Category: Space law

Goodbye 2023!

2023 was a really terrible year. On the list of terrible things we have major knee surgery, another novel failing to get a book deal, a really upsetting reading slump, Neutron making it clear he’s about ready to retire, my mom being diagnosed with brain cancer, and more. It’s been a rough time, and I can’t wait for 2024 to start and hopefully move in a more positive direction.

But there were some good things that happened in 2023, and I’d like to focus on those right now.

I have a wonderful, supportive group of friends and writing buddies who I honestly could not have gotten through this year without. And this year I really strengthened and developed my friendships with some of my coworkers. I feel like I have an army around me holding me up, and I couldn’t be more happy to have all of them in my life.

I also successfully branded myself as the person in the office with all the space clothes, and I’ve got even more coming for 2024! A silly thing but a good thing. Everyone should have galaxy dresses.

My job has been fabulous about letting me telework from home, so I’ve been able to spend so much more time with my mom than I would have otherwise. We have had so many small adventures in the last few months and built so many precious memories.

I wrote a new book this year. It was a deeply personal book about the first time a friendship ends, but it’s also about prejudice and inclusivity, and I’ve thrown in some vampires, selkies, weerebears, and dragons for fun. The draft needs a lot of work, and I’m currently revising to add more actual plot to balance out all the feelings, but I’ve grown a lot as a writer because of this project, and I think I’ll be really proud of this book in the end. If I ever finish it.

I also started writing another book this fall, which I’m calling my destress project and which has done wonders for my mental health and my love of writing. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in 2024.

And I had two short stories published in 2023, which I completely forgot about in my first draft of this post! “Duet for a Soloist” was published in Electric Spec, and “Where No One Sleeps” was published in Andromeda Spaceways. I’m really proud of both of these stories and so glad I got to share them with you this year!

Despite the reading slump, I also read a total of forty-five books this year. Twenty of them were new books, and twenty-five were rereads. Here are my favorites:

  • The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
  • Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn
  • Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum
  • Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel: The Ultimate Guide to Writing a YA Bestseller by Jessica Brody
  • Don’t Want to be Your Monster by Deke Moulton
  • The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin
  • Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways From Fascism to Dolce Vita by Karima Moyer-Nocchi
  • The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan

I have added these books to my book recs page, and I will have more detailed thoughts about them soon, I hope!

As for what’s coming next in 2024? I don’t know, and I’m not going to set any goals for myself right now. I have plans for my blog and books and short stories I want to write, but I’m just going to keep doing my best with everything.

So happy New Year! Here’s to a 2024 full of light and love and words!

Summer 2018 Part Two: Space Law and Space Lasers

Last week, I talked about the first half of my summer and my internship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now I’m going to talk about the second half of my summer and my internship at Analytical Space, Inc. First, though, I’m going to back up and tell you about space law.

Since my post a few months ago about why I want to go into space law, a lot of you have asked me what exactly space law is. Lucky for you, I was expecting this response, and I did in fact promise a post about this. So here is my quick and dirty—dare I say nebulous?—explanation of space law. (All space puns are 100% intended.)

When I say space law is nebulous, I mean two things. One, it’s kind of fuzzy. And two, it is still very much in its infancy.

Quick astronomy lesson for you: A nebula is a cloud of dust and gas surrounding a baby star.

A baby star like this little guy! Picture shows Neutron as a puppy sitting in front of a white and blue background. He is all head and paws.

Sorry, there was a picture of me and Neutron Star, and this picture of baby Neutron, in Seeing Eye’s quarterly magazine, and I couldn’t resist sharing it with you.

But seriously, nebulae are nurseries for stars and solar systems. A nebula is a vast cloud of interstellar dust, hydrogen, helium, and other ionized gases. The gas, dust, and other matter in the nebula clump together, gravity starts to do its thing, there’s some spinning action, and eventually the clump becomes dense enough to form stars. The remaining material, through a process called accretion, forms planets and other objects. This is how our own solar system and our own planet were formed. Cool, right?

