On East Main Street in Columbus, Ohio, amidst motels promising cable television, an old bowling alley and various car repair shops, there is a dingy bar called the "Silent Woman." The sign in front pictures a woman's voluptuous body--headless. Viewed from the backseat of my childhood station wagon on the way to the orthodontist, the airport, and the hairdresser, the landmark rattled my worldview. Was the woman on the sign somehow better without a mind or a voice? Was her body all that mattered to the men inside that bar, to beer-drinking men everywhere? My reaction to that disturbing image represents the earliest stirrings of my feminist instinct, which has shaped many of my life choices and fueled my desire to study the law.

It's too easy to divide contemporary feminism into bumper sticker issues: Reproductive Choice, Violence Against Women and Women and the Workplace, to name a few. My career and study experience has taught me that social issues do not fall into neat little compartments in real life the way they do in theory, on campaign platforms and college textbooks. I am drawn to the study of law because it provides a sturdy bridge between theory and practice.

The "Silent Woman" image epitomizes the struggle surrounding reproductive choice for women. During the summers I spent on staff at a women's heath clinic in Ohio, we were in the trenches, doing the kind of work that generations of women before us had fought for the right to do. Yet there was no discussion of "pro-choice" or "when life begins," no politicized rhetoric. There was simply a woman dropping a birth control pill down the drain, or a condom breaking, or a sexually transmitted infection scare--and the ensuing panic. Simply observing the daily clinic life, it was difficult to believe that nationwide culture wars could stem from such quotidian events.

I found a similar disconnect in the courtroom where I interned with the District Attorney's Office of Family Violence and Sexual Assault in Philadelphia. There, the problem was reversed: The attorneys and judges worked within a rigid factual framework, but the courtroom narrative did not reflect the experiences of the victims in that it was not possible to isolate discrete snapshots of criminal behavior from the moving picture of a lifetime of abuse. In one case, a man terrorized his family for decades; he regularly abused and sexually molested his wife, three daughters and two sons. The court's job was to charge him with specific crimes, but the stories of constant violence and victimization were too heavy and complicated to be translated into the concrete language of the law. As I interviewed the six complaining witnesses and took notes on the raw horror of their lives, I couldn't help but wonder: Where was the charge for being a monster?

I was drawn to the Center for Court Innovation precisely because of this frustration. I have since worked on the statewide rollout of Integrated Domestic Violence Courts, innovating the structure of the court system to combine family, criminal and matrimonial proceedings into one courtroom with one judge trained in the dynamics of domestic violence. Rather than a woman's experience with abuse and violence being illustrated by piecemeal episodes, her life is better represented as a whole story, full of complications, allowing the judge to make better-informed decisions to ensure her safety and her batterer's accountability.

However, even that achievement doesn't solve the whole problem. Relationships are often stereotyped into victim versus perpetrator, which further obscures the shades of real-life experience: Some battered women strike back against their abusers and are then branded criminals. Through my work with the Women in Prison Project, I have advocated on behalf of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women whose lives do not conform to a simplified template of victimhood. The movement to use criminal justice responses to combat domestic violence has only gone so far, and these women suffer re-victimization from the very system that should protect them. Indeed, our nation's prisons serve as a bitter reminder that many "criminals" were "victims" all along.

I am eager to continue work in this particular field, and use the tools of a law degree to bridge theory and practice to promote social justice. As a feminist lawyer, I will lend my voice to marginalized women--a voice that speaks to the nuances of life and exposes the complete truth. I want to spend my life ensuring that the "Silent Woman" image stays where it belongs--on a sign, in a dumpster, behind a dingy bar, where no one has to see it ever again.