A Good, Sad, Real Reason to Go to Law School

Because you grew up in an abusive household, with nine brothers and sisters, most enduring regular bouts of beatings, starvation—torture, really—as your parents ate steak and lobster, ridiculed your interests, made you, at the age of ten, care for your younger siblings, one of whom was sodomized and chained to a bathtub, and worse, while being brainwashed to think that everyone in the world was as evil as your father who used the money from your brother’s life insurance policy to buy a sports car. And because you want to make sure people like that get what people like that should get:

On Saturday, [Melissa Anderson] graduated from St. Mary's University School of Law at the top of her class, and she plans to practice family law or represent abused and neglected children in the court system. She would like to run for office some day. She is also an author, and she published her first illustrated children's book last year.

“I have a burning desire to help children. I grew up seeing so many injustices in the world,” she said. “(Law school) seemed like the place to go to make it right, to help someone who is now where I was.”

You can read the full story here.

[The San Antonio Express-News]