Faculty Address 2020: Professor Sofia Yakren
Professor Yakren was elected by the Class of 2020 to the distinction of Outstanding Faculty Member. These are her words.
Sofia Yakren, Professor of Law, teaches Lawyering, Torts, and Disability Law.
Professor Yakren received her B.A. from Yale College and her J.D. from Yale Law School.
Prior to joining CUNY Law, she was on the faculty at American University Washington College of Law, teaching Disability Law, Mental Disability Law, and the Women and the Law Clinic, where her students represented clients facing a broad range of civil issues related to family law, public benefits, special education, and immigration.
In her courses, Professor Yakren emphasizes reflection, engaged client-centeredness, rigorous legal analysis, the reality and value of emotions in lawyering, and self-awareness/actualization. Before entering academia, Professor Yakren was a civil rights litigator at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP, where she represented individual and class plaintiffs in employment discrimination, false arrest, and wrongful conviction actions.
As an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at the Mental Health Project of the Urban Justice Center, Professor Yakren challenged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act in New York City’s welfare system. She also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Nancy Gertner of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Remarks
Dear 2020 (and 2021) Graduates of the CUNY School of Law and loved ones, it is so wonderful to see you. This in-person gathering to honor you is obviously long overdue! On the bright side, we all get to relive and revel in your life-altering milestone of completing law school. May today serve as a reminder to us to make space and time in our lives to return — if not always physically, then at least in our minds — to our moments of greatest achievement and joy. To be sure that we balance out the hardships and the sorrows that always linger and sometimes overtake the joy.
One of my favorite poets, Kahlil Gibran, writes that joy and sorrow, “they are inseparable. Together they come . . . .” “Days of honey, days of onion,” according to an Arabic proverb. Perhaps it is always true that tragedy and splendor are companions — making life forever bittersweet — but that truth shaped your graduation story in the extreme.
In March 2020, you were nearing the end of law school — a time that typically comes with great joy and satisfaction, especially when you beat the odds to get there, like so many of you. You were in the middle of your final law school semester when everything changed overnight.
You had to adjust to life in a pandemic of unimaginable magnitude. School got canceled so we could all regroup. Our city went into lockdown. Zoom classes began. There was so much loss.
Life was scary and confusing and at times quite lonely.
Yet somehow you completed your last ever final exams — and with that came some relief, if not momentary joy. Somehow, you studied for the Bar exam — which is a nightmare in the best of times! Somehow, you looked for employment in a rapidly shrinking job market.
There was much pain and uncertainty, but also hopefully some joy in getting closer to the work that brought you here and, simply, in persevering. In sharing laughs with friends or family along the way, getting transported by a piece of music, eating a good meal, or feeling the warm sun on a spring day. More bitter than sweet, perhaps, but bittersweet nonetheless.
Many of you have worried about how to keep going in law practice when the systems are so very broken. When racism and ableism and classism shape everything. And it seems as though the successes — the joys — are always being overtaken by the sorrows. Susan Cain, author of the book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, insists that there is tremendous power in the bittersweet. As she explains, the bittersweet phenomenon of crying in the face of profound beauty — like a painting, or nature, or a child playing — is our recognition of the gap between the perfect world for which we long and the deeply imperfect world which we inhabit.
That longing — that desire for utopia (or even just for better) — made almost unbearable in a moment of perfect beauty is at the heart of our creative impulse. It is what inspires us to help ease the pain of others. And our collective broken hearts give us the capacity to empathize.
You may feel like imposters in doing the work: not brave enough, not clever enough, not whatever enough. As a very young refugee to this country, I felt that way too. I still feel that way too. I think most of us do. Not being good enough feels so real, yet that does not make it true. The world, your clients, your communities, need your particular story and even your particular pain to drive change and inch us closer to our utopia.
Cain describes Sarajevo in the grips of civil war on May 28, 1992 when the lead cellist of the Sarajevo opera orchestra pierced the sound of gunfire with exquisite, infinitely sad music that he played while seated, amidst the rubble, on a white plastic chair and dressed for a night at the opera. His music traveled and inspired other musicians to take to the streets and fill them with bittersweet music. Their music didn’t stop the war, but in ways it transcended it.
You’ve already made your own music in the face of adversity, and I know you’ll go out there and continue to do so.
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