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A Light Inside: An Odyssey of Art, Life, and Law
Excellent Book
267 pages, Paperback
First published February 26, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 24, 2014
The first Asian Woman tenured at Harvard Law School, Guggenheim Fellow, Herbert Jacob Prize Winner, 'Best Lawyers Under 40' by the NAPABA, Jeannie Suk tells her heartfelt story. By telling her old love for Ballet, Piano and reading, she guides us to her passionate life and work and finally to the world "that she wanted to see". She decided to write this book because she was frequently asked to explain the connection between how she grew up and how she works and lives now.
What world do we want to see? What is "education" in its true sense? What is "life" where one paves one's own path? Through this clean and elegant memoir, we learn that one's attitude and passion for life is the most important in life. and she suggests that we should be brave as we have freedom to be imperfect. Also she tells about her disciplines of life and work. One of those is "find what you really love to do."
What world do we want to see? What is "education" in its true sense? What is "life" where one paves one's own path? Through this clean and elegant memoir, we learn that one's attitude and passion for life is the most important in life. and she suggests that we should be brave as we have freedom to be imperfect. Also she tells about her disciplines of life and work. One of those is "find what you really love to do."
March 27, 2025
This book was absolutely marvelous, save for the few grammar errors that honestly fit well into the “smells like a Korean supermarket book” vibe this had going for it. Indeed, Suk articulates this as her audience — young Korean readers who are moved by her academic and scholastic career as a Marshall Scholar and the first East Asian female tenured professor at Harvard Law School.
I was first introduced to Suk through her New Yorker columns on affirmative action around two years ago. Since then, I have read much of her academic work, such as At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Transformed Privacy and her gorgeous Harvard Law Review article, The Socratic Method in the Age of Trauma, which I read at the end of college using my extra printing dollars to print it out.
The reason why I picked up her book, although not Korean, is because I am greatly drawn to her. When I read her domestic violence book, I could immediately sniff out her background in literary studies, where she got her DPhil (UK way to say PhD) in Francophone literature. Unlike other scholars in her field, she begins with intensely literary and philosophical modes of inquiry. For example, the notion of “home as man’s castle” is part of the motif that undergirds laws surrounding privacy and private property. She studies the law by asking questions such as, “What does it mean to be human? How does human beings’ production of meaning affection how we govern ourselves?” (203)
Beyond this connection to literature and a more surface-level connection to her female, Asian identity, I am primarily drawn to the topics that she discusses. I have mentioned her during numerous legal cover letters and interviews. Her interests are in public versus private, including public trauma (war) versus private trauma (rape) and the intersection between the two. She is also interested in Title IX, affirmative action, and comfort women during WWII — as she herself lived under Japanese control of Korea.
I read this book with the intent to discover slowly if I want to go to law school, and this book definitely encourages me in that direction.
It’s interesting to also reflect on the autobiographical lens surrounding her essay on the Socratic method. She writes that she is developing a book on trauma; though this was published a decade ago, I’m assuming this did not become a book but rather the article I read last year. The article is in part about how educational methods favor certain children’s upbringing. For example, she talks in her book how as a Korean it was frowned upon to debate company or question authority. She talks about how as a young child she could feel alienation during school and had stage fright when performing the piano.
Throughout her life journey, I was deeply moved by how empathetic and emotional she is — as I read in Barack Obama’s most recent autobiography, “empathy is objectivity” since it allows you to stand in the position of others too.
Another thing that is deeply striking is her humility. She constantly refers to chance, when her intellect would rationally dictate it was not chance at all. She writes it was “luck” that got her into Yale for undergrad because she underperformed her classmates (not to mention she went to the gifted school Hunter in New York, danced at the School of American Ballet, and attended Julliard’s pre-college high school program for piano). She writes it was a “guardian angel” watching over her that she didn’t ‘fail’ out of Harvard Law School — meanwhile the reality is that one of her professors told her, “You will be a professor one day.” Finally, she calls her clerkship with Supreme Court Justice David Souter — one of the most sought-after positions after law school — a hand at “good fortune.” For goodness sake, she married a Rhodes Scholar and her sister and her were the first Marshall Scholar sisters in the history of the scholarship!
