By Lillien Waller

The future of the legal profession isn’t a question of numbers: there are currently more than 1.3 million active lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association. Rather, it’s a question of priorities: what are the most pressing issues of our time, and how can skilled legal practitioners help us reimagine how society addresses them? At least that’s how these five Commonwealth alumni/ae, who practice, study, or teach law, view their work. Catherine Sevcenko ’79 deploys movement lawyering in support of abolishing incarceration for women; Laverne Berry ’67 reveals the practical matters in entertainment and media law; Charles Kip ’18 discusses the role of class in housing eviction cases; Alexandra Natapoff ’83 shows how “snitching” and misdemeanors racialize crime in America; and Etenish Abebe ’13 finds the personal in practicing corporate law.

Catherine Sevcenko ’79: Senior Legal Counsel, The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls

The number of incarcerated women in the United States increased six-fold over the past four decades, “from a total of 26,326 in 1980 to 168,449 in 2021,” according to The Sentencing Project. Like their male counterparts, many of these women are imprisoned as a result of mandatory minimum sentences, pretrial detentions, minor offenses, and wrongful convictions. But unlike men, incarcerated women are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault and exploitation, human trafficking, and reproductive abuse while in prison and, upon release, they face collateral consequences that make rebuilding their lives difficult if not impossible. But what if we imagined and worked toward a future without incarceration that provides women and girls—and the families and communities who rely on them—with systems of support, rather than imprisonment?

That is the singular question upon which the mission of The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls is based. Founded in 2010 by formerly incarcerated women of color, the nonprofit seeks to end the incarceration of women and girls via issue advocacy, community and economic development, campaigns to prevent the construction of new prisons, decarceration (helping women get released from prison), and education.

As Senior Legal Counsel, Catherine Sevcenko works primarily on decarceration. She supports the work of the council’s organizers, who have achieved such successes as the Dignity for Incarcerated Primary Caretaker Parents Act. Drafted by The National Council and now passed in states such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Missouri, the law requires that if the primary parent is a defendant and has young children, then the judge must put in writing reasons why a carceral sentence is preferable to some other alternative. “[Incarcerating women] destroys families,” Catherine explains. “When a man is incarcerated, it’s the mother who takes the kids. When a woman is incarcerated, very often it’s the grandmother. But what if the grandmother gets sick or incapacitated and there’s no other family member to take the children, so they become wards of the state? After fifteen months, as a matter of federal law, which many states follow, all parental rights are severed.

“You can go to federal prison for a minor drug offense for five years. And you can come out and not know where your kids are, have no right to find out where your kids are, and only hope that when they turn eighteen, they try to find you. It’s that kind of urgency that necessitates having to use clemency or compassionate release or whatever we can think of to get women out before their families are utterly destroyed.” Currently, The National Council’s biggest legal campaign is focused on prison moratorium bills in New England states, which would stop the construction of new prisons for five years in order to study alternatives. A moratorium bill passed in Massachusetts but then-Governor Charlie Baker vetoed it. It has been reintroduced this session.

“At the end of the day, I would advocate for movement lawyering,” Catherine says. “My practice is very different because I’m not looking for cases I can win; I’m looking for ways I can help organizers end the incarceration of women and girls by moving public opinion to support decarceration. Movement lawyering turns the traditional assumption about the lawyer as the expert on its head: I use my technical knowledge to help formerly incarcerated women create the solutions their experience tells them are needed.”

Laverne Berry ’67: Entertainment and Media Business Affairs Lawyer

Long before you think you need a lawyer is when you need a lawyer the most, says Laverne Berry to her clients in publishing, film, television, and music. Before her work begins, Laverne has her clients complete a questionnaire about a given creative project, covering nitty-gritty details like who is responsible for financing and approvals. This deep dive serves as a helpful roadmap for a given case—and as a wake-up call for lay people, who think entertainment law is all celebrities and glamour when really it’s largely negotiations, contracts, and copyrights. “There are certainly entertainment lawyers who work with classic clients and do all sorts of things for them, from protecting their rights to protecting them personally,” Laverne says. “But my law is for artists and creatives who create things and the public wouldn’t actually know it was them.”

