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 English Language 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 First 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 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 I, Torts II, Employment Law,
Jurisprudence, and seminars in The Legal Process 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. 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 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).
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. Married to the
painter Nancy Van Goethem, he lives in downtown Manhattan.