"What a visceral pleasure it was to watch her work" -John F

Every so often, rarely, you come across somebody who embodies a quality that you admire – more than admire, revere - and who does so with such a measure of off-the-scale completeness that you know you are never going to come across anyone ever again who will nudge them into second place. Long ago, for me, Vanessa took home the traveling trophies in acuity, intensity, tenacity, commitment, wit, focus, and moral courage. I’d say these could possibly be merged into just one trophy if only there were even a single other contender.

But my marvel in her presence predated any of our work planting the vines that would give brief fruit to the first years of CUNY Law School.

In my first days as a law student at NYU, walking in something of a fog through the corridors of Vanderbilt Hall, shuttling between seemingly immense lectures and the crowded isolation of shared research tables in the law library, I’d pass this person who strode obliviously through the hordes of urgently hustling students, faculty, visitors, and workers. Like Moses at the Red Sea, the waters parted in front of her; there seemed to be a vague glowing haze hovering over her; she seemed unaware of the mundane errands of those shuffling around her.

Some of it was her startling beauty, to be sure, but more of it was the quality of self-possession she broadcast. The simple fact that she held her head up, eyes tilted slightly toward the ceiling but gazing implicitly beyond to some cloud of inspiration or inquiry, while everyone else was focused on their shoelaces and their books.

Usually, she was surrounded by a small clutter of others. Surrounded isn’t the right word. They formed more or less an open-ended, tightly-knit, straggling gaggle just a hair’s breadth behind her, seemingly each fascinated by whatever insights were spilling out of her mouth, each hopelessly eager to get her attention but content just to have had the opportunity to keep up with her march down the hallway. Like a group of cub reporters in the aftermath of their first press conference, chasing after a swiftly exiting potentate, pressing for an answer to one or another unclarified urgency.

I wasn’t alone in trying to figure out who this numinous force was, what was the source of her mystique as she walked the otherwise dull NYU passageways. I’d ask other 1-Ls, “Who is she?” as she’d pass us by with an unselfconscious air of muted celebrity. The answer was always the same, “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.” I never actually found out until years later when our paths crossed again.

My next memory of Vanessa, although I’m sure we intersected many times in between in the process of recruiting her to be the first faculty member we selected at CUNY took place in what must have been the early spring of 1983, in a large open pen of a room off Washington Square.

As I recall it, NYU Law School had extended its reach into tenement buildings around it and, after reflexively slapping a coat of paint on the walls and filling the resulting neon-lit empty spiritless spaces with what appeared to be cast-off office furniture, it populated them with random ancillary functions that overflowed from Vanderbilt Hall. Reprographics. Law journal offices. And, of course, clinics – even at NYU the poor relations of the credit-bearing academic program.

This was a time before there were workstations or modular offices, before personal computers or even rudimentary word processors. The room was absolutely empty but for the desks and swivel chairs about. I recall it as windowless though probably at the periphery there were the characteristic grey NYU windows looking out onto dark airshafts. Just a warren of unnaturally-lit steel desks, typewriters, phones; a room for sleeves-rolled-up legal worker bees or journalists, like a scene from The Front Page 10 minutes after the early editions were put to bed and the entire crew had retired to the bar around the corner, except for the one guy alone at a desk, furiously rewriting as material came in for the later editions.

That chaotic stillness must have been the Criminal Defenders Clinic.

Vanessa was sitting more or less in the middle of this, alone, amid the reminders of yesterday’s clamor and the looming immanence of tomorrow’s deadlines, at a battered desk, telephone to one side, typewriter on the other, a mountain of law books obscuring the entire work surface, her hair engaged in that wild life of its own launching out in all directions (at times I thought that that’s how her body took in nutrients, like an air fern or an orchid).

Led by Howard Lesnick – part paterfamilias, part architect, part prophet of the school’s inchoate program – and Charlie Halpern – its commander-in-chief and visionary CEO and charmer of the outside progressive legal world, a small group of planning-year faculty were aided by a slightly larger cohort of those who were in the process of being recruited into the next year’s actual teaching faculty. We were trying to chart not just the as-yet-unborn curriculum but the entire structure of the institution. How it would be governed, how it would be managed, how the sequence of its program would work.

Vanessa was the very first of the ten teaching faculty to be onboarded onto that shared creative process, months before the school would open its doors to students, and while she was still working full-Vanessa-time at NYU. And she and I were supposed to work on something crucial to the very soul of the new institution. I have no idea what that ‘something’ was – it could have been whether we would have grades, or it could have been how many paper clips we needed to order - but what I recall was that I got there after dark, and she was neck-deep - finishing some project all by herself that she believed needed to be completed before sunrise or the clinic would fall into some chasm of client abandonment and betrayal. No, not neck-deep, in over her nostrils, inhaling the task she was immersed in with every breath she took.

And every so often the phone rang and she swiped it up and spoke and listened without stopping what she was doing. I sat there with her as she furiously dug through the books, pounded at the typewriter, and sporadically grabbed at the phone to respond to what appeared to be increasingly plaintive calls from someone, on the other end of the line, who seemed always to be the same iterated caller in a slowly-building crescendo of inaudible pleas. Over the hours I sat there the calls continued to punctuate our work, melding into a varying cocktail of anger, despair, hope, and sorrow.

Vanessa was dutifully answering each of these increasingly frequent calls demanding, begging for, her presence, fending the caller off, promising each time to be there soon.

She finished her task and, still without missing a beat or diminishing her intensity, she turned to me and our work and we then spent a couple of hours hammering whatever it was out. As soon as we finished, she leapt up, looked at a clock and cried out in genuine horror and guilt, “Oh my GOD! John’s been waiting on a street corner for three and a half hours!” And she flew out the door. And headed off to meet the other ‘John’ who’d been calling her with admirable but misplaced resilience. I found my own way out, taking a shot at locking the door behind me..

So, there’s a lot in that memory, but perhaps the most compelling (though not the most obvious) part was that I truly recall nothing whatsoever about what we were working on or whether it actually contributed anything of value to the new law school. And yet I do remember Vanessa, vividly, and what a visceral pleasure it was to watch her work, what a model of dedication and intellect and completeness of commitment she presented. A model of taking responsibility for the fruits of one’s calling, of The Work being in under and through one’s life, of it being suffused with The Good.

Vanessa is the lawyer I wish I had been able to become; the teacher I aspired to grow into; the paradigm of reflection and responsibility forming simultaneously the foundation of and reward for being fully engaged with The Work. A paradigm so Platonically ideal that one actually failed at first to notice the meticulousness of the Planning or the pervasiveness of her engagement in the Doing that are the building blocks of her Reflection, and of the growth that emerged from all three, but especially from the last.

I thought before CUNY actually got into motion that the incredible intensity and totality of her commitment to client would compete with and cut against her capacity to teach. But then, of course, once we started delivering the CUNY program the following fall it was obvious, should have been obvious all along, that Vanessa’s practice was in fact the agency of her teaching. That she walked the corridors of CUNY, as she had at NYU, followed by an indistinguishable gaggle of student sponges hoping to absorb some little bit of her lawyering DNA to become for their future clients what Vanessa was and had been and would be for hers.

None of us have ever fully lived up to that mix of lawyering qualities, of geist, of essence. But we try and keep trying. And as I try, and I’m sure for others it is no less true, somewhere inside my head, I continue to struggle to shape myself to fit the armature of Vanessa’s ongoing praxis, her ineluctable, her indelible, being in the world.

John F