Spring 2009

Far, Far Away

By Michelle Bates Deakin     |     Photograph by Amanda Voisand

Sylvia Struss ’96 calls Mexican Hat, Utah, “the middle of nowhere.” She first went there in the mid-1990s on a law school co-op with DNA-People’s Legal Services to represent residents on the Navajo reservation. She saw the Milky Way and spent entire weekends hiking over desert plains, sandstone cliffs and layered canyons without seeing another soul.

“It’s so remote that ‘Star Trek’ episodes were filmed there, because it looks like another planet,” says Struss. “I just loved it.”

Enticed by the region and its people, Struss headed back to the reservation, and, since 1996, has built her career at DNA, now serving as its administrative director. A single mom, Struss has raised her twin son and daughter, now 12, on the Navajo reservation in Chinle, Arizona, and more recently, in Flagstaff. “Twins are part of the Navajo creation story, so I was considered blessed, and my kids were considered blessed,” says Struss. “It’s really special to live in a community where people think you’re blessed.”

Struss is among a small group of Northeastern graduates who have eschewed big-city practices for the call of rural and small-town life. They are drawn by the lure of the land, the variety of the practice and an enduring desire to help people in remote areas where public services are scarce. They are undaunted that the nearest grocery story can be two hours away, or that some of their clients can only be reached by airplane.

“You need to not need a Starbucks,” says Struss.

Life in a Northern Town

Sometimes, it means you have to forgo face-to-face meetings with your clients. That’s the case for Kirsten Bey ’84, who has worked in the Alaska Public Defenders Agency in Nome for 14 years. Nome, with a population of about 3,500 people, is located on the western edge of Alaska on the Bering Sea, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle and 160 miles east of Russia. It has a district and a superior court, and is the judicial seat of Seward Peninsula, which serves a scattered collection of remote villages, that, like Nome, are reachable only by airplane.

“Defendants have to pay their own way to go to trial and pay for a hotel room to have their day in court. So, consequently, a lot of people don’t have trials,” says Bey. “It’s an interesting question of how to provide judicial services in a location that doesn’t have roads.”

Phones and computers have made contact with defendants easier during the decade and a half Bey has been practicing in rural Alaska. She most often represents clients who have waived their right to be in court and appear instead via telephone. “They don’t get the impact of the judge looking sternly at them,” she says. “It’s hard to get respect for an entity they just never see.”

Slower Pace, Larger Variety

Struss wouldn’t trade the practice she has carved out among the mesas and the canyons for any other. She provides legal services to Native Americans, helping people with disability and consumer issues, family and criminal matters, and the host of legal difficulties that arise in any impoverished community. DNA works to protect civil rights, promote tribal sovereignty and alleviate civil legal problems for people who live in poverty in the Southwestern United States.

In the Navajo language, DNA is an abbreviation for words that translate to “attorneys working for the revitalization of the people.” Struss is licensed both in the Arizona and the Navajo courts. She prefers the latter, with its restorative justice approach. “The judges are very focused on Navajo custom and tradition,” she says. “They ask, ‘How do we bring these people back into harmony with each other?’”

DNA has also petitioned the US Supreme Court, along with other legal groups, to hear Navajo Nation v. US Forest Service, a religious freedom case that seeks to protect the San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona — holy ground to 18 native tribes — from development by a ski resort that uses recycled sewage to make snow.

The range of legal issues and the variety of forums — from Navajo family court to the highest federal courts — gives Struss varied work of significant impact. “Living in a really rural place, I can have the kind of life that I want to have, and I don’t have to live at such a fast pace,” says Struss. “I can have kids and help people who have traditionally been crushed by our government.”

Of Courts and Canines

Up in Alaska, Bey handles the typical garden variety of criminal matters that any public defender would see — assaults, thefts and murder — with the occasional case with local flair: driving a snow machine on the Bering Sea while intoxicated or assault with an ice pick.