So space law is nebulous in every sense of the word. It is fuzzy and confusing, and there’s no simple way to define it, but that’s because it is still being formed. Space law has been around since the USSR launched Sputnik in the 1950s, but as far as legal fields go, space law is pretty young.

Okay, you say, but what is it? The oversimplified answer is space law is the legal framework for anything to do with outer space. That legal framework is being built as we speak. I’ve heard that within ten years, space law is going to be the next big thing in the legal world. Which is why I’m trying to get aboard this rocketship now.

The way I understand it, space law is happening in multiple orbits in the U.S. First, there are the international treaties and agreements that govern what nations can do in outer space. Then, there are the federal agencies, like NASA, which are doing things in outer space. There are the federal agencies like NOAA, FAA, FCC, and the Department of State, which are creating regulations for what can be done in outer space. And finally there are all those new commercial space companies (you know, the ones sending cars to Mars). This is obviously not a complete picture, but it’s a basic outline.

There are five international treaties and a slew of memoranda of understanding between countries which make up the international law governing outer space. The gist of these international agreements is that outer space cannot be claimed by any one country, and space is only to be used for peaceful purposes. There are also agreements on rescuing astronauts, liability for damages caused by objects launched into outer space, and of course agreements governing the international space station.

On the domestic level, there are a whole bunch of federal agencies doing work in space. There’s NASA, of course, which runs the U.S. space program. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates weather satellites. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulates launch vehicles, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates radio frequency spectrum use (I’ll explain that more in a minute). There are more—Department of State, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NIST, and more.

Finally, there are all the private space companies, which are doing everything from sending cars to Mars and launching inflatable modules for the International Space Station, to operating weather, GPS, and safety system satellites and conducting experiments on new medicines in microgravity. There is a lot of really cool stuff happening up in space, guys. The private space industry is growing very quickly, and this is one of the big reasons space law is growing so much as a field. The growing private space industry raises a lot of questions that will need to be answered. For example, no one can own bodies in space (like the moon or Mars or asteroids), but what about resources that could be extracted from asteroids by asteroid mining companies? And, on a simpler note, all these new space companies will need lawyers to do regular lawyerly things like drafting contracts and negotiating agreements and litigating disputes and such.

At the end of June, I left NIST and returned to Cambridge. I moved back into my apartment, returned to my habit of buying ice cream in Harvard Square every day (only kidding, I got myself down to once a week), and started my second internship at Analytical Space. Analytical Space is a small startup in Cambridge building an in-space data relay service using satellites about the size of shoe boxes. Basically, everybody has satellites up in space, but it’s really hard for these satellites to get data down to the ground, because as you all know, 70% of the world is water, and as you probably don’t know (because I didn’t) satellites need to connect to a specific ground terminal to get their data down to Earth. So Analytical Space is planning to put a bunch of satellites up in space to act like cell towers and connect other satellites with the ground much faster. And my favorite part, they’re using lasers to do it. I repeat: space lasers.

Right after I got here, our first satellite was deployed from the International Space Station, and we’ve been testing everything and getting ready for tests with customers. I’ve been helping with the regulatory side of that, which mainly means working with the FCC regulations. Which brings me back to the spectrum regulations I mentioned earlier.

Think back to high school science class and the electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves to gamma rays and all that stuff in between, including the rainbow. All communications take place on the electromagnetic spectrum. The FCC regulates how the spectrum is used and makes sure that no one is interfering with anyone else. This is why radio stations broadcast at different frequencies. Basically, the FCC is trying to minimize those awkward spots where you’re hearing two radio stations at once, except they’re not just doing it for radio stations. They’re doing it for satellites too. This is a very simplified version of what’s going on, but it’s the general idea. For the past two months, I’ve been learning how all this works, getting everything ready to get FCC approval for our beta tests, and drafting comments on the FCC’s proposed regulations for small satellites.

