About Amy White
Amy White is a former senior editor at Super Lawyers having been with the magazine for 17 years. Prior to that, she was a sports columnist and feature writer for a daily newspaper in Pennsylvania. Her freelance work can be found in Delaware Today Magazine, Mainline Today, Brandywine Hunt, Philadelphia Style and Delaware Beach Life. She is an adjunct professor of writing at the University of Delaware, where she graduated with a journalism degree. She also holds an MFA in publishing and creative writing from Rosemont College and has served as line editor on poetry anthologies and works of contemporary fiction. She loves baseball, bikes, books and coffee.
Articles written by Amy White
Copyright Law in the Digital Age
Say you come across a book review in The New York Times that your friend must read, and you copy and paste it into an email. No problem, right? Not necessarily. “It’s so easy to copy and send,” says lawyer Joseph Petersen, a New York intellectual property lawyer. “But if that article is behind a pay wall, for example, that’s infringement.” Most of us don’t think twice about copyrighted works, either. “The apprehensive consumer is the exception to the rule,” Petersen agrees. …
The Person She Always Was
There were never two sides to Robyn GiglQ: Tell me about growing up. Did your childhood point you toward the law? A: I was born in 1952 in a basic middle- to upper-middle-class family; I had two older sisters, a younger brother, and my mom and dad were happily married. My father was a business executive. I saw how hard he worked, and I decided I never wanted to go into the business world. I didn’t realize yet that the practice of law was truly a business. I saw Inherit the Wind, and read Clarence Darrow for the Defense, and was …
Got a Family Law Question? Answer it Jersey Style
New Jersey family lawyer Bari Weinberger is the first to admit she’s no gadget geek. When she has a tech question, one quick web search is all it takes for her to find the info she needs to tell a gig from a GIF. But she noticed that for her potential clients, there was no go-to resource available that could translate legalese into language that makes sense. So she created one. “I’ve been writing all of my career for judges and other lawyers,” says Weinberger, founder of the law …
The Benzo Way
From paralegal to partner to president—and now principal at Benzo Law—it’s been a steady climb for Tracee R. BenzoWhen Dean Richardson Lynn presented Tracee R. Benzo, class of 2008, with the John Marshall Law School’s Distinguished Alumni Award in Chicago six years later, he said, “She will eventually be president of any organization she joins.” One down, anyway. Benzo, a workers’ comp attorney, is the immediate past president of the Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys (GABWA). “I like to galvanize other people and be of service, with the law as my catalyst,” she says. Benzo ushered in …
The Dream Job
Tin Fulton Walker & Owen’s Katy Lewis Parker reflects on six years as legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of North CarolinaQ: You went from Holland & Knight to the ACLU. Why the transition? A: I interned for the ACLU when I was in law school and loved it. I took a circuitous path to get back there. But I don’t regret it. Holland & Knight had such a reputation for pro bono. They also did a lot of media law, and I always gravitated towards constitutional issues. I was there for five years; during that time my husband, a reservist, got called to Iraq. I didn’t plan to stay at a large firm for as long as I …
Boom
Did Claudia Ribet’s bicycle accident turn her into a better lawyer or just a better Californian?Family law lawyer Claudia Ribet of Ribet & Silver is barely 5 feet tall, but she makes up for it with the volume of her voice. Family legend has it that Ribet first diagnosed her father’s loss of hearing when he attended an oral argument and told her afterward that he didn’t think the justices could hear her. “I simply boom in the courtroom, so I knew something was wrong,” she says. Ribet calls herself a tough New Yorker; so last fall it came as a surprise when she paused in the …
Balti-More
McGuireWoods’ Ava Lias-Booker on why she’s tired of ‘first’ but not ‘more’Q: You chose the law with no experience or exposure other than a seventh grade mock trial. A: I always knew that I wanted to do something academically or professionally inclined, and it was not going to be medicine. That left law. I envisioned having more of a Thurgood Marshall-type career. I absolutely did not see the legal career that I have had for the past 30 years. Q: What happened? A: There is a story I tell on this subject about an exchange I had with a professor. I went to visit him for …
You Can Believe What Terry West Says
Personal injury attorney Terry West finds the missing linkQ: The press loves to bill you as a “self-made man.” What’s your take? A: I never give it much thought. I look back, and I see people who said they’re the first person in their family to graduate college. You don’t see that much anymore, but I saw it. That certainly wasn’t true for me. My mother had a master’s degree in the late ‘40s, when that was unheard of. I had guidance from her. My dad had virtually no education other than five or six years in grade school, but he had an …
First Comes Love
Before same-sex marriage was the law of the land, business litigator Robbie Kaplan became a hero of the movementWhen 9-year-old Jacob Kaplan is asked to explain United States v. Windsor, the pro bono U.S. Supreme Court case his mom Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan won for client Edith Windsor, he shrugs and says, “Edie wanted her money back.” Three hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, to be exact. That’s the estate tax bill Windsor received after the death of her wife, Thea Spyer, in 2009. Kaplan’s 2013 victory before the U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, …
Covert Operations
Why scientific misconduct lawyer Barry Nelson Covert knows more about space dust than you doQ: I have a confession—I have no idea what “scientific misconduct” means. A: Neither did I. A good friend of mine, a wonderful lawyer, came to me after he was consulted for a scientific misconduct case out of SUNY Buffalo. When he called I said, “What the heck is scientific misconduct?” What it generally means—and it applies to all scientists that generate work—is any type of publication or study in which they are accused of plagiarism or fraud in relation to their studies and how …
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