption and injustice, he still believes in this system, believes in the law, and believes in justice. And every day, when he suits up with his robe, he gets to make his belief a reality.

By witnessing attorneys sparring in the courtroom, I've also learned that justice doesn't just sit behind the bench. It exists in every motion a lawyer drafts, in every second a lawyer spends researching her case, in every page written on behalf of your client, in every deliberately emphasized word of oral argument. Because, as my judge says, everyone deserves to have their day in court. It's not as black and white as I thought, and sometimes it actually can be meaningful to represent a company. Because when the "company" is sitting in trial behind their attorneys, you see that it's really just a person praying their lawyer tells their truth correctly and persuasively and that their story is done justice.

When the corporation that loses $150k due to fraud and has spent hundreds of thousands in attorney's fees trying to right that wrong is a family-run, small-chain barber shop that couldn't afford to take the loss and has been buried in litigation for years, you realize why it matters to be a commercial litigator. When the federal agents who spent years of their lives securing the mountains of evidence to hold accountable a man who helped steal millions from elderly victims who didn't know better via medicare fraud are sitting next to the prosecutor, you understand why the government brings cases against individuals who've caused harm. When the family of a young man who was self-admittedly guilty tearfully stands up in court at his sentencing hearing as his newborn daughter cries in the row behind them, you see why everyone deserves a defense attorney. When the 54-year-old woman who committed a crime for the first time in her life has a village coming to her defense as character witnesses, you appreciate that every case is unique so judges shouldn't have to abide by guidelines –– and that your judge agrees and has mercy.

As my first essay showed, in May I feared the phrase, "I am, after all, a lawyer. I am never far from evil." Yet, having seen "evil" up close and personal in the courtroom this summer, I understand now that proximity to evil does not make you evil in itself. My biggest lesson these past few weeks is that no matter whose side you're on, you're representing your client to the best of your ability. That's it. You don't have to think they're in the right, but everyone deserves their day in court.

I am not the Sun

I was anxious to be spending my summer back home in South Florida. I feared that family meant self-stifling. I set out to subvert that self-imposed expectation and have dedicated this summer to growth and self-understanding. I spent the Spring semester frequently reflecting on my future role in the law and whether that vision matched what I saw my duty in the law to be. Most of my friends dedicated themselves to Public Interest, and despite my admiration for that choice and desire to do good, I could not decode why it was so hard to see myself in that field. I saw my inability to veer off the path of big law as a sort of moral failing: am I really so selfish to my core?

I've tried to understand my thinking and found a parallelism with Paul's description of sin in Romans 7:15–20: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing." As relatable as his internal struggle feels, he explained it away as sinful nature. Maybe the fact that I relate to it so strongly on this topic says more about big law than about myself, but I digress.

It’s not that I want to go into big law because I truly desire to do that work in particular. Rather, I want to desire not going into it, yet I cannot shake, or better said, outthink, that desire. I know that, deep down, I don’t want to subject myself to that path, but I have come up against an immovable stubbornness that won’t let me not try it. While I've tried to blame this desire on external factors, I realize it comes from within. I recently read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and resonated with his journey. The driving plot point was that Siddhartha felt he could not truly internalize a lesson through another’s teaching: he could not think himself out of desire, and words alone could not help him understand the baseness of a life he never lived himself. Being an ascetic and merely abstaining was not enough; he had to experience the world for himself to crush earthly desires, by revealing and understanding what it does to a human. To defeat his lust, he fell in love with a seductress; to defeat his greed, he ran a business empire; to defeat his ego, he climbed to the top and saw the emptiness follow him there. It was only after going down all these paths that he was able to return to an ascetic lifestyle in recognition of its superiority.

If I seek to overcome this desire––if I wish to truly want to do good––I don't think I need to fight this battle against my ego prematurely, for how will it truly go away if not through understanding via experience? If this is the wrong path for me, I need to learn that for myself. Professor Moglen's words all semester did not fall on deaf ears; they spurred this quest for greater understanding of myself and my desires. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I think by going in with no expectations, I will learn what that’s supposed to be. I've listened to the stories of those who big law burned out, marriages torn apart, work placed above health, years of youth "wasted." But, would you say you regret your time in big law if it had a role in shaping who you are now? if it showed you that you actually had no desire to move large armies? My decision may not be wise, but I don’t think I can gain that wisdom for myself without knowing through experience why exactly it’s not wise for me.