Two-Oh-Two-Seven-Two-Six-Five-Six-Two-Three. This string of numbers was the first I learned—to be recited on command for hypothetical firemen, the school nurse during pollen season, or both—and was delivered each time with a rapidity and enthusiasm that only a four-and-a-half-year-old could muster.

The treatment of animals by our nation’s industries is out of line with the public’s sentiments about animal welfare. As a result, a revolution is taking place in animal law.

I have spent the last three years in a master’s program for English at the University of Massachusetts, which has been simultaneously enriching and frustrating: enriching because I have been equipped with a variety of analytical lenses through which to view the social and historical implications of literary texts, and frustrating because I crave an opportunity to apply my interpretative skills to a discipline with a more immediate social impact.

This may be where I die. A tsunami is heading toward the coast, we don’t know how large it will be or when it will hit, and this daft old woman just made a wrong turn, driving us straight to the water’s edge.

“People hearing without listening.” These words, immortalized in the Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence,” highlight an important distinction in the human condition, that hearing and listening are not one and the same.

The large room was beginning to feel like a cramped interrogation chamber as we stood anxiously awaiting the next set of difficult questions.

The sky was still dark—but it was almost dawn. I tightened my sweat-sticky headscarf. Watching the men circumambulating the sacred black stone of the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, I could not help but envy their ehrams, white towels that draped around their waists like airy togas.

During my final months at Stanford University, I received the same well-intentioned advice from many different people: Don’t pick a job for money or prestige, pick it because it’s what you love to do. I was happy to comply.

Law influences virtually every aspect of the world and works, in theory, to ensure equality and justice for those which it governs, serving as a safety net for societal values.

The Iranian government operative I sat across from was clearly growing weary of being interviewed by me, a woman at least forty years his junior, and from the minority group he spent his life discriminating against.

The institution of Evangelical Christianity serves many purposes: For some, it is a convenient farce, an expedient through which power, fame, and authority are acquired; for others, it is a source of moral guidance, a doctrinal foundation upon which ethics, ideology, and way of life are grounded; and for still others—for those whose faith constitute purpose itself—it is the very “bread of life.”

Last November, I taught my friend Madeleine how to tone. We entered the cavernous stone interior of Dwight Chapel. No choir stood poised to sing its first note; no audience murmured in the wooden pews.

It is my belief that a person should contribute positively to their community and their society, and the practice of law has been a natural choice for me.

Dusk had begun to edge its way across the parking lot, and up to our dented minivan. I leaned against the door until the side of my face pressed against the window, hoping to maximize the remaining light.

When I was five, I had a charming habit of running full force into Lake Washington with all my clothes on, whenever I got the chance.

Juan Rivera was interrogated for four days before he confessed to the murder of Holly Staker in 1992. On the night of the fourth day, the questioning became particularly accusatory, and he suffered an emotional breakdown.

As I stood in front of my class, ready to begin my first lesson, I felt a flash of déjà vu. I felt as though I had been there before, swimming in that sea of expectant gazes.

I was seven years old when I returned to Nigeria for the first time after my family’s immigration to the United States. How do you describe returning to a place that you had always called home, but had never intimately known?

It’s 6:53 on a Monday evening. My three-hour shift at Vanderbilt’s Writing Studio starts in seven minutes. As I set my backpack down at my favorite table, I hope for a few minutes to sit, to check my e-mail, to relax.

If I were to write a book about my life up to this point, I would entitle it Stories of an Ivory Tower Refugee. I often think of myself as a refugee, escaping a future in biological research not meant for me.