Professor Lawrence Joseph was born in Detroit, Michigan, in
1948. His grandparents were Lebanese and Syrian Catholics,
among the first Arab emigrants to Detroit. He was educated at
the University of Michigan, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with
High Honors in EnglishLanguage and Literature in 1970, and received
first prize in the major Hopwood Award for Poetry; Magdalene
College, Cambridge University, where he received both Bachelor and
Master of Arts degrees with Honors in English Language and
Literature, in 1972 and 1976 respectively; and the University of
Michigan Law School, where he received a J.D. in 1975. He then
served as law clerk to Justice (later Chief Justice) G. Mennen
Williams of the Michigan Supreme Court. From 1978 to 1981, he
was a member of the School of Law faculty at the University of
Detroit. In 1981, he moved to New York City, where he was
associated with the firm of Shearman & Sterling. At
Shearman & Sterling, his practice included
securities, bankruptcy, anti-trust, mergers and acquisitions,
products liability, and real estate litigation.
Professor Joseph has been at St. John's School of Law since
1987. He has taught, and teaches, courses in Torts,
Employment Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Interpretation, and
Advanced Torts. In 2003, he was named The Reverend Joseph T.
Tinnelly, C.M., Professor of Law.
Professor Joseph has published and has lectured extensively in
areas of labor, employment, tort and compensation law,
jurisprudence, law and literature, and legal theory. He
has served as Consultant on Tort and Compensation Law for the
Michigan State Senate's Commission on Courts, and as
Consultant for the Governor of Michigan's Commission on
Workers' Compensation, Occupational Disease and Employment,
and has received a grant from the Employment Standards
Division of the United States Department of Labor to write on
workers' compensation. He has been invited to speak at
law schools throughout the country, including Stanford,
Columbia, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of
Pennsylvania, New York University, Northwestern, and
Georgetown, and is the former Chairperson of the
Association of American Law School's section on Law and
Interpretation.
Professor Joseph is also an internationally acclaimed poet and
writer. He has been described by David Skeel in
Legal Affairs magazine as “the most important lawyer-poet
of our era.” His fourth book of poems, Into It,
published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Fall 2005, has
received widespread attention and praise. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux also published, simultaneously with Into
It, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems
1973-1993, which collects Professor Joseph’s first three
books of poems, Before Our Eyes (1993); Curriculum
Vitae (1988), and Shouting at No One
(1983). Both books were chosen as “Best Books of the Year” by
Joyce Carol Oates in the Times Literary
Supplement. In 1997, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
published Professor Joseph’s prose book
Lawyerland, which also received national and
international acclaim. Lawyerland is the
subject of a Columbia Law Review symposium, "The
Lawyerland Essays" (Volume 101, No. 7, November 2001), which
includes articles and essays by Robert Weisberg, Pierre
Schlag, David Luban, Robin West, David Skeel, and Sarah
Krakoff. Lawyerland also is being developed
into a film by Mr. Mudd Productions, whose partners are John
Malkovich, Russell Smith and Lianne Helfon. Professor
Joseph’s poems, prose, essays, and criticism have appeared,
and his work has been featured, in both national
and international publications. His work has been widely
anthologized, most recently in The Oxford Book of American
Poetry (edited by David Lehman), and has been translated
into several languages. Professor Joseph’s writings are
the subject of a second law review symposium, which appears in
volume 77 of the University of Cincinnati Law
Review. “Some Sort of Character I Am: Narration and
the Poetry of Lawrence Joseph” includes articles and essays
by Joseph Tomain, Lee Upton, John Lowney, Eric Murphy
Selinger, Frank Rashid, Lisa Steinman, Thomas DePietro, and
David Skeel. Professor Joseph's book, The Game
Changed: Essays and Other Prose, was published in 2011 by the
University of Michigan Press.
Among Professor Joseph’s awards are a fellowship from the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, two National Endowment
for the Arts poetry fellowships, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett
Prize, which he received for Shouting at No
One. In April 2006, he was named the third
recipient of the New York County Lawyers Association’s “Law and
Literature Award” (prior recipients are Louis Auchincloss and
Louis Begley). In 1989, Professor Joseph lectured
on law and on poetry in Jordan, Israel, and Egypt through the
cultural affairs offices of the United States embassies in
each country. He has been a member of the board of
directors of Poets House, the Poetry Society of America, and The
Writer's Voice, and served on the PEN Events Committee. In
1994, he taught in the Council of the Humanities and Creative
Writing Program at Princeton University. Professsor Joseph’s
literary, professional, and personal papers have been acquired
by the Special Collections Library of the University of
Michigan, the archive to be held in the University of Michigan’s
Hatcher Graduate Library. Married to the painter Nancy
Van Goethem, he lives in downtown Manhattan.
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