I attended the University of Rochester and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in mathematics (with honors) and in political science. Even while I was in high school, I planned to attend law school. I had always done well at math: I enjoyed the logic and the problem solving aspects of it. Once you solved an equation, you had an answer and you were done.

Once in college, my advisor suggested that I should have some courses on my transcript that showed I knew “how to write a sentence,” so, I took a few political science classes. I found them far less difficult, but, in many ways, more interesting than math courses in that they taught me about the “real” world. As a result, I signed up for more and more and, by my senior year, found that I had enough for a double major.

While in law school and, now, in practicing law, I still find myself thinking and reasoning linearly, as I would in solving a math problem. Step A leads to Step B which leads to Step C and so forth. In law, you start with a basic legal principle or proposition, apply the principle to the facts at hand and reach a conclusion, f(x) = y, so to speak. But, in the practice of law, to say the least, the conclusions are not so clear cut.