Representing both individuals and entities, including production, distribution, and media companies, Laverne specializes in business affairs, arbitration (dispute resolution), and developing strategic relationships. “If you were going to write a screenplay, I would work with you as you were writing it to make sure that the screenplay had copyright protection and when you were selling it to make sure there was a reasonable agreement between you and the person who was going to develop the film,” Laverne explains. “And if I were representing the company, I would see to it that they were able to get the rights to your screenplay for a reasonable amount, with the time to be able to develop it, and whether there would be spin offs or merchandising or books.”

Prior to becoming an attorney, Laverne worked for eighteen years as a television producer and media business executive. She sees her practice as an extension of her prior work, a response to an increasing need for media professionals who can negotiate deals, write contracts, and wrangle trademark and copyright issues. Becoming a lawyer gave her the ability to do those things, and it allowed her access to—and authority in—the elite rooms of the entertainment industry often closed to African American women like her. Getting a law degree also  represented an eye toward the future, as she realized the production and consumption of media was evolving. Rapidly. That includes the advent of AI technology and all of the pressing creative and legal concerns that accompany it.

“AI has implications for both sides of the business,” Laverne says. “A lot of lawyers are learning how to deal with it in their law practice. [AI] may help organize documents or write contracts, for example. That’s going to be my future, too. But there’s another side to it, because all of my clients are dealing with it from a creative perspective as well, and my job is to figure out how to help them contractually or in terms of copyright with those issues.”

Charles Kip ’18: Law Student, Georgetown University Law Center

“When you put the onus on the individual to assert their rights, you are going to get disproportionate outcomes along income and class lines,” says Charles Kip, a rising third-year law student and a Staff Editor at the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy. That becomes even harder when people living in poverty don’t know what their rights are. This is the case even in the District of Columbia, which, Charles notes, has strong protections for tenants relative to the rest of the country. The problem is exacerbated by lack of resources and the inability to afford a good lawyer, something he noted while working in an eviction legal clinic in fall 2023.

“People would come in at various points in the eviction process, and we would walk them through the process, represent them in court…give them whatever support they needed,” Charles explains. “And what we found is that most people don’t know about all of their rights as tenants.... So what we see is a major differential outcome based on whether there is a person asking the tenant, ‘Do you have housing code violations [as many low-income units do]? Do you know that housing code violations mean you don’t have to pay rent?’ And if that was a function of the court rather than a function of a private attorney, I think we’d see a lot better outcomes for poor people in eviction cases.”

Charles points out that most people wrongly assume that they must leave immediately when they receive a notice to vacate—or that they will be charged with a crime if they can’t pay. In D.C., eviction notices must be accompanied by information on legal-aid organizations, but this isn’t the case in many other jurisdictions. Even D.C. is no stranger to landlords who don’t follow proper eviction procedures, despite having stronger safeguards. And while there may be a few jurisdictions that provide an attorney for eviction cases, Charles adds, the Constitution only guarantees the right to representation in criminal cases.

It’s a problem created and compounded by poverty. Might regulating landlords be a possible solution? “There has to be much heavier state involvement at all stages of the process,” Charles says. “A landlord can, in many cases, get away with not following proper eviction procedure, even in a protective district like D.C., because the tenant has no idea what their rights are. Theoretically, there should be some state oversight there where, for example, if [landlords] had to register every tenant they have with the state, every time they evicted somebody, they would have to submit all the paperwork the tenant had given them, even if that tenant voluntarily leaves.”

Alexandra Natapoff ’83: Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Most criminal convictions—upwards of 95 percent—in the U.S. are the result of plea bargaining, says Alexandra Natapoff. This may sound benign but it creates a big problem: an environment in which informing, or “snitching,” can thrive, fueling wrongful convictions and wreaking havoc on low-income, heavily policed neighborhoods, often communities of color.

“Once you’ve decided to run your criminal system as a market where people are wheeling and dealing, in the most basic sense, over the name of the crime and the extent of the punishment,” says Alexandra, author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, “then you are going to have deals in exchange for information, in exchange for cooperation, in exchange for all kinds of things. And that’s why snitching is so pervasive, because we permit police and prosecutors to negotiate with people over guilt, to put pressure on them, to reward them. And once you do that, you open the snitching can of worms.”

The idea for Alexandra’s book emerged from on-the-ground work experiences after law school, which have fueled her scholarship ever since. She knew she wanted to do community-based legal work on civil rights, racism, and inequality issues, and in 1998 she was awarded a Community Fellowship from the Open Society Institute—Baltimore. Later, she worked as a criminal public defender in the city, an experience that showed her the legal system is not only unfair, it’s broken, particularly if you are poor and Black.