Apart from spending the last two months being thoroughly amazed and getting to geek out about cool space things, I’ve really enjoyed getting experience at a startup and seeing how the private space industry works. The people are all a lot of fun too. We had a big party to celebrate our first satellite’s deployment, and the interns had a Dungeons and Dragons night, and it’s been a really great experience on the whole. I’m going to be continuing part time at Analytical Space through the fall semester, or until 3L eats me.

So that’s what I was up to for the second half of my summer. I’m going to go enjoy the last few days before I have to crack the law books again, but I’ll be back next week with my August reading roundup and to talk about how I overcame my writer’s block this summer.

Summer 2018 Part One: Adventures in Standards, Technology, and Maryland

It’s hard to believe it, but summer is drawing to an end. In less than two weeks, I’ll be starting my third and final year of law school (cue simultaneous terrified screaming and joyful dancing). But before I dive back into school, I want to talk about my summer. And what a summer it’s been.

Summer in law school is about four months long. That’s plenty of time to have a fulfilling internship and to take some time off. Or, if you’re like me, it gives you time to do two internships and squeeze in half a vacation where you can. I started working the Monday after finals ended, and I’m still working now. In fact, I’m continuing at this second internship through fall semester, so I’m never really stopping. A few people have commented, and I’ve made these comments myself, that I planned this poorly and should have built more of a break into my summer, but I’m really glad I did it this way. I wanted to get a lot of experience out of this summer, and that’s what I did.

I’m going to talk about my summer in three blog posts. Otherwise it would be one crazy long rather scattered blog post. In this post, I’m going to talk about my first internship at the Office of the Chief Counsel of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In a few days, or next week, or whenever I get to it, I’m going to talk about my second internship at Analytical Space. I’m also going to talk about what exactly space law is in that post, because I know I’ve been promising that since I wrote this post a few months ago. Finally, in the third post,  I’m going to talk about how I overcame my writer’s block and my strategies for continuing to write once school starts again. That’s the plan, at least. So let’s get started.

Right after finals, I took a road trip down to Gaithersburg, Maryland to start my first internship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST. I had never heard of NIST before this year, and I was a little nervous about the whole thing. I’d had a hard time finding housing, too. All in all, I wasn’t looking forward to two months in what I saw as middle-of-nowhere Maryland, and thanks to my experiences in Italy, I hate commuting by bus. But it turned out to be a really great experience.

It was everything I could have wanted from an internship, and more.

First of all, I got to do some really cool legal work. There was the standard legal research and  memo writing, but it was on topics I found really interesting, like Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation and how it impacted the federal government, or how different aspects of government function, like appropriations from congress and delegation of certain powers to federal agencies. I also got to do some things I’ve never done before. I wrote two pieces of draft statutory language to amend NIST’s authorization bill (the law that gives NIST power to do things), and those were presented to Congress for revising. What happens to them next is anyone’s guess. I also got to draft a response appealing the denial of a patent. Finally, I got to do some things that all the NIST lawyers get to do—reviewing policy directives and notices of opportunities for federal funding (basically notices for federal grants), and it was really interesting to see how that process worked. I did a lot of interesting legal work. I was challenged, and I learned a lot of new things. And if I wasn’t sure about my choice to go into space law, I was absolutely positively sure after working at NIST.

It wasn’t just all the cool legal stuff that made my experience great. I really liked the people I was working with, and there was a great office environment. People were busy, but it never felt stressful, and people were always laughing. Neutron made a lot of new friends, of course. He liked to camp out under my desk, but whenever someone was walking past in the hall, he stuck his head out the door and was like “Hey, hey, you forgot to pet me!” We also got to meet attorneys from other NIST offices, and we even got to have lunch with an attorney from NOAA, which is one of the jobs I’m applying for after law school (cross your fingers for me). I also got to take a tour of the Capitol with other legal interns from the Department of Commerce.

