Mentorship means many things to different people, but for Dominique Shelton Leipzig, the presence of legal role models at home and in the classroom made all the difference in her career.
I knew I wanted to be a lawyer at a very young age. My father started law school when I was around five years old, my mother had studied law in Haiti before pursuing her doctorate in the US, and her father, my grandfather, was a distinguished attorney in Haiti before that.
When I was about nine years old, my parents encouraged me to write to Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, an African American congresswoman representing my home state of California, about concerns I had regarding foreign policy. I was delighted and surprised to receive a personalized, signed letter in response.
That moment solidified my desire to pursue law. Her encouragement at such a young age was incredibly impactful, and I realized then that I wanted to dedicate my life to making a difference.
Years later when I was attending law school at Georgetown University, I met two African American professors who helped shape my career — Professor Anita Allen, who initially sparked my interest in privacy law when I took her course titled "Privacy in American Law," and Professor Elizabeth Patterson, who taught contract law.
It was very empowering to be taught by these incredible women of color, but in that same chapter of my life, I was faced with the harsh reality of how my race could be used against me.
One of my classmates wrote an op-ed for the university newspaper that criticized affirmative action programs and argued that Black students do not belong in law school because their grades and test scores were not good enough. This was the first time in my career that I realized unwarranted generalizations about the Black community would be used by some people to try to inhibit our career aspirations.
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Originally published in bizwoman, Feb 26, 2024
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