I was especially moved by her reflections on working as a prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where I interned and spoke at length about her to one of the paralegals, Noah. It is interesting for her, her clerkship to prosecution was moving in reverse — the highest court of the land to the lowest court of the land, whereas my introduction was this low-level court. She writes about this move: “The domestic violence prosecutions I conducted and observed provided a most vivid window into a distinctive developing legal regime that exercise state power in service of a wrought social theory: legal feminism, which has had revolutionary influence on the law since the 1970s” (182).
I think her reflections are important to remember, and I wish I had read this prior to the internship: “I wanted to do the quotidian work of law enforcement, to understand through experience what it means for a person to wield state power, not only through written legal decrees, but as a live personification of the violence of the state” (178-179). I think this word of “violence” is one that I thought about often, and much like my favorite supervisors, she writes about the tremendous real-world weight the word holds. Ultimately, the law is the power of real state threat to induviduals who break the governing laws. She writes of this weight: “People accused of stealing cans of soup, having sex for money, and hitting their children were criminal defendants, and they were also human beings who wept, whose families wept, as the routine weight of criminal justice descended on them” (182).
The book ends with her discussion of motherhood and primarly her teaching. One of my favorite professors in undergrad said her students were her greatest teachers. Perhaps this humility and willingness to follow and illuminate the students’ pathway rather than mercilessly tugging and shining a bright, moving light for a student to chase is what makes me love scholarship. She speaks of learning not as spectatorship but rather teaching as a mutual conversation between teacher and student.
I would love to next read her article “The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds of Abortion Discourse” and her article “The Laws, Culture, and Economics of Fashion.” I read a book after listening to a talk she gave with Richard Thompson Ford. She also does a lot of work in intellectual property law in addition to constitutional law.
Anyways, I’m looking forward to engaging in her work. She is not only beautiful and talented, she is also deeply thoughtful, willing to be open about her failures and mistakes, and humble. I am a fan of her not only as a scholar but also as a human being.
Some other quotes I jotted down:
1. “Why is law “artificial reason”? It is not pure reason… Instead if builds upon past acts and ideas: precedents, traditions, and reasoning. And this is the subject to judgment of their practical consequences in the world” (231).
2. “[A lawyer’s] reasoning can also become acts… with real consequences for people’s lives. Will our students become not only professionals with breathtaking technical skills, but also people of integrity who can wield the law with practical wisdom, discipline, and mercy?” (233)
3. “Educators like me think of learning as fun, and we want to instill a sense of excitement and wonder in the process of learning” (246).
I was first introduced to Suk through her New Yorker columns on affirmative action around two years ago. Since then, I have read much of her academic work, such as At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Transformed Privacy and her gorgeous Harvard Law Review article, The Socratic Method in the Age of Trauma, which I read at the end of college using my extra printing dollars to print it out.
The reason why I picked up her book, although not Korean, is because I am greatly drawn to her. When I read her domestic violence book, I could immediately sniff out her background in literary studies, where she got her DPhil (UK way to say PhD) in Francophone literature. Unlike other scholars in her field, she begins with intensely literary and philosophical modes of inquiry. For example, the notion of “home as man’s castle” is part of the motif that undergirds laws surrounding privacy and private property. She studies the law by asking questions such as, “What does it mean to be human? How does human beings’ production of meaning affection how we govern ourselves?” (203)
Beyond this connection to literature and a more surface-level connection to her female, Asian identity, I am primarily drawn to the topics that she discusses. I have mentioned her during numerous legal cover letters and interviews. Her interests are in public versus private, including public trauma (war) versus private trauma (rape) and the intersection between the two. She is also interested in Title IX, affirmative action, and comfort women during WWII — as she herself lived under Japanese control of Korea.
I read this book with the intent to discover slowly if I want to go to law school, and this book definitely encourages me in that direction.
It’s interesting to also reflect on the autobiographical lens surrounding her essay on the Socratic method. She writes that she is developing a book on trauma; though this was published a decade ago, I’m assuming this did not become a book but rather the article I read last year. The article is in part about how educational methods favor certain children’s upbringing. For example, she talks in her book how as a Korean it was frowned upon to debate company or question authority. She talks about how as a young child she could feel alienation during school and had stage fright when performing the piano.
Throughout her life journey, I was deeply moved by how empathetic and emotional she is — as I read in Barack Obama’s most recent autobiography, “empathy is objectivity” since it allows you to stand in the position of others too.