Yes, I was still in the middle-of-nowhere Maryland, and yes the bus system did leave something to be desired (I could get to work in the morning and from work in the afternoon, but that was all, and don’t get me started on the times when the system that announced the stops was broken), but I made it work. The other attorneys gave me rides if it was pouring rain so I didn’t have to get all wet getting to work. I was living with three housemates, so I wasn’t on my own on the weekends. There was a nice mile loop around my neighborhood where I could walk with Neutron in the evenings. I got a lot of writing done, and I mean a lot (more on that in part three of my summer).

And I finally sucked it up and got a Lyft account so I could venture out if I wanted to. This was actually a pretty big deal for me. I haven’t talked about it on here, but I’ve been pretty nervous about ridesharing services, because I’ve heard so many horror stories about what happens to people with guide dogs when they try to use them. Best case scenario, it seemed to me, the driver would simply drive away when they saw you: Worst case scenario, they’d get out of the car to yell at you that you can’t come with them and end up hitting you, or they’d take you in their car, but stop under a bridge somewhere, mug you, and leave you stranded god knows where. My philosophy on travel is that I want to get places on my own two feet, or using public transportation, even if it takes me longer. But in Gaithersburg, if I wanted to go anywhere on the weekends that wasn’t this mile loop around my neighborhood (and you can only go in circles so many times before you get dizzy), I needed to take a Lyft. And so I did. I met some friends from Kenyon at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, and I went to Silver Springs a couple times to have lunch with them and for a board game night. The worst that happened was a really awkward conversation in which a driver asked me a bunch of questions about being blind because she didn’t know anyone who “has the same problem as you.” But compared to being mugged or stranded, this was just fine. (Note, taking a Lyft has not been so easy in Boston.)

I realize that I haven’t actually told you what NIST is or what it does. This was sort of deliberate, because I didn’t realize the full extent of NIST’s work until my second to last day, when I got to go on a tour. Since I was splitting my summer between two internships, I started and ended my work at NIST earlier than most other legal interns at the federal government, so I missed the tour for the legal interns from the department of Commerce. But I got to join a tour for a group of middle and high school science teachers who had won grants. It was a ton of fun.

NIST is a federal agency, part of the Department of Commerce. It’s basically a giant government lab. The science kind, not the wagging kind. There are scientists from all over the world inventing things (hence the patent project I worked on), or working inn new and better ways to standardize everything from peanut butter to plumbing components. One of my housemates was doing something with neutrons (the subatomic particle, not my doggy), and another roommate was working on how to 3D print metal. So lots of cool stuff.

I think the thing NIST is most famous for is the standard peanut butter.  I don’t mean that this is the peanut butter from which all peanut butters are born. I mean that NIST makes a jar of peanut butter, and using their super special scientific measuring tools, the NIST scientists figure out how much fat, how many carbohydrates, and how much other stuff is in the peanut butter. Then, they sell the standard peanut butter to companies who make peanut butter, and the peanut butter companies can use their super special scientific measurement tools to look at the NIST peanut butter. If they get the same results as NIST, they know their measurements are right, and they can measure their own peanut butter and put all the correct info on the labels. If they get different results, they know they have to recalibrate their super special scientific measurement machines. NIST doesn’t just do this for peanut butter. You name it, NIST standardizes it.  there was even standard air and standard water, used to test machines that measure pollution.

On the tour, we got a presentation from a scientist working in a lab where they did temperature and thermometer standards. It was a fascinating presentation, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember many of the finer points because it was about two months ago and I didn’t take notes. But the really cool thing was that all around this lab, there were these tubes containing different elements at their triple-point. They were keeping these tubes at precise temperatures and pressure, so that in each tube, at the same time, the element was in its solid, liquid, and gaseous state. They passed around the triple-point cells for water and tin. Jameyanne holding a triple-point cell for water, a glass cylinder containing solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous water vapor.The picture on the right is me holding the triple-point cell for water. It’s a glass tube, with ice at the bottom, water in the middle, and gas at the top. This was definitely one of those times when I was mourning the fact that I didn’t become a scientist, because soooo cooool!!!! But there’s plenty of time to become a scientist later if I want to, once I’ve paid off the law school student loans.

