About Jessica Glynn
Jessica Centers Glynn is a writer and teacher in Denver, Colorado. She earned her journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and her award-winning reporting has also appeared in The Anniston Star and Westword.
Articles written by Jessica Glynn
Keeping Families Together
Ofelia Calderón on why that mission has gotten harderBefore Ofelia Calderón can describe what it’s like practicing immigration law during the second Trump term, she pulls over at a rest stop on I-95. She’s running late, still driving the 165 miles back to Fairfax from Farmville Detention Center, where she met with a client stuck in jail without bond. Like so many of her clients of late, she says, he was arrested with no criminal charges, picked up by ICE on his way to work. It’s hard not to feel pessimistic, Calderón notes, but she …
‘The Bow Tie Guy’
At a time when it’s easy to sit down and be quiet, John McHugh stands up as an LGBTQ advocateJohn McHugh stops mid-sentence to let out a warm, disarming laugh at his own expense before admitting he’d never given pro bono work much thought until the day in 2012 when two partners at Reilly Pozner came into his office. They were thinking about challenging Colorado’s ban on gay marriage, and asked if he could introduce them to anyone in the LGBTQ advocacy community. McHugh, now a director at Fennemore, was a young associate then. He was also new to Colorado, having followed his husband …
The Lessons of Lahaina
As Jesse Creed was preparing to argue on the Maui wildfires, his home in the Palisades was destroyedOn the morning of Jan. 7, 2025, Jesse Creed stepped from a deposition at the Panish Shea Ravipudi office in West Los Angeles and looked out the 7th-floor windows to see a dark plume of smoke coming from the Santa Monica Mountains near his home in the Pacific Palisades. When his wife had called earlier to discuss what she should do—there was no evacuation order yet, and their boys, 4 and 7, were at a school in the neighborhood—they were both thinking of Lahaina. As lead attorney in …
‘For All of Us’
The Leonard Peltier case and lessons from Kevin Sharp’s time on the federal benchWhen retired Chief Judge Kevin Sharp’s portrait was unveiled in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee this past May, the only speaker to address the audience had not stepped inside a courtroom since Sharp sentenced him to life in prison. Chris Young was convicted in 2014 for what Sharp called a minor role in a drug conspiracy case. At that point, three years after President Barack Obama put Sharp on the federal bench, Sharp had already spent many sleepless nights before …
On the Eve of Trial
When Dionne Scherff got a death penalty case dismissedDionne Scherff worked all weekend leading up to the trial for her first and only death penalty case. The former Wyandotte and Johnson County prosecutor of child- and sex-abuse cases was no stranger to jury trials or homicide cases; she’d had as many as 11 trials in a year, and in private practice she often took homicide court appointments when judges asked. That was how she came to represent Ataven Tatum, who was accused, along with two other defendants, of a quadruple homicide in Kansas …
The Unpopular Position
Cesar de Castro on Morgenthau, the Garcia Luna case, and going into believe modeIn 2007, Cesar de Castro was five years into his tenure as assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s office when he heard that the Deutsche Bank Building in Lower Manhattan, abandoned since 9/11, had caught fire. It happened in the midst of a complicated deconstruction, one floor at a time, to remediate asbestos and other contaminants. As firefighters battled the blaze, rapidly spreading from the 17th floor, the building’s standpipe system wasn’t working correctly. Water was …
SEARCH and Rescue
For Chris Hanslik, homelessness is not something that can be ignoredChris Hanslik says he can’t take credit for Houston’s 60% reduction in homelessness since 2012, moving more than 34,000 people off the streets and into housing. But as board chairman of Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County and past chairman of SEARCH Homeless Services, he certainly played a role. “We lead the country in reducing homelessness and have become the model, which started about 14 years ago with switching the paradigm to a housing-first model. You get people …
The Maestro
Paula Barran never wanted to be anything as much as she wanted to be a lawyerEmployment lawyer Paula Barran had just printed two copies of a commencement address given by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—the one where he said freedom was not enough to “wipe away the scars of centuries.” This was two months into the second Trump administration, so two months since President Trump issued an executive order designed to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government and private …
‘Me Against the World’
Antitrust litigator Joseph Saveri pushes defendants to the brinkIn June 2022, months before the release of ChatGPT and the explosion of generative AI, San Francisco antitrust lawyer Joseph Saveri read a blog post describing potential copyright violations with the Microsoft AI tool GitHub Copilot. Titled “This CoPilot is Stupid and Wants to Kill Me,” the post was written by Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, programmer and author of the book Typography for Lawyers—which Saveri had made required reading for his staff when he opened his firm in 2012. …
‘Strive Mightily’
Laura Phillips carries the torch of a long family tradition while creating her own legacyIt’s impossible to tell the story of Laura Phillips’ career without first talking about her dad, the legendary defense-turned-plaintiff’s attorney William “Denny” Phillips. She did, after all, start working at his Washington-based law office when she was in middle school, and they later spent years trying cases side-by-side. He died last year at age 86, the same year he stopped practicing. Phillips speaks of his legacy and example through a mix of tears and laughter. “I learned …
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