FEATURE
best story relating the facts to the law is the one who wins. It was a more or less natural progression from my interest in writing to my interest in the law.” Besides, Adam says, despite his family’s writing heritage, he’s aware that very few people are able to make a living as writers. In the creative writing world, it’s difficult to get ahead because unless someone else has taken a risk on you, no one else is going to even look, he says. “I was warned by friends that the things I learned about writing in my creative writing classes don’t have much application to legal writing. The purposes and styles of legal and creative writing are very different. I have had to learn a new style.” And there’s more than just words in Adam’s blood connecting him with the study of law. His ancestry is part Cherokee. “I have always been intrigued by events such as the Trail of Tears. My ancestors were there, forced out of Georgia. The Cherokees did it right. They took their case to the Supreme Court and eventually won, but President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the ruling,” Adam says. “When the U.S Government wants something, the treaties are enforced. When the Native Americans want something, the treaties are put on the back burner. You can’t tell whether the U.S. views Native Americans as a conquered people or a sovereign people. The government doesn’t want that question
4 Io wa Advocate Summer 2008
answered. Right now, I am interested in Native American law and intellectual property law. “Being a creative writer at heart leads me to an interest in the question of who owns ideas. Especially with the rapid developments in technology, what seems to be a more important question is at what point does an idea become property? As long as that idea remains in your head, it’s clearly yours, but once you share it, it is in the heads of the person who heard it and then the person who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it. You hear an idea and as you think about it, it grows and changes. “At some point, society wants that idea to be attributed and owned. Where is that exact moment? And when does the ownership end? It seems ridiculous to me that the copyright law is extended every time Mickey Mouse is about to become eminent domain.” Iowa seemed a natural choice to Witosky for law school. He grew up in Des Moines and went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. “Coming from that small town to Iowa City is a huge change,” Adam says. “For most Iowans, at least for those who did not grow up in Des Moines, Iowa City is big, and there are lots more choices to be made here. Not that law school leaves a lot of free time.” “I might have gone to school in Des Moines, but if I were there, I’d know where
all my friends were when I was studying and there was always the risk that I would get tired of studying, find my friends, and then not be as well prepared for class the next day,” he says, only half-joking. “In truth, I chose Iowa because of its excellence. If there was one ranking that made up my mind, it was the law school ranking by library done by former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas E. Brennan,” Adam says. Brennan ranks Iowa’s library third behind only Harvard and Yale. “He does his own rankings of American law schools, trying to avoid subjective criteria,” Adam says. “Iowa ranks high in most of his measure of the top 20 law schools in the country.”
n Amanda Bahena Amanda Bahena has lived and studied in Canada, Mexico, England, and the United States, and her abiding interest is in international trade and economics. It’s hard to imagine an educational path less likely to lead a young person back to Iowa, but it has. Amanda grew up in Sioux Center, Iowa and attended Iowa State University as a National Merit Scholar. In her junior year, she took a semester’s exchange trip to Mexico that grew into a yearlong stay.
“I took Spanish for two years in high school thinking I wouldn’t have to take it in college. I hated it, but I got it done,” Amanda says. When she got to Iowa State, she found that she needed three years of Spanish to graduate. For most of her academic career, Amanda has allowed her intellectual interests to guide her career path. If she wasn’t interested in a subject or she encountered something more interesting, she took a new path. Interestingly, here she made a life-changing decision to continue with the study she most disliked. “I took Spanish for one more year. My teacher in that class was putting together a semester-long exchange program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I’d always wanted to study abroad, but never thought of Mexico as a possibility. I decided to go on this exchange and at the end of three months, I was conversational in Spanish, but not fluent. The more I studied Spanish, the more I loved it. I loved it so much that I decided to stay another semester. I took classes and I volunteered in the Mexican state’s human rights department in Cuernavaca. It was very interesting. Amanda had originally wanted to be a teacher when she went off to Iowa State, but she was pulled toward journalism and politics. “While writing about politics, I was drawn to the legal side of things. In Mexico, I became interested in international business, economics, and trade,”