The Law and Me
"The law is reason, free from passion." – Aristotle
A noble ideal, a timeless fashion.
But when will its reason, so cold and austere,
Free me from the shadows I carry near?
Justice speaks in measured, rational tones,
But my cries echo through hollow stones.
Where is the balance, empathy's face,
When the law moves slow in a survivor's space?
Rationality reigns—detached, so severe—
But it cannot erase what happened here.
I seek not vengeance, only to heal,
For my wounds are deep, and time won't seal.
If law is reason, then let it see
The human cost of this agony.
Not just logic—compassion must rise
To mend the broken and hear our cries.
§ Elle Hoods Meets Elle Woods §
Harvard Law School Application Essay
I was raised far from privilege in Waterford, California—where "justice" is a rumor and survival is a talent. I've learned that life hands some people a stick and others a sword, but the truth is, it never asks who deserves which. What I carry is the perspective of the overlooked, the misjudged, the ones I call T-hugs—The Hugged.
T-hugs are tattooed by stereotype and often criminalized before their stories are ever told. If society's greatest crime is the abandonment of its own, then T-hugs are its most silent survivors.
Growing up, I found comfort in the commandments, repeated by every faith: "Honor thy mother and father," "Thou shalt not kill." Yet those same commandments declare: no one sin is greater than another. If you forgot to call your mother, the scripture says you fall short. The point isn't to trivialize murder—it's to show the peril of a system obsessed with ranking sins while demanding we never judge one another. Yet every page of scripture seems filled with nothing but judgment. In fact, the Bible, revered by nearly all faiths, is less an instruction manual and more of a warning label: judge at your own peril, because nobody is truly innocent.
And yet, we built our laws from this contradiction.
If the Bible was written in a language no modern person can verify, translated by governments as needed, how could we ignore the chance for error? When we base justice on foundations we cannot even decipher, whose truth are we really upholding?
Blind Justice or Blind Spots?
We cling to the belief that "the law is blind," but maybe what's really blind is our willingness to question that phrase. Are we blind to the fact that discretionary power—the ability to arrest or not, to see crime or circumstance—shapes outcomes just as much as any statute?
Police have broad latitude in making arrests, especially for drugs, nonviolent misdemeanors, and minor offenses. In truth, no officer is blindly bound by the letter of the law—their discretion is not only powerful, but foundational to justice itself. Yet, when it comes to drugs, arrests soar, and the faces in handcuffs are so often the homeless, doing what they need to survive the night. Their "crime" is fighting off a darkness so suffocating that simply seeking to make it through another day makes them heroes in my eyes.
Too often, even the officers themselves forget—or are never taught—that their power is flexible and meant to serve compassion as much as control. The system trains them to see only the law, not the life behind it. Many openly admit to feeling trapped by protocol, even when their conscience tells them otherwise.
When our law's discretion is wielded at its worst, it doesn't differentiate between a person's hope for comfort and a real threat to society. As a result, those most in need of help—the unhoused, the addicted, the traumatized—are funneled straight into the justice system, not because they are the greatest threat, but because they are the most vulnerable.
No Win Without Weighing What Matters
Imagine standing before a court with the defense:
"Your Honor, you cannot judge my client any harsher than yourself. For if forgetting to call your mother breaks the same law as murder in scripture, who among us is truly without guilt?"
Justice is not about winning or losing a case; it's about recalibrating the scales. I don't seek to be a lawyer who argues hardest—I want to be the one who asks the right questions, who refuses to rank sin or suffering, and who understands that the most broken are often the most brave.
I created Elle Hoods—my alter ego—to confront the comfortable with the uncomfortable. To ask not only "who broke the stick?" but "why was it swung in the first place?" The goal isn't to excuse, but to see—the pain, the context, the humanity. Elle Hoods doesn't judge by the worst thing someone has done; she measures by the best thing they might still become if anyone bothered to try.
Conclusion: Rewriting the Forest from the Roots
I am not only Elle Woods, the dreamer—I am Elle Hoods, the advocate, emboldened by contradiction but resolved to act. I believe in law, but only if it sees what's in front of it. I believe the law holds power only because we agree it does—and it must always earn that agreement by delivering true justice, not rote punishment.
Give me the tools of Harvard, and I will use them to shape a legal system that refuses to be just "blind" but dares to see the ignored, the misunderstood, the survivor clutching hope for one more day.
Don't just blame the stick—heal the tree, nurture the forest, and do not fear the shadows, for they are cast by the light we walk toward together.
If you'd like, I can refine this further or prepare it as a formatted document for submission.
References:
Ending the War on Drugs Requires Recasting Police Discretion ...
Homeless and Non-Homeless Arrestees: Distinctions in Prevalence ...
EFFECTS OF POLICE CONFISCATION OF ILLICIT DRUGS AND ...
Police discretion in encounters with people who use drugs
Police Use of Discretion in Encounters with People with Opioid Use ...
To me, love is
vole I mean but divided from the one by international blindness is all I've ever known while the great divide of asses put me on my back to rape me blind of my fortune.
It's like that country song—I may not know what love is, but I know what it isn't.
So thank you to every string of bad relationships, every abuse I've witnessed and felt, every scar—some and most of them unseen.
But in the shadow of all that pain, I hear Emma Lazarus's words from the Statue of Liberty:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…"
I am among those yearning to breathe free—not just from poverty or oppression, but from the cages built by men who claimed ownership of my body and my worth. Her torch isn't just a welcome; it's a beacon for reclaiming my right to exist, whole and unbroken, without needing a man to define or validate me.
And even through all of that, my children still love.
My daughter doesn't discriminate against gender; my son doesn't discriminate against her anymore. Thank you, bi girlfriend and her presence—suddenly he's fine with lesbians, and even if he had sex at 12, he raised his girlfriend's bar, and she raises his.
They came to me together—he makes a rose petal bubble bath.
With all the abuses they've ever seen me go through, never once being treated right, I look at them, at their kindness, their acceptance, and I think that means I win.
Because love, for me, is not about what I was denied,
but about what I've managed to grow—
in spite of everything,
in the next generation,
in the open arms and open hearts of my children.
To me, that is the only love I need—the love of my children. That's it. The rest is just a bonus, so I hear.
Their love is the light I carry forward, the liberty I reclaim, and the proof that even in darkness, something beautiful can grow. Everything else, every other kind of love, is just a gift beyond that foundation. That's the love that sustains me.