After Karen Usselman Lindell graduated from the University of Georgia in 2007, she joined AmeriCorps and spent the following year as an English-as-a-second-language instructor in northern Virginia, “a wonderful experience,” she recalls. Then Lindell moved to Nashville to join her fiance, a student at Vanderbilt Medical School whom she married in 2011. “My plan was to have a year with my fiance while I worked and applied to law schools, before I perhaps went somewhere else,” she recalls. “I applied to 12 law schools, and ended up choosing Vanderbilt. There was a thumb on the scale because I liked Nashville so much, and my fiance was here, but independent of the personal factors, I know I ended up at the best school.”
One reason Lindell, who speaks Spanish and had also volunteered as an ESL instructor as an undergraduate, felt an immediate connection to Nashville after moving here was Mayor (and 1983 law graduate) Karl Dean’s outspoken opposition to “English only” legislation proposed by a local city councilman. Karen’s first task as an intern with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) was to organize efforts to encourage members of Nashville’s diverse immigrant communities to register to vote. “I got to meet politicians, religious leaders and people in the Somali, Kurdish and Hispanic communities,” she says. “I was really impressed with the community and with the strong opposition to the ‘English only’ bill, which ultimately failed.” She also worked part-time as a nanny and worked as a tutor at the Martha O’Bryan Center, a community center serving children and adults in poverty. “I taught mostly Somali students, and it was a fantastic experience,” she said.
Lindell acknowledges fearing that her first-year law courses would be “dry” and was surprised to discover that she really enjoyed them. “I’ve loved the classes in law school,” she said. “I thought I’d suffer through the first year and then be able to take classes I’d enjoy, but my first-year classes were some of the best I’d ever taken at a university. I had the standard first-year course load, but every professor made the material come completely alive. I would take another class from every professor I had my first year. Professors here take an incredible interest in students and in teaching; in class, you can tell how seriously they think about teaching techniques. I also was not expecting to have several professors take us for coffee, or to find that their office hours would be a really useful and used part of the law school experience.”
She was also pleased to find that the warm and welcoming culture that had attracted her to Vanderbilt was pervasive. “Vanderbilt professors really make an effort to get to know you, and that’s extremely helpful both for the learning process while you’re in class and for getting advice about careers, law review notes and life after law school,” she said. “And students here work very hard, but they work together. I’ve made strong friendships with my classmates and loved the overall atmosphere at the school.”
Lindell spent summer 2010 working with the ACLU of Tennessee, researching anti-immigrant legislation the state had just passed, which afforded her an opportunity to compare the proposed Tennessee legislation with the legislation recently passed in Arizona. “My topic for my Law Review note actually came out of my internship with the ACLU,” she said. “Questions that are normally very routine can be incriminating if someone is undocumented. I’m exploring the question of whether the scope of Miranda warning should be expanded to include routine booking questions.”
She became an articles editor of the Law Review in February 2011. “It was a huge time commitment, but probably the most rewarding thing I did in law school,” she said. “As an articles editor, I got to read articles on a diverse array of topics, met twice a week with an amazing group of colleagues to select articles for publication, and then work with the authors of the articles we selected to get them ready for publication. Through that experience, I learned about many new areas of law and became a better writer.”
Lindell spent summer 2011 with Ropes and Gray in Boston, and during her 3L year, she worked in collaboration with Vanderbilt medical students and the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee to co-found a Medical Legal Partnership at the Shade Tree Clinic in Nashville modeled after a similar program she participated in during her summer with Ropes and Gray. “It’s designed to address the legal needs of low-income patients, many of whom are unable to receive adequate health care due to their legal problems,” she explained. We conducted a month-long pilot of the program in February, which was very successful, and we hope the partnership will be a long-term addition to the Clinic.”
Lindell will clerk for Judge Kent Jordan on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Wilmington, Delaware, during 2012-13.