I spent eight weeks at NIST. I was so busy and I did so much that the time just flew by. It felt like one minute I was learning my way around the campus, and the next I was saying goodbye. This was hands-down the best legal internship I’ve had so far, and now I can’t wait to finish law school and start practicing science and space law.

What Disability Rights Mean to Me

I’ve talked to a lot of people about this already, but for those who don’t know, I’ve decided to pursue a career in space law after law school. When I tell people this, I get two different reactions.

 

Either: That sounds so cool! … What is it?

 

Or: What happened to disability rights? You’d be so good at that.

 

Let’s set aside the first reaction for now. I’ll come back to what space law is in a future post—I promise. Today, I want to talk about that second reaction. What happened to disability rights? And the follow-up comments that I’d be so good at that and it’s really important.

 

In true Jameyanne’s blog fashion, let’s back up. Believe it or not, I started thinking about law school about three-and-a-half years ago. I’d been in Italy for about a month, and I was already pretty sure that I didn’t want to be a teacher. I was invited to a dinner at the local chapter of the Lions Club, because this chapter was involved in fundraising for a guide dog school in Milan, and they’d heard about the blind girl walking around Assisi with her guide dog and wanted to see her in real life. So I went to this dinner, and when I successfully  cut up my own chicken, everyone at the table applauded. I kid you not. They applauded.

 

I got back to my apartment at about two in the morning, exhausted and frustrated to the point of tears. It had been a long, difficult month, filled with countless incidents just like this. The people who screamed at me on the bus for having the nerve to leave my apartment by myself. The clerks who tried to stop me entering their stores. The head of the school for the blind who wouldn’t let me volunteer to help teach the students skills for independent daily living—like pouring liquid or getting toothpaste on the toothbrush without making a mess—because, and I quote, “they can’t do that.”

 

So here I am, at two in the morning, tired, homesick, definitely in culture shock, confused because I’m six months out of college and I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, and furious because I just want to cut up my chicken without people clapping. And I think to myself, you know, self, you could make a difference here, if you really want to. You could go to law school and become a disability rights lawyer and make a difference here, or back in America, or anywhere. You might wonder why law school was the first thing I came up with for a way to make a difference, but actually I’d been told by my parents and our family friend/my special education advocate, Eleanor, that I would make a great lawyer. And I’d actually been fighting against this idea for years. But here I was, seriously contemplating it.

 

Granted, I was seriously contemplating it at what was now 2:30 AM, so I took that contemplation with a large pinch of salt. But I couldn’t shake the idea, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. So I spent the next year volunteering at the New Hampshire Disability Rights Center, which I loved, while I studied for the LSAT, took the LSAT, applied to law schools, got accepted to law schools, and decided where I wanted to go. And then I started law school.

 

Law school,  if you don’t know this already, is literally the worst. I have never worked so hard and felt so stupid. I’ve heard this from a lot of friends in grad school for other fields, so it may not be exclusively a law school thing. It took me less than two weeks to start questioning all my life choices and berating myself for letting my crazy 2:30 AM ideas get me into this mess. But I stuck with it, because everyone said there was a steep learning curve, and I’d only been doing this for two weeks. This was nothing like what I’d been doing at the DRC, but of course I had no legal training when I was there. What if the lawyers were spending all their time doing what I was doing in law school now? Could I do this for the rest of my life? So at some point, I asked my resident advisor if this was what it was like to be a lawyer. He said no, not really. Being a real lawyer was more like what we were doing in my legal research and writing course—applying cases and statutes to new problems—than what we were doing in my black letter law classes—reading a lot and analyzing a zillion cases that all said a zillion different things. This advice helped a lot, because I was enjoying my legal research and writing class better than anything else so far.

 

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t doing the right thing here. I just wasn’t totally happy with the idea of doing disability rights anymore. There were a lot of reasons for this.

