A Brief Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Alec, or "Alec82" to reflect the birth year, on Daily Kos. A little bit about me.

I'm an attorney who currently practices in an undisclosed location in Michigan. In past lives, I've lived in California and for briefer periods, France and Thailand. There are more than a few issues that interest me beyond LGBT rights. In fact, while those issues are important for personal reasons, most of my political work is not LGBT related.

When I decided to go to law school (and I come from a family of attorneys, so the issue of "choice" in that context is an interesting and problematic one), my original goal was to work in the area of international development, and law school and the degree was going to be a springboard to get there. To that end, I applied for a position as a research assistant in my second semester of law school and began working on a State Department project related to economic law reform in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Before I began working on that project, you probably could have described me as a nominal Zionist. The work I did on that project really opened my eyes to the unseen reality of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and so it is an issue that I have blogged about on Daily Kos and elsewhere, and it is an issue I spend quite a bit of time on offline as well as online.

But another thing happened while I was in law school: I took criminal procedure, and I loved it. And as a result of that experience, coupled with my personal and longstanding opposition to the abuses associated with the "drug war," I decided that criminal defense was an area that I wanted to work in, and it wasn't an area that merged easily with international development, so the latter went by the wayside. While I no longer work on criminal defense exclusively, it is part of my practice and it remains, in many ways, my true love.

And that is all about me.