N.U.'s Legal Eagles

PRACTICING LAW
ON THE ALASKAN FRONTIER

By David Heilbroner

Even at midnight, the summer vistas in Nome seem limitless. Part of the effect comes from the twenty-four-hour-a-day sun that makes for three-month-long days. But the open-ended feeling here springs from more than a trick of light and a northern latitude. It comes from the very essence of this most remote, forbidding, and perplexing of all the American states. A place where citizens watch presidential elections with a four-hour time lag, where bears routinely wander into shopping malls, where fur-lined jockstraps in store windows don't draw stares, and where the motto on every license plate reads: The Last Frontier.

Kirsten Bey, a 1984 N.U. School of Law graduate, has lived here in Nome, a former gold rush town just below the Arctic Circle, for two and a half years now. Her newly built house, located at the furthest edge of this spare outpost-population 4,500-is one of the last traces of civilization before pristine wilderness resumes its roll. It is a starkly beautiful place. Her rear window looks out on neither mountains nor forests nor salmon streams-the classic Alaskan postcard views-but a subtly undulating expanse of Arctic tundra. The land, while green in summer, supports virtually no trees and seems to extend to the end of the earth. In the winter, covered in snow, it flows to infinity like a frozen white desert.

Like much of Alaska, Nome has long been a place of both danger and opportunity. In the nineteenth century, panners found gold mixed in with the sand right on the beaches by the Bering Sea. Claim-stakers quickly built up a thriving if tenuous community. But then as now, black and grizzly bears roamed the hills. Moose charged unaware hikers. More worrisome still came the prospect of straying just a few miles beyond a hillock and losing all sense of direction. There are still no roads connecting Nome to the rest of Alaska and virtually no neighboring villages. If you begin to travel in the wrong direction, the likelihood is that you will remain lost forever in a wilderness that can resemble a hall of mirrors, receding identically in every direction.

Unorthodox lawyer that she is, Bey thrives on the ever-present challenge presented by life in the bush. "I was interested in the idea of living out in the woods, in a harsh environment-the cold, the winter-and being self-sufficient. Not having running water, not having electricity on demand," she says.

During her workdays, Bey is a career public defender devoted to helping the indigent in this desolate region. And while Nome may seem an unlikely place for a lawyer to call home, the entire state of Alaska turns out to be something of a lawyer's paradise.

Alaska occupies an area the size of the entire Eastern time zone of the United States, with a population roughly that of the city of Boston, or, more specifically, 600,000 people living on 420 million acres. The region's astronomical royalties from natural resources-deposits of gold, oil, and copper-allow the state to pay its residents a yearly bonus of more than $1,000 apiece just for living there. And where there is wealth and land, lawyers are not far behind.

There are some 2,200 lawyers practicing in the state, giving it, I was told, one of the highest per-capita percentages of attorneys in the nation. Yet true to its quirky nature, the state has no law school and must import legal talent from the Lower Forty-Eight, or the Outside, as the contiguous United States is known. Adding to that unlikely mix, Northeastern University School of Law is a disproportionately powerful presence, represented by such luminaries as Dana Fabe, L'76, the first woman to occupy a seat on the Alaska Supreme Court.

N.U. law grads "are at the point where we can control a lot of things in the bar. It's just been an unbelievable opportunity," says Jeff Lowenfels, L'75. At forty-eight, he is both a quintessential Alaskan success story and also the very first Northeastern lawyer to carve out a niche here. Many graduates are now attracted to the state for obvious reasons: natural beauty, lucrative job opportunities, well-funded public-interest jobs, a tight alumni network. In all, fifty-five grads have made the trek four time zones and some 4,000 miles from Huntington Avenue. Lowenfels paved the way.

"I was in the summer session" back at N.U., he recalls, "and I met this fabulous woman. On our fourth date, I took her to the botanical gardens. At three o'clock in the afternoon, with people all over the place, we were held up and I was shot in the neck and robbed by five little kids in a racially motivated attack.

"So as I was lying on the sidewalk breathing through this little hole in my neck, I said to myself, 'Self, you know your mother may want you to be mayor of New York, and you may think about having the nice kind of life your parents had in Scarsdale. But you know what? It's time to get the hell out of here.' And I decided I've got to get as far away as I possibly can without a passport."