 

First, I knew I didn’t want to litigate or work with individual clients. I was more interested in broader policy issues. I wanted to go into the federal government and make a bigger difference. But then the 2016 election happened. I don’t want to get political, but civil rights and the federal government became much less certain after that. Our teachers advised us not to give up on federal government work if that interested us, because the federal government was going to need good lawyers now more than ever. But the idea that, if you worked for the federal government, what you were defending or choosing not to defend, what policy you had to promote, could change so radically overnight, shook me. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious to me until I saw it happen. And I didn’t know what to do with it. If I didn’t want to work defending individual clients, and if I didn’t want to litigate, and if I wasn’t sure about working at the federal government, where did that leave me?

 

I spent most of second semester feeling like I had no clue what I was doing. I toyed with the idea of going into literary law and being some kind of literary agent/lawyer thing. And while that seemed like it would nicely tie everything I’d done up to this point together, I just couldn’t get really excited about it. When I got my internship at the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights in Boston, I thought education law might be what I’m interested in. I was interested in education—why I’d decided to teach in Italy rather than research—and I’m passionate about all children getting an equal education. See any of my rants about Braille literacy and you’ll get the point. And the way the attorney who interviewed me described the Department of Ed, it seemed like a really good fit with my interests. But within the first few weeks at that internship, I knew that this, too wasn’t right. I wasn’t sure if education law was right for me or not—unfortunately I wasn’t doing much legal work because the office was so unclear about what it was supposed to be doing after the election—but I knew that in general this kind of federal enforcement office wasn’t for me. Basically, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Ed makes sure that any school receiving federal funds is following the federal antidiscrimination laws. So, if there’s alleged discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or disability, OCR does a review to make sure the school is complying with the federal laws. But, to give one example they used during orientation, if you have a really small rural school that’s receiving very little federal money, the school can just decide they don’t want the federal money and then they don’t have to comply with the federal laws. When I asked, “But where does that leave the student?” the attorney basically replied that, as sucky as it is, the Office for Civil Rights doesn’t have power to do anything about it if the school isn’t taking federal funds. And this really bothered me. I know I know, I’m a walking contradiction. I don’t want to litigate for individual clients, but when I’m working for the agency that’s making sure the law is upheld in a broader context, I’m upset by the idea that a hypothetical student could be discriminated against and there’s nothing we could do about it. And again, this left me… Where?

 

So that’s my first reason for being uncertain about doing disability rights. I just wasn’t  sure I wanted to do it. I wasn’t sure I’d be happy doing it.

 

My second reason is tied pretty closely to my first reason, and that’s that it just seemed like it would be exhausting, particularly in today’s political climate. It felt like everywhere I turned, I was hearing about activist burnout. And let’s be honest, I face disability discrimination pretty often myself, almost on a daily basis, even here in America. If someone on the subway isn’t insisting he’ll pray for god to fix me, someone else is shouting “Oh my god, she’s blind!” If I’m not being stopped from entering a restaurant and asked to prove that Neutron is a service dog—illegal, by the way—then someone is seizing my arm and attempting to drag me and Neutron across a street when I didn’t want to go that way thanks very much. I’ve had cashiers in the law school cafeteria question whether Neutron is a service dog, for crying out loud. I’ve had people refuse to let me get on elevators with them because they’re afraid of my dog. And then there are all those pesky new airline policies about service dogs (there’s another post about emotional support dogs coming, let me tell you). And this might be a standard week for me. I try to be polite about it all, but I’m only human, and it’s frustrating. I swear the next time someone asks if Neutron is a guide dog is going to get the response, “Yes, I’m blind. I can take out my fake eye to prove it if you insist.” The idea of working forty hours a week on this sort of thing, and then having to live it myself is pretty unappealing. Reason number three really didn’t help with this either.

