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
The Neelley Commutation
Barry Ragsdale’s 30-year crusade for one of Alabama’s most notorious killersWhen senior partners at Sirote & Permutt assigned 31-year-old Barry Ragsdale to the pro bono representation of Judith Ann Neelley in 1989, he tried to pass. “I still have the memo I wrote that said, ‘No, I’m not going to do this because it’s pro bono—I won’t get any credit toward my billable-hour goals and collected-dollar goals,’” Ragsdale says. “They correctly ignored me and told me to get to work.” He adds: “If I’m going to get credit for having taken on a pro …
From the Outside
Former deputy general counsel Andy Hirth is still working to improve the governmentAndy Hirth wanted to be a man of the people, but, as an adjunct professor of English at the University of Missouri, the people he found himself surrounded by were often the fictional type. “I felt called to do something different, and I thought that different thing was being a lawyer,” he says. Post-law school, Hirth wound up working for a big firm in Chicago for three years. But he couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting to be of service. “I never felt like I was doing the right thing in …
A Desire for Service
Jerina Phillips lives out her earliest dreams to do goodTwo pivotal moments pointed Jerina Phillips down the path of justice. The first came when she was 12 and her parents transferred her from an East St. Louis public school to a Catholic private school. “It was eye-opening,” Phillips says. “In East St. Louis, I saw firsthand a lot of kids living in poverty. There were a lot of failing schools. … The differences between my old school and my new school were stark: classroom size, access to technology, new books. I thought, ‘This is really …
The Intersection of Law & Politics
Richard St. Paul has been White House intern, city council member, and mayoral candidateAt age 12, Richard St. Paul was in social studies class wondering how he could make the world a better place. “Something told me, ‘Become an elected official,’” he recalls. At home, he leafed through World Book Encyclopedia to a section on members of U.S. Congress and the inspiration took. A decade later, he was a White House intern. “That was pretty awesome,” says St. Paul about his days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “I most remember the clocks in the Situation Room, which were …
Exercising Their Power
Four women who’ve practiced law since the ’70s share their origin storiesWhen asked if she faced any discrimination early in her career, Linda Mariani responds, “Geez, which story do you want?” The women who blazed the trail in law were not only trying to perform in high-pressure jobs with little support, they also faced harassment and discrimination while doing so. This was in the ’70s, before laws prohibited it. Here are the stories of four women who chose law, succeeded when the odds were stacked against them, and found an ally or two along the way. …
The Three Ds of Dan Dain
How the real estate attorney’s desire to chart Boston’s future inspired him to write Boston’s past1632: Boston is home to the first public school. Four years later, Harvard becomes the first institution of higher education in the colonies. The first regularly issued newspaper, The Boston News-Letter, drops in 1704. In 1840, the first women’s rights and Black civil rights movements in the nation are sparked. The world’s first publicly supported free municipal library, The Boston Public Library, opens in 1848. Alexander Graham Bell makes the first phone call in 1867. 1897 offers the first …
Once More with Feeling
Sharon Stiller shares in the emotions of her clientsFor a woman who says she is not theatrical, Sharon Stiller barely makes the two-minute mark in conversation before she delivers, from memory, the opening and closing verses of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer,” a poem which imprinted itself on her as a child: “In winter I get up at nightAnd dress by yellow candle-light.In summer, quite the other way,I have to go to bed by day.“And does it not seem hard to you,When all the sky is clear and blue,And I should like so much to …
Staying Mum
In high-profile cases like Mel Tucker’s, Jennifer Belveal unspools facts outside the public eyeOfficially, Jennifer Belveal leads Foley & Lardner’s Government Enforcement Defense and Investigations practice in Detroit. Unofficially, she says, “People pay me to be nosy and find out the truth.” Fascinated by mysteries and the facts that unspool from them after some concerted, intelligent digging, Belveal, who has had her eyes trained on the law since she was 12, finds a certain “glamor and glitz” in getting to the bottom of things. “I spend my professional time …
The America His Father Believed In
Shahid Haque’s fight for a more equitable Montana for immigrantsIn 2008, Shahid Haque did something that many might not have expected—he opened an immigration firm … in Montana. “There was no one specializing in immigration in Montana at the time, and it is worth noting that Montana has some of the fewest numbers of immigrants per state capita in the country,” says Haque, founder of Border Crossing Law Firm. “But I felt there was a need.” His first experience in the practice area was as a student at Chicago-Kent College of Law, he worked asylum …
The Movement
Yoga helps bring Jacqueline Simonovich her best ideasIf there’s been one constant in Jacqueline Simonovich’s life, it’s movement. She pirouetted through pre-K and beyond, beginning her study of dance as a 4-year-old ballerina. And movement followed her to Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she majored in dance and English literature before earning a master’s in humanities and social thought at New York University. She eventually landed at Berkeley for law school at 29, after helping her husband get through his Ph.D. …
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