In 1972, Lowenfels arrived in the flat, nondescript city of Anchorage for his first co-op job. At the time, the state's commercial center was a city of just 75,000 people on the Cook Inlet, set in what is known as south central Alaska. "It was like a very, very small college town," Lowenfels says. "Everybody involved in anything they want to do, no one stops 'em from doing it."

For Lowenfels, the opportunities proved irresistible. After graduation, he returned to the state and quickly climbed the ranks of a prestigious law firm. After becoming managing partner, he left to become general counsel for a natural gas pipeline company. Two years ago, Lowenfels became its CEO.

"A lot of the guys who were howling when I went back to the law school saying what a great place Alaska is," he says, "are now living here."

The story of Alaska and its lawyers really begins in 1968 when oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of the Beaufort Sea. With fortunes to be made, armies of workers, industrialists, and lawyers flocked to the state. But in order to drill the oil and then pipe it across the state for shipment by tanker, vast sections of land needed to be annexed, and for the most part this land had long been inhabited by native populations. Rather than simply move locals to reservations as had been done in the disastrous "civilizing" of the American West, in 1971 the Nixon administration negotiated an immense contract called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).

Among the first wave of Northeastern graduates to follow Lowenfels's lead northward, Annalee McConnell, L'79, quickly became involved in administering this unprecedented agreement between peoples. "I loved the legal education" at N.U., she recalls, "but I didn't want to be a lawyer. As it happened, the director of the Alaska Native Foundation-the nonprofit agency that dealt with all the issues coming out of ANCSA-hated lawyers, too. I think he figured if he's going to hire a lawyer, he better hire a lawyer who hates lawyers. And that was my first real job here."

As part of ANCSA, corporations were set up by Congress across the state to receive the oil royalties and the land owed to the native population. McConnell remembers that "none of the folks in these really tiny little villages ever had any experience with a cash economy, let alone being shareholders and all this sort of stuff. So I started helping them deal with all the other lawyers and accountants and consultants who had jumped into Alaska to make a bundle of money off the Settlement Act.

"It turned out to be a fabulous job because I got to travel all over the state to native villages that you just don't up and go to. These were places where you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb and it gave me a chance to get to know native people and the issues, which were not easy things for a white person to break into."

In the towns where McConnell worked-places with obscure names like Shaktoolik or Mary's Igloo-an airport meant a strip of plowed field, and locals still kept racks of salmon drying outside their small houses. "I was surprised at how welcoming they were. I would have had a lot of resentment if I had seen how much the white people had screwed me over. I don't think I'd like very many of them. But they really took people as individuals and didn't assume you were like everybody else."

In fact, like many newcomers, McConnell found herself impressed at the quiet dignity and grace of the Alaskan native population. Early on in her career, one of her closest co-workers, an Alaskan native, was killed in a plane crash. A few months later McConnell went to meet the woman's uncle.

"He was an older man of about seventy, an Inupiat speaker. I ended up getting weathered into the village, which is a fairly common experience around here, since you have to travel by small planes much of the time. I stayed at his house for three days waiting for the skies to clear, and I spent a lot of time just sitting with him to have coffee, which is part of what you do in the village. I met a lot of his friends who were older men, and right before I left he gave me two pieces of fossilized ivory. One is the plug that you put in seal bladder you use when harpooning a whale to keep the harpoon afloat. He had found it as a child and it was a very special gift that I'll never forget."

In the following years, McConnell devoted herself to many issues that have shaped the destiny of the state. She helped coastal villagers get bank loans to build twenty-foot skiffs to enable them to break into the lucrative herring fishery business, until then dominated by Seattle-based concerns. She consulted for businesses wanting to recycle and helped Planned Parenthood with its pro-choice program. Most recently, she ran two election campaigns for governor Tony Knowles.

None of which compares with McConnell's current position as director of the Office of Management and Budget for the entire state. With an evident sense of surprise at the velocity of her own career, she looks out the window of her office in Juneau, the state capital, situated in the Alexander Archipelago of southeast Alaska. A blue-gray bay sweeps up to snowy peaks. She laughs: "Here's somebody who's just shown up in the state and a few years later she's director of OMB. It could only happen in Alaska."

Ready avenues to success, seemingly infinite wilderness, and an ancient native population make up the fabric of this highly particularized culture. But even the nether world of crime, it turns out, bears an Alaskan imprint.

Robert Meachum, L'81, practices at the public defender's office in Juneau. The town itself makes a spectacular impression. It sits at the foot of a vertiginous mountainside rain forest clustered with pines and overlooks a deep series of fjords that resemble the fantastic landscapes in the Romantic paintings of Bierstadt. But the view is rarely in evidence. More often a dense, drizzly fog hangs on the crags and peaks like gray linen. In fact, while Juneauvians claim theirs is among the ten most beautiful cities in the world, they will add, if pressed, that the sky is clear only sixty-five days out of the year.

And as state capitals go, Juneau is also particularly tranquil. It has a population of just 30,000. There are about fifty lawyers. Total. The only transportation in and out is by ship or air. On days when the populace is weathered in, people can be seen in coffee shops rereading two-day-old newspapers. "It's pretty much a small town," Meachum concedes, "but that makes for a fairly civil atmosphere among lawyers. I mean, we play hardball in court, but we can't be jerks since our kids go to school together and we might well run into one another at the supermarket that night."

But the practice of law in a state that often feels like a separate nation offers lawyers a unique vantage point on some of the more obscure aspects of daily Alaskan life, specifically crime. Last year, Meachum defended thieves who stole from crab pots and were eventually nabbed in a sting operation. Larceny of crabs may sound petty, but as Meachum tells it, "It wasn't too long ago that people said if you took a deer out of season in Alaska, you'd get more time than for killing someone."

And despite-or rather, because of-Juneau's remoteness, Meachum has seen his share of deadly serious criminal cases. Just a year ago, a stranger from the Outside came to Juneau. He arrived for much the same reason that drew Jeff Lowenfels: to find a faraway locale that doesn't demand a passport.

"This guy came to town and was fishing and ended up staying with a miner," Meachum remembers. "Then one night, he beat him up pretty bad and tortured him, probably to get his PIN number for an ATM card. The guy died when my client stuck a knife down the back of his neck and separated his brain stem."

Meachum soon learned what had brought the man to Juneau. "It turned out he was a serial killer, wanted for one murder in New Jersey, one or two in Ohio, two or three in Oregon. He got ninety-nine years here without possibility of parole, and was extradited and put on death row in Ohio."

Recollections of his client interviews still give Meachum nightmares, but people with dark pasts, he says, are common in the state. "Fugitives from all kinds of situations seem to gravitate here. Alaska has always been to a certain extent kind of a last stop for people, kind of the end of the road. People that don't always fit in elsewhere and people who have burned a lot of bridges come to Alaska to try to get a new life and get back on their feet. Some people are running from things and they end up here where they can hide."

There probably isn't a law school graduate in the country who hasn't entertained the notion of running as far as possible from the shirt-and-tie world of law firms and courthouses. Some Northeasterners answer the call by buying the ticket northward and setting up practice in cities like Anchorage or Fairbanks. But for a handful, the lure of the wild pulls them to an even more remote world, where common law is a foreign concept and the best mode of transportation howls at the full moon.

In 1990, Kirsten Bey had just finished working at the Oregon public defender's office when she attended a public defender's conference in the Alaskan town of Valdez (now infamous for the oil spill that devastated Prince William Sound). There she met an Alaskan lawyer, got to talking, and suddenly found herself facing an unexpected offer: Would she be interested in working with sled dogs?

Until then, Bey knew little about dogs, cared for them even less. She had been bitten as a youth and had never had a dog as a pet. But, tired of practicing in Oregon, she took up the offer. Looking back, she laughs about her naiveté.

"I just figured the dogs were sort of a way to live in the wilderness, that they were like livestock. That they were tied up to their little house, and you fed 'em and you maybe trained and ran 'em. But otherwise that was it. You could just sort of take or leave 'em. I soon found you can't very well leave 'em."

Thus began Bey's journey into what is known as the Alaskan bush. Nome itself is a beautiful if lonely outpost. The town itself looks like a Western movie set with billboard-style storefronts and unpaved roads. Every other building, it seems, is a saloon, most of which are occupied well before noon. The few visitors who come through still pan for gold-often successfully-on the town beach. There are a couple of grocery stores, some restaurants, even a video rental outfit, but otherwise few trappings of the high-tech civilization known as the Outside.

Sled dogs-huskies, naturally, for a Northeastern grad-are among Bey's primary companions here, and more important, her prime modes of winter transportation and recreation. Indeed, dogsledding, or mushing, as it is called, was the only mode of transport from Nome to the interior before the advent of snow machines and airplanes. (The term mushing comes from the French marcher, to go.)

The dogs are friendly, but only to a point. Every year the Alaska newspapers run editorials decrying the death of yet another child who wandered too close to a chained sled dog. Bey, however, seems perfectly at home as her brood jumps around her. And for good reason.

In 1993, she placed her life in their hands as she ran the famous dogsled race known as the Iditarod. The grueling 1,200-mile event lasts between twelve and seventeen days, depending on weather and other hazards that are routinely encountered in the bush. During her run, Bey found herself held up for three days in the town of Unalakleet by bad weather and deep snow. She needed a full seventeen days-sleeping only to give the dogs rest-to complete the run from Anchorage to Nome.

By the accounts of her Northeastern classmates who work in the relatively more civilized cities of Anchorage and Juneau, no other N.U. lawyer has adapted herself to the peculiarities of Alaskan Arctic life as well as Bey. But it isn't just her association with mushing. Even in the relatively mundane world of law, Bey, like many Northeastern law graduates who come to Alaska, faces a world filled with the exotic.

Bey's office itself is spartan: a suite of fluorescently lit rooms she shares with a secretary and an investigator. She comes into work to confront the usual attorney's pile of mail, briefs, Alaska Law Reviews, and Supreme Court slip opinions.

But her job as a public defender requires that she get to know and understand a native population whose contact with big-city life, to say nothing of the Lower Forty-Eight, is virtually nonexistent. The names of the dialects they speak do not fall easily on the western tongue: Aleut, Yupik, and Inupiat. More often than not, it is Bey's task to walk these indigenous peoples through a system of law imposed by a white-dominated government.

"For one thing, the notion of being on time just doesn't mean much to people who basically live a subsistence existence," she says. But there are more serious problems stemming from the immensity of the Alaskan landmass.

Bey's bailiwick covers the Seward Peninsula, an area twice the size of Massachusetts that includes some of the tiniest Eskimo villages in the state. "There is only one village in the entire area besides Nome that's big enough to have a court," she grouses. "There's not a court there, but there is a parttime magistrate, and if we want to have a trial a judge is willing to go there. But everyone else in every one of the other villages has to come to Nome if they want to get their day in court."

She pauses and looks out the window of a truck we are driving down the center of Nome's dusty main street en route to the courthouse. "Well, you can't drive to Nome so that means people have to fly, and it costs $150 to fly round-trip. Is it fair for someone who's accused of a crime to have to pay that just to get to go to court? Here, nobody has any money to fly to court, anyway."

The result is a highly unusual type of justice. In a vast number of cases, witnesses, experts, and even defendants appear via telephone. Their voices emanate from overhead speakers in the courtroom while the other participants speak into special receiver-microphones. At times, Bey says, even the prosecutor appears by phone, creating an eerie disembodied proceeding, one that reflects the complexities of living in a place that has yet to construct a statewide roadway system or build more than a handful of halls of justice. Even the Nome court is actually a federal building leased by the state. And Bey can recall at least one murder she handled where only the defendant was present in a courtroom attended by court officers. The judge, Bey, and prosecution all called in from diverse locales.

"You couldn't do this in a place where everyone doesn't know everybody else," she says. "But then there aren't many lawyers out here in the bush."

The day I visit Bey, she has only a handful of defendants to arraign. That morning, she, the DA, and the judge all stand by, drinking coffee and gossiping for twenty minutes before they enter the courtroom. It feels as if they are a troupe of actors suddenly stepping on stage. And in typically Alaskan style, much of the costuming seems out of character. Bey wears a simple skirt and blouse. The DA has on no tie and below his slacks are a pair of dusty running shoes.

The defendants are predominantly minority. And as with public defenders everywhere, Bey's caseload contains the usual grist-assaults, petty thefts, domestic disputes that have gotten out of hand. But one problem unites these matters in a way foreign to lawyers from the Outside: alcohol. Alcohol has visited a scourge upon the native populations, a phenomenon that may well be exacerbated by the extremes of light that mark the seasonal shifts.

During the summer months, even the southernmost places like Juneau see just four hours of darkness a day (actually a prolonged twilight). Weather forecasts sound like slips of the tongue. On the car radio one afternoon, I hear an announcer predict, "Cloudy skies this afternoon, but clearing and sunny tonight."

Elizabeth Maynar, a summer co-op student on her first Alaskan stint working for the Office of Public Advocacy in Anchorage, says she has been suffering from insomnia. Even locals don't seem to adjust well to the powerful diurnal shifts. People are sleepless in the summer, I hear again and again. In the winter, with only four hours of light, virtually everyone I speak with complains that they have trouble getting out of bed. Annalee McConnell says she suffered from terrible bouts of what is known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. "For months I had to just drag myself out of bed. It was only when I started light therapy, sitting in front of bright lights for twenty minutes a day, did I finally come out of it."

And that may well explain the state's long-standing struggle with alcoholism. A Northeastern co-op student at the Anchorage Office of Public Advocacy puts it this way: "Fishing season isn't long in Alaska. So you're stuck with no light and no employment and a lot of the natives don't necessarily have something to do in the winter. I know that's how we pick up our cases in criminal court. Domestic violence. DUIs. And the fact that the towns have all made alcohol a major issue shows that it's really at the heart of Alaskan concerns."

Many native villages, in fact, have voted themselves entirely dry. There is also a hybrid, known as a "damp town," where alcohol may be possessed privately but not sold. And under either legal schema arises the other typically Alaskan crime: bootlegging, either making hooch out of fruit and sugar or simple importing.

According to Bey, many natives find the entire system a strange means of enforcing social order. "In the bush, a whole lot of people's time is occupied either with getting food and water and wood for heat, or with emptying their 'honey pots,' " the local euphemism for outhouse buckets. "There are almost no stranger-on-stranger crimes. People seem to want to be helpful and respond to authority and to answer questions and oftentimes they implicate themselves. And there seems to be a sense that, 'Well, I fessed up and said I'm sorry and that should be the end of it.' It's sometimes a little difficult to explain that, 'Well, that's not the end of it. That you have to deal with court.' You start from scratch and explain you're considered innocent at that point and the state has to prove it. And that's a foreign concept to many people around here."

In the end, Bey and others who work here feel that, for all the goodwill and efforts to accommodate remarkably different cultures, the Anglo-American justice makes for an uneasy fit with populations who until just a generation or two ago knew only the laws of their elders and where the supreme punishment was banishment.

"It feels like an imposition to me," she says, "particularly with some of the jurisdictions we've imposed. We've said this is the geographical area we're going to cover and we've put this superstructure over the existing environment. That's troublesome. I think people are trying to do some things to make the process more meaningful. But a lot of that is in flux right now."

Flux and dispute, opportunity and wildness, may well be inherent strands in the texture of Alaskan life. Ever since the region's discovery as a source of furs by Russia in the late 1500s, Alaska has drawn adventurers, exploiters, and entrepreneurs (not to mention hucksters, hookers, and assorted unsavories). It has seen waves of Spanish, British, and French invaders before being purchased by the United States in 1867. Only by 1959 was Alaska inducted into statehood. A pipeline-a technological wonder in itself, while also an environmental peril-now runs some 800 miles from the north slope to Valdez. Yet oil giants still battle protectionists for the right to further plumb its deposits.

And for all the attempts at exploitation and civilization, the place remains one of the world's very last untouched Edens, a wilderness virtually unequaled for its stretches of stark, intimidating beauty. Denali (formerly Mount McKinley) National Park contains thousands of square miles of forbidding peaks, the tallest in North America. Immense glaciers press, finger-like, down to icy basins where they calve into brilliant blue icebergs. Moose, bear, salmon, and eagles continue to be common sights.

Meanwhile, the state's infrastructure remains startlingly undeveloped. Roadways are few. Television is a hodgepodge of diverse servers. The largest newspaper is frustratingly slender.

To many lawyers this is, at first, an unattractive prospect.

"I had no interest in going to Alaska until my husband got transferred there by the Coast Guard," says Elise Nacht Boyer, L'88. Until that day, she insists, she had no desire whatever to live in the wilderness. "I'm a Jewish kid from Maryland and Alaska wasn't in my vocabulary. And yes," she adds, "I, too, thought that everyone up here lived in igloos."

Her first impressions were mixed at best. "I got here and found a law library smaller than my living room. I figured attorneys must be committing malpractice every day."

She now lives in the town of Homer, a small marine community ringed by a spectacular (even by Alaskan standards) series of mountain ranges. It is known as "the end of the road," the final stop on the United States highway system. The streets of her neighborhood are frequented by moose. "Town" means a haphazard agglomeration of stores and tourist shacks ending at a spit that extends into a forbiddingly beautiful bay. For a woman who prefers champagne art openings to a hike in mosquito-infested woods, moving to Homer was not an easy transition.

"This wilderness thing is not me," she still says. "Black cocktail dresses are me." Yet to her own surprise, Boyer has become an enthusiast. "We came here and it turned out to be an absolutely lovely community. It was just so much easier than in Boston to walk into a group of new people and come out with twenty new friends."

Another surprise came in the area of legal decorum. "In the five years I worked in a big city, I practiced with some great attorneys but also some real jerks-guys who would hang up on you in the middle of a discovery conference. I mean, I'd think, 'What are you, four years old?' So much of law turned into that, that I wanted to find something different."

In Homer, Boyer started an alternative practice of mediation, where she specializes in divorce, Alaskan style. "A typical phone call," Boyer says, "goes, 'I'm getting divorced, we have four kids, and here's the problem: my husband leaves Friday for six months on the North Slope pipeline or for two months to do halibut fishing. How soon can we meet?'

"No one lives here year-round so a lot of what I do is crisis management. People want you to dissolve a twenty-year marriage in three days. I tell them they'd better wait and think things over, but that kind of problem, I think, is uniquely Alaskan. Never mind how you do visitation when someone is gone six months of the year."

The issues Boyer faces become even more complex when all a couple owns is a fishing boat and an Alaskan fishing permit called an IFQ (individual fishing quota). "You can't fish without a boat, and you can't use the boat for fishing without an IFQ. How on earth can you divide that?"

It has been nearly two years since she came to Alaska and Boyer still sees only a few clients every six months. In a state where every price reflects the transportation costs, somehow she manages to make ends meet, working parttime in an art shop between clients. And while she jokes about her lack of wilderness savvy, the pull of the Outside seems to have weakened.

"We just bought some land nearby," she says. "We're going to build a house there for when we retire." I ask why. She pauses, then explains, "This is a place where there's real freedom. I felt it as soon as I came here. No one is surprised to find out you have a Ph.D. and are pouring cement, or have a law degree and aren't using it. I think it's wonderful. If I had stayed in Boston and dropped law and started working in Kennedy Galleries, my friends would have said, 'Tsk, tsk, poor kid, wasting all that wonderful education-maybe she drinks.' Here, there doesn't have to be any explanation."

In a culture marked by the opportunity to make of life what you will, law graduates with initiative and talent have risen spectacularly.

Alaskan Supreme Court justice Dana Fabe is, perhaps, the archetypal success story. Ironically, she confesses to having had some trepidation about living outside the Lower Forty-Eight in the first instance. "I wanted some adventure and the sense of adventure is, I think, what brings a number of people up here. But I didn't come thinking I would stay."

Her biggest concern at first, she says, involved her legs. "After graduation, I packed my car and drove up along the AlCan [Alaska-Canadian Highway] in a car full of my LeCreuset pots and all these Danskin tights since I imagined my legs would be freezing. And where would I get tights? Of course, when I got here I saw a Nordstrom's right in town."

But while some traces of civilization were in evidence, the legal world Fabe entered was quite unformed. The entire set of State Supreme Court opinions at the time fitted easily on one very narrow shelf, a marked contrast to the wall of cases lawyers must confront in states like New York or Massachusetts. "There were so many issues of first impression that you really got to choose what is the right path for us to take as a state. That was the exciting part of practicing law in Alaska."

Fabe started out as an assistant public defender, work that in most any other state can feel like a backwater devoid of the chance for true advancement. Not so in Anchorage. Within just three and a half years, Fabe found herself appointed acting public defender for the entire state. Her appointment, she admits, had something to do with the small number of attorneys in the state at that time. "Believe it or not, I was one of the senior people in the office," she recollects. "People kind of viewed me as the old lady, even though I was only twenty-nine."

Fabe served as public defender for seven and a half years, leaving only for her next appointment, to the Superior Court. Then in January 1996, she was appointed the first woman on the state's Supreme Court.

She speaks of the issues she has faced, and the tasks she handles, with a remarkable calm and clarity, traits that no doubt helped her rise to the state's preeminent legal post. "There are so many issues that are before us. The issues of active land and tribal sovereignty. Issues like a stand-alone right to privacy in our constitution. It's all very exciting and the Alaskan Supreme Court has never been afraid to interpret our constitution in ways that are different from the federal Constitution or other state constitutions."

Fabe now lives outside Anchorage in what a fellow lawyer termed a "millionaire's log cabin." This architecturally subtle variation on the classic wilderness retreat overlooks the bay and has views of the mountains in two directions. But despite her current prosperity and power, Fabe sees her current position as a natural extension of her work as public defender, a time when, like Robert Meachum or Kirsten Bey, she regularly visited the most isolated villages in the state and represented the destitute.

"Being in Nome, you have such a different sense of things," she says. "But it's just as much a part of the state as Anchorage. And now on the Supreme Court, I have an ability to decide cases that are important to people all over the state, and also to serve people all over the state."

On my last day before returning to the Outside, Fabe threw a potlatch dinner for all the Northeastern lawyers in Anchorage. After eating smoked native salmon and drinking the state's microbrewed beer, the original law pioneer Jeff Lowenfels and I took a stroll on Fabe's immaculate green lawn. Although it was around nine in the evening, the sun was still high in a clear Alaskan sky.

As we talked it became clear that building a powerful Northeastern community in Alaska is not only the culmination of Lowenfels's vision but also the culmination of an era in the law school's expansion to national stature.

"I remember as a student walking into the dean's office-this was a guy named Dean Sherman," Lowenfels says, "and I said, 'I want to travel to the four corners of the earth.' And he said, 'Sit down, I love you.' Because everybody back then wanted to stay in Boston."

Obviously, all that has changed. "Just look around you," Lowenfels goes on, gesturing at the gathering of graduates. I recognize a federal defender who occupies an office with a stunning view of the mountains, a partner in a small firm who routinely takes eight weeks of paid vacation a year, a woman from the class of '81 who is the executive director of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights, and a Superior Court judge. Around them all spreads a majestic expanse of bay backgrounded by snowcapped mountains.

"None of us in our wildest dreams would have imagined we'd have all this. And we would, none of us, have been here, no question about it, if it hadn't been for Northeastern University Law School."

In an unexpected but very real sense, Alaska and N.U. School of Law have proved a natural fit. David Hall visited Anchorage in 1994, not long after assuming his role as the school's current dean.

"Alaska has always symbolized the idea of a new frontier, and that notion seems manifested in the way our alums have shaped the profession there," Hall says. "There were people who wanted something different from the [standard] practice of law, and who wanted to push themselves in some unique way. They have formed a community of people who reflect the best values of what the practice of law should be about. And that is what the law school has always encouraged."

Many of the original N.U. pioneers, like Jeff Lowenfels, admit that life in Alaska has changed, that the legal arena is busier now, and the competition tighter. They wonder at how Anchorage has gotten so big, so fast. And they grouse good-naturedly about the dark winters and the insomniac summers. But what is more telling than these minor cavils, none of these pioneers seems to long for a job back in the Lower Forty-Eight.

David Heilbroner, L'84, a freelance writer in New York, wrote about criminal justice graduates working for the U.S. Customs Service in the September 1996 issue.

Related Links:

N.U. School of Law
Alaska Bar Association
State of Alaska
Alaska Court System
The Milepost, a popular Alaska travel guide. Includes an answer to the question "What's the big deal about Alaska?"