 

Reason number three is that from the moment I started law school, anyone who met me, whether at the law school or not, assumed I was going to do disability rights. Conversations invariably went like this: “Oh, you’re going to law school? And you’re blind? So you’re going to do disability rights, right?” And this drove me nuts. Just so you know, I absolutely hate it when people assume things about me just because I’m blind. For example, in sixth grade a friend told me I couldn’t learn to make those gimp lanyard things everyone was making because it was more of a “sighted person thing.” I would stop at nothing to learn how to do it. That’s the kind of person I am. When someone assumes I can’t do something or I will do something or anything like that, I immediately want to prove them wrong and I do the opposite. So yes, I went to law school wanting to do disability rights. But between discovering that I wasn’t really sure about that (reasons one and two), and the constant assumptions that I’m blind so of course that’s what I’m going to do, I was really unhappy with the idea of doing disability rights.

 

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it myself for a while. I shouldn’t make decisions because of what some people say. I shouldn’t let people’s assumptions derail my career. But like I said, I had plenty of other reasons why I didn’t want to do it. Above all, I didn’t think I would be happy doing disability rights, which is ultimately what made my decision. Yes, part of the reason I wouldn’t be happy is that I couldn’t stand the way people were always trying to pigeonhole me into disability rights because I was blind. But the problem remains, I wouldn’t be happy.

 

If you’re still not convinced, let me relate some of the conversations I’ve had with family and friends. Some people try to comfort themselves and/or convince me to reconsider by asking what kind of pro bono work I can do for disability rights om the side. Some people insist I’m making the  wrong decision, because I would be really good at disability rights, and when I try to explain to them that I’m not happy for all of the reasons I’ve just explained to you, they counter by saying they’re just looking out for what’s best for me. There are layers of problems with that statement that I’m not going to dissect for you. But I think the fact that I felt I had to write a whole blog post justifying my decision and that I’m really nervous about how people will take it says a lot.

 

Which brings me to the last reason I decided not to go into disability rights: I found something I really want to do. Not many people know this about me, but I am a huge astronomy nerd. Like huge. So when my property teacher mentioned space law, I started looking into it, and I was totally fascinated. I even applied for an internship at NASA for my first law school summer—I didn’t get it, but that didn’t dampen my interest in space law. So at the end of my summer internship with the Department of Ed, when other interns and I were sitting on the floor of the file room, talking about what we would do if we could do anything in the world, and I said “I would be a space lawyer and work at NASA,” and another intern said, “Jameyanne, you go to Harvard Law, if you want to do that, you can,” I realized she was right. It’s a really niche field, and I don’t have much of a science background, but I decided to go for it. And I have been a lot happier since. My parents have said that I just light up when I talk about space law in a way they haven’t seen in a while, and friends have told me it’s just great to see me make this decision and go for it. And fun fact, two days after I made this decision, I met my Neutron Star, which pretty much made it official.

 

This year, I’m splitting my summer and interning at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal government laboratory in Maryland, and Analytical Space, a private space company in Boston that’s building a network of satellites that use lasers to communicate. I’ve been at NIST for three weeks, and I’m having a blast. And who knows? Maybe one day I’ll go back to school and get that science degree I wish I had.

 

All this isn’t to say that disability rights aren’t important. It isn’t to say that I don’t care about them—of course I care about them—I need them. And it’s not to say that I won’t keep fighting for them in any way that I can. It just isn’t the right career for me.

 

The way I see it, there are two ways to fight for disability rights. One is to be a disability rights attorney. this is really important. We need good disability rights attorneys who care about the issues. But to me, disability rights means more than standing up in court to fight for someone’s right to read Braille, or use a service dog, or have financial independence or the right to vote or the right to not be abused and neglected. Disability rights means standing up and living the life I want to live, pursuing the career I want to pursue, regardless of my disability. It means showing people that I can do whatever I set my mind to, even if I’m blind. There is a lot of value in seeing someone with a disability doing something totally unrelated to their disability. And really, this is the point of disability rights: to let people do whatever they want to, with their disabilities, just like everybody else. As a disabilities rights lawyer, I felt like I would always be defined by my disability, and true or not, I don’t want that. As a space lawyer, well, not even the sky is the limit.