Before she came to Alaska, Bey had taken a break from law. Working in Oregon, she had grown weary of practice and went to Alaska to visit law school friends. There is a surprisingly high number of Northeastern law graduates in “the last frontier” (see Northeastern Law Magazine, summer 2004), though most live in the larger cities.

Bey became hooked on Alaskan life when she was asked to help care for a team of sled dogs. “I decided I liked dog mushing and wanted to stay in Alaska,” she recalls. She now has her own kennel of 19 dogs that she feeds on her way to and from the office each day. She takes them on runs in the evenings and joins the occasional sled dog race, such as last year’s 100th anniversary of the All Alaska Sweepstakes.

“It’s just one of those lucky things I fell into,” says Bey. She relishes the balance of the physical activity of caring for the dogs and 40-mile training runs with the office and courtroom life of the public defender.

Economies of Scale

Though Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is a booming metropolis

compared to Nome, Lee Flournoy ’74 finds the small city has allowed her to fashion the kind of law practice and lifestyle often impossible in a big city. Nestled in the Berkshire mountains two and a half hours west of Boston, the city of 41,000 supports her diversified practice with two other attorneys in the Law Offices of Lee D. Flournoy.

“I’m a small-town lawyer,” she says. “If I were in a city, I probably would have gravitated into a niche. But we’re able to do three or four things really well, not just one.”

The firm handles matters in criminal and family court, as well as insurance defense and business litigation. Flournoy works with the same ease on simple small-town matters as sophisticated litigation with counsel from large cities.

“Sometimes lawyers from New York or Boston will assume that a lawyer from Western Mass. isn’t as good,” she says. “But I think we have a hidden advantage. With technology and continuing education, we have access to everything that somebody in a big firm does.” And, she says, she has an edge in knowing the character of local juries.

At the dawn of her career, Lydia Milnes ’07 is working to carve a niche for herself in country law, too. A native of West Virginia, she reminisces about growing up in rural Webster County, which didn’t boast a single stoplight. She rode a school bus for an hour and a half to get to school, with the driver winding through mountain “hollers” to pick up students on the way.

Milnes has returned to her home state for a two-year clerkship with federal district court judge Irene Keeley in Clarksburg. “I feel called to work in West Virginia,” says Milnes, citing the many people she grew up with who have permanently left the state. “We have an aging population and a poor population, and if you’re career oriented, it’s hard to find a lot of opportunities.”

Milnes is hoping to find a permanent job in legal services, though the positions are difficult to come by. “There are few opportunities,” she says, noting those who share her public interest ambitions often open their own offices and take court-appointed cases from the criminal courts or work as cooperating attorneys with organizations such as the ACLU.

In the forefront of her mind are concerns about student loans. “The upside is that the cost of living here is not high,” Milnes says. “But the size of my loans hasn’t decreased.” In Arizona, Struss is nearly finished paying off her loans 13 years after graduating. Her starting salary was $23,000, and her loan payments were $1,100 per month on an $85,000 debt. She took advantage of loan forgiveness programs offered by Northeastern, DNA and the State Bar of Arizona.

Country Living

Inspired by their love of the land and a call to serve communities that are frequently underserved by professionals, these lawyers often encourage others to follow in their paths.

Struss emphasizes the isolation of her area to prospective applicants, who may be drawn in by a romantic notion life on a reservation. “I like to make sure they’ve done something remote like this before,” she says, such as working in the Peace Corps or in another capacity in a developing country. “And people need the ability to create community for themselves,” she says. “It’s not like you can go out to the movies or to a restaurant.”

For the past five years, Struss has lived in Flagstaff, where she moved primarily for schools for her children. But she feels a longing to live again on the reservation. “I will move back,” she says. “I still feel the pull.”

Michelle Bates Deakin, a freelance writer, is author of Gay Marriage, Real Life: 10 Stories of Love and Family (Skinner House Books, 2006).