As Katherine “Shelley” Broderick prepares to step down this summer as dean of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) David A. Clarke School of Law, she reflects on her law career that began more than 40 years ago.
There were two defining moments in her life that pushed her to become a lawyer. After her brother was wounded in the Vietnam War, she became outraged and believed that legislators and lawyers needed to push for change. Second, she was heavily influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I was in high school when MLK and Robert Kennedy were assassinated,” Broderick said in an interview with Diverse. “I heard MLK speak when I was 11 years old in Boston and it touched me deeply. I also saw that lawyers and the Justice Department were deeply involved in changing the way that we behave in this country.”
From a small fisherman’s village in Maine, Broderick moved to Boston with her family at the age of 11. Four years later, her family moved to Manhattan. Following in her sister’s footsteps, Broderick decided to move to Washington D.C. and eventually chose to attend American University.
“I chose Washington for college because I thought that’s where change could happen,” she said. “I loved the city, I loved politics and I cared about changing the way we do business in this country. I drank the Kool-Aid and never left.”
During her time at American and a few years after, Broderick worked with inmates who were within six months of release at a halfway house and then at a local prison in D.C. Broderick’s experience with the inmates inspired her to become a criminal defense lawyer.
“I was again morally outraged at the waste of human beings we locked up, doing 20 years to life for crimes that did not deserve that kind of time,” Broderick said. “I couldn’t help but notice that 100 percent of the people locked up in the D.C. prison were African-American. I decided to go to law school to try and keep people out of jail.”