Another thing that is deeply striking is her humility. She constantly refers to chance, when her intellect would rationally dictate it was not chance at all. She writes it was “luck” that got her into Yale for undergrad because she underperformed her classmates (not to mention she went to the gifted school Hunter in New York, danced at the School of American Ballet, and attended Julliard’s pre-college high school program for piano). She writes it was a “guardian angel” watching over her that she didn’t ‘fail’ out of Harvard Law School — meanwhile the reality is that one of her professors told her, “You will be a professor one day.” Finally, she calls her clerkship with Supreme Court Justice David Souter — one of the most sought-after positions after law school — a hand at “good fortune.” For goodness sake, she married a Rhodes Scholar and her sister and her were the first Marshall Scholar sisters in the history of the scholarship!
I was especially moved by her reflections on working as a prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where I interned and spoke at length about her to one of the paralegals, Noah. It is interesting for her, her clerkship to prosecution was moving in reverse — the highest court of the land to the lowest court of the land, whereas my introduction was this low-level court. She writes about this move: “The domestic violence prosecutions I conducted and observed provided a most vivid window into a distinctive developing legal regime that exercise state power in service of a wrought social theory: legal feminism, which has had revolutionary influence on the law since the 1970s” (182).
I think her reflections are important to remember, and I wish I had read this prior to the internship: “I wanted to do the quotidian work of law enforcement, to understand through experience what it means for a person to wield state power, not only through written legal decrees, but as a live personification of the violence of the state” (178-179). I think this word of “violence” is one that I thought about often, and much like my favorite supervisors, she writes about the tremendous real-world weight the word holds. Ultimately, the law is the power of real state threat to induviduals who break the governing laws. She writes of this weight: “People accused of stealing cans of soup, having sex for money, and hitting their children were criminal defendants, and they were also human beings who wept, whose families wept, as the routine weight of criminal justice descended on them” (182).
The book ends with her discussion of motherhood and primarly her teaching. One of my favorite professors in undergrad said her students were her greatest teachers. Perhaps this humility and willingness to follow and illuminate the students’ pathway rather than mercilessly tugging and shining a bright, moving light for a student to chase is what makes me love scholarship. She speaks of learning not as spectatorship but rather teaching as a mutual conversation between teacher and student.
I would love to next read her article “The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds of Abortion Discourse” and her article “The Laws, Culture, and Economics of Fashion.” I read a book after listening to a talk she gave with Richard Thompson Ford. She also does a lot of work in intellectual property law in addition to constitutional law.
Anyways, I’m looking forward to engaging in her work. She is not only beautiful and talented, she is also deeply thoughtful, willing to be open about her failures and mistakes, and humble. I am a fan of her not only as a scholar but also as a human being.
Some other quotes I jotted down:
1. “Why is law “artificial reason”? It is not pure reason… Instead if builds upon past acts and ideas: precedents, traditions, and reasoning. And this is the subject to judgment of their practical consequences in the world” (231).
2. “[A lawyer’s] reasoning can also become acts… with real consequences for people’s lives. Will our students become not only professionals with breathtaking technical skills, but also people of integrity who can wield the law with practical wisdom, discipline, and mercy?” (233)
3. “Educators like me think of learning as fun, and we want to instill a sense of excitement and wonder in the process of learning” (246).
March 8, 2020
Inspirational memoir from a legal academic, written in the lapidary precision of her profession to uncommonly beautiful effect
May 25, 2022
my amateur writing style will simply be much too inadequate to justly give an account on how much this book has meant to me. suk’s profound writing style combined with her raw and genuine anecdotes have deeply inspired me in more ways than one. i will say however the omission on certain occurrences in suk’s life has left a lot of room for the readers interpretation; whether this was done on purpose or perhaps to protect the people close to her life is unsure. jeannie suk has lived the korean-american life of my dreams and i hope both sides of her pillow are always cold.
August 21, 2015
A Light Inside: An Odyssey of Art, Life, and Law (Paperback)
by Jeannie Suk
Ill from the library
This type of memoir should be examined after understanding Haidt's Righteous MindThe Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jeannie Suk
Ill from the library
This type of memoir should be examined after understanding Haidt's Righteous MindThe Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews