[Editor’s Note: For the seventh year, The National Jurist recognizes 10 law students who have made outstanding contributions to their schools or communities this past year. To determine the Law Students of the Year, we asked each law school to nominate one student. We then whittled the list down to 10, which was not an easy task. All were featured in the Spring 2022 issue of The National Jurist magazine.]
Katherine Hanson
Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology
Class of 2022
By her own account, Katherine Hanson has been managing a landslide of good news lately.
Her recent accolades include a scholarship from the Women’s Bar Foundation of Illinois to recognize her work to help women in the legal community. She plans to donate a portion of her $10,000 prize to a nonprofit she co-founded called JD & Family. It offers networking and financial support to law students nationwide who are juggling law school and family responsibilities.
Hanson’s path to law school — and her focus on labor and employment law — was paved with her own experiences as an employee and business owner. She was a hairstylist, a hair product educator and sales manager, and eventually a hair salon owner for a decade before pursuing her law degree.
She was motivated by the stories she heard from hair salon clients again and again. They often hid their roles as parents from their employers to avoid discrimination. Women in executive roles were getting paid less than those they supervised. And working parents were often pushed to gig jobs for their flexible schedules, at a time in their lives when they could really use employment benefits.
Hanson, a single mother herself, recalled: “All of that made me think, ‘I need to go to law school. I need to know how the system works. Are there protections or are there not?’”
At Chicago-Kent, Hanson started a student organization called Parents and Caregivers. It now has dozens of members, including students caring for grandparents and parents raising young children.
The organization recently ran a clothing, toy and feminine product drive for The Women’s Treatment Center, a Chicago-based social service organization.
Nearly 15% of Chicago-Kent’s student body are part-time evening students, many of them working parents.
“I see there are places where parenting students need more resources,” Hanson said.
Hanson, who is a first-generation college graduate, will graduate this spring.
“The biggest driving force behind what I do, especially during the pandemic, is I really want more parents to have visibility,” she said. “I can produce and be a parent. If you want to become an attorney and you have the drive, you’ll find a way.”
—Jennifer McEntee contributed to this story.
Comments (2)
Congratulations, headed that direction!
This was so inspirational that I would like to be part from Fl.