Chris Richardson '07
Chris Richardson '07: A Healthy Perspective
Part of being an attorney ... is being able to represent your firm. Part of representing your firm is being involved.
- Chris Richardson
For Chris Richardson ’07, being diagnosed at 15 with bone and lung
cancer was a life-changing experience.
Cancer free for the last 10 years, he describes cancer as “looking at my obituary and saying ‘how do I get as much out of life as possible?’ To me that’s [by] giving back.”
Since high school, Richardson has been doing just that: as a patient-turned-volunteer at Camp Happy Days in his home town of Charleston, South Carolina, where he helps children with cancer; as president of Emory University’s Student Government Association where he advocated for the release of a Chinese labor camp detainee; and now as the leader of the Law School’s Guardian ad Litem (GAL) program and a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society.
“Having cancer made me willing not to be as cautious a person in terms of being involved,” Richardson says. “When you’ve been told that your life is coming to an end, and you become so sick that you’re in a wheelchair, and every bit of what you find to be dignity has been stripped away, and yet you still find a way to smile and be happy and still find joy in life–you come away from something like that with an entirely different perspective on the world. It just makes you want to be involved.”
Richardson attributes his proactive approach to his mother and stepfather, whom he describes as “hardworking people who don’t take crap. They taught me that life isn’t going to be fair, and that you might have to work twice as hard because of where you were born and what you have been through, but you can do it.”
He recalls his mother feeding his appetite for reading with books that recounted stories of American and world history. These stories taught him how much people have sacrificed to make a difference, Richardson says. “I think the least I can do is just the little bit I can contribute in comparison to the great people who have gone out there and trail blazed before me.”
After graduating from Emory in 2003, Richardson went to work with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, where he developed an outreach program aimed at helping cancer patients obtain legal services and assistance. While there, he helped clients obtain Social Security benefits, Medicaid, Medicare, and housing assistance. He doubled the number of cancer patients served by the Legal Aid Society that year. “Working there drove home to me the difference attorneys can make in the lives of people who are sick, who are poor, who need assistance,” he says.
That is the philosophy Richardson brings to his leadership of the GAL program. Calling the five children he represents the brother and sisters he never had, Richardson says he hopes that by working as Guardians ad Litem, his fellow volunteers will realize that “a lot of what we do in law school is in a bubble, that we are sometimes divorced from what is going on in the rest of the world, and that these kids can be general reminders that many people have it worse than we do. In a small way we can make a difference in their lives and also improve upon ourselves.”
Richardson hopes to eventually apply his legal training to community action, continuing to help people with cancer.
“Part of being an attorney is not only getting the brief right and getting the law right, but also it is being able to represent your firm. And part of representing your firm is being involved. You should be out there. You should be a face and be visible in the community,” says Richardson. “My goal is to take not only the academic lessons I have learned here at Duke, but also the social lessons and apply them in my life and say ‘I am not just going to write a brief, I am going to represent you in a holistic fashion.’”
Until then, Richardson plans to continue “giving back” through his volunteer work and other activities. He is involved with Moot Court and the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, is among a group of students working with Professor Erwin Chemerinsky on a Fourth Circuit appellate case involving a defendant who may have received ineffective counsel, and recently organized an event honoring Law School staff. Other than that, he plans to “take each day as it is.”
“Having cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me ... it helps you keep everything after that in perspective.”