Like so many others who have taken the LSAT, Laura began her relationship with the exam while completing an undergraduate degree in a field that seemed unnervingly unlikely to produce a viable career. As graduation loomed, she began to catalog the many ways in which she might use her interdisciplinary degree. She quickly discovered that foci in women’s studies, Africana studies, political science and theatre do not a paycheck make. It was then that she decided that academia was the way, and began planning for her next step along the winding road to tenure. A law degree, she surmised, might allow her to teach at the collegiate level without spending the next 6 years working towards a Ph.D….an appealing prospect to a person who has always prized efficiency.

And so began her love affair with the Law School Admission Test. Here was an exam that tested what standard college curricula ignored. Here you were forced to recognize the true and exact meanings of the words on the page before you, the shifts in meaning that occur when a comma is added or eliminated and the subtle syntactic changes that drastically alter the meaning of a piece of text. Here you were faced with arguers hell-bent on deceiving you, but you, master of the LSAT, could defy their fallacious trickery and ultimately emerge victorious. For a woman who had spent hours mounting arguments to convince skeptical classmates that racism and sexism persist, expertly refuting their illogical responses to the contrary, yet finally failing to convince anyone of anything, the exam was liberating. Finally, someone, somewhere cared about argumentation. Laura began helping students prepare for the LSAT shortly after her college graduation and has now taught LSAT classes at more than 20 universities across the country, many among the nation’s best. She has also written and published in the field of pedagogy, and is as fascinated by the processes of teaching and learning as she is by the subjects that she teaches.

When not teaching logic, Laura can be found frolicking in the redwoods and exploring the Pacific coast.