Given their access to lawyers, wealthier defendants can more easily navigate the legal system and can better shield themselves from law enforcement pressure to inform. “The use of informants varies wildly by who is being pressured or who is being rewarded, and the nature of the crime and the community in which it is taking place, and which law enforcement entity is using it,” Alexandra says.

Alexandra’s research ultimately led her to another open secret of the criminal justice system: misdemeanors, or petty offenses, which are the subject of her book Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal. She explains that 80 percent of all criminal cases are filed as misdemeanors. While the law may refer to the crimes in question as “petty,” the “collateral consequences” that such convictions introduce into the lives of the millions of people who are herded into the system can be devastating.

“Even a very brief stay in jail can completely derail a person’s life, wildly out of proportion to the offense that they are accused of,” Alexandra says. “Many people are sentenced to probation and a fine, for example. That’s a typical sentence for a misdemeanor. But the actual burden on the individual is much greater. They may have been incarcerated prior to trial. They may have lost their job. They may have lost their immigration status. They may have lost custody of their child. They may have been evicted.”

Misdemeanors, like snitching, are a way of racializing crime in America; they just haven’t always been analyzed that way, Alexandra says. “The future of criminal law in the United States is up for grabs right now. People have started asking, do we really need to be locking people up for this stuff? Do we even really need to be arresting them in the first place? There have been reforms and changes to shrink the system. Arrest rates and prosecution rates have gone down over the past decade. So have racial disparities. At the same time, we’re still the largest, harshest criminal system on the planet. We haven’t eliminated the problem, but this decade has seen a new willingness to reconsider.”

Etenish Abebe ’13: Corporate Associate, Cooley LLP

“Corporate law” doesn’t scream “scintillating.” Popular media has advanced the narrow view of corporate lawyers as dutiful, joyless paper pushers. For alumna Etenish Abebe, however, corporate law not only fulfills personal interests but also enables her to provide much-needed guidance to her mostly tech-based clients in the early stages of their companies and business ventures. It can be exciting, and, refreshingly, revolves around relationships.

“[Advising] emerging tech companies and venture capital firms—that’s our bread and butter,” says Etenish, a second-year associate. “When you’re more junior, you get to work with companies in different phases of their life cycle. Right now in my role, I do a little bit of everything, although a lot of my practice is focused on emerging companies: the initial financing rounds, as well as figuring out what needs to be done from a legal perspective to protect the company and set it up for success in its early stages.”

Etenish wasn’t looking to pursue law, but she did want a career that would enable her to be creative and tackle interesting problems. After earning a degree in English and American Studies at Wesleyan University, she worked briefly for a public-relations firm. While the work didn’t necessarily allow Etenish to hone the skills she was hoping to develop, she felt drawn to the firm’s tech clients. Later, while working as a paralegal for a nonprofit, she discovered transactional law, which emphasized analytical thinking rather than arguing cases.

Her work as an associate at Cooley marries the best parts of those experiences. And corporate law, Etenish notes, relies mostly on interpersonal skills, problem-solving, and the ability to work within and across teams. “Even within a junior role, I’m able to advise clients and build those relationships with founders,” she says. “Soft skills are huge in my field, and I think that sometimes people come in from law school and they don’t really consider that. As a junior [associate], you’re often the first person that the client will contact, and you have to know how to manage those relationships.”

For Etenish, a Black woman and the child of immigrants, one of the most significant issues her field will need to address in the future is its lack of diversity. According to the American Bar Association’s 2020 Profile of the Legal Profession, at 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, African Americans make up a mere 5 percent of all lawyers, a statistic that has remained relatively static for the last decade. That needs to change.

“There is a lot of power in representation,” Etenish says, whether it’s in law or startups. “If we saw more investors who look like us, that could mean more people who feel inclined to invest in companies that we think are important or that impact us on a day-to-day basis or that are founded by people who look like us. The impact is almost cyclical. That’s where I think this field needs to go in the future, and I hope, over time, it gets there.” 

Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her essays focus primarily on the intersection of art and personal history. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to profile interdisciplinary artists of color in her hometown, Detroit. This article originally appeared in the summer 2024 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.

Meet More Commonwealth Alumni/ae