INNOVATIVE
Students
immigration law. Miami won—where better to study than one of the hubs for legal and illegal immigration? “I did the Immigration Clinic after my 1L year and have worked on immigration reform at the Senate. That was an unbelievable experience. “But I came to Miami to have a different experience, meet new people, see a different part of the country, learn new things,” she said. “I don’t want to be stuck in the Northeast forever. I just wanted to spread my wings a little more.” Calabro has mostly studied intellectual property at Miami Law. She went to work for Ultra Music, the electronic dance music label that has created electronic music festivals and conferences around the world. “I worked on different tech issues there, it was a rare and intriguing opportunity.” As a rising 3L, she interned in Washington, D.C. and clerked for Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I worked on an amazing range of issues, but the bread and butter of what we did for the committee was judicial nominations. So you always had that going on, but the judiciary has very broad jurisdiction—over immigration, over intellectual property—and that is why I really wanted to work for Senator Leahy. We worked on sentencing
reform, whistle blower protections, Privacy Act and NSA stuff, and, I got to have my hands in a bunch of really interesting, provocative issues that haven’t been answered yet,” Calabro said. “It was really the coolest job I’ve ever had.” Calabro was given an American flag that had flown over the Capitol. Her family is filled with service members. Her father served as a doctor in the Army, her mother as a nurse during the Gulf War, her grandfather served in Vietnam, and a great uncle died at the Battle of the Bulge. “Working in the Senate made me feel like I was doing something to give back to my country, as my entire family has done,” she said. “Everyone has served in one way or another. I don’t know if I’ll pursue the Judge Advocate General’s Corps or what, but I’ll serve in some capacity. So, we will see how it goes. We’ll see.”
IN N OVA TIV E ST UDE N TS
At Newhouse, she was required to take a communications law class her senior year. They read and studied the Kazaa case and there came the eureka moment. “I thought to myself, ‘that’s it! I’m going to law school,’” Calabro said. “It was my last semester in school so I hadn’t taken the LSAT yet, as I hadn’t planned to go to law school. So I had a weird gap year in Chicago.” Her next move would be to the south and Miami Law, bringing with her the memory of her Kazaa litigation. “It wasn’t that I was just being rebellious and doing it; every single person in my high school did it and I just happened to be the one to draw the short straw. When I got served by Sony and the Record Industry Association of America, I was a minor. My parents looked at it and said, ‘Oh, hell no! We don’t care, we are not fighting it. This is gone as soon as possible.’ So there was no court, it was just settled,” she said. “In my communications law class in college I wondered how could it be that the Constitution should promote the progress of science in the useful arts but at the same time punish those people that are using the new technologies that are promoting the progress of science?” Growing up in a beach town heavily influenced her choice between New York and Miami for law school, but she also had a fascination with
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