Miami Law's Bossone, Turning Poet, is 'Ready to Take a Chance'

Although his day job involves acting as Special Advisor to Dean Patricia D. White at Miami Law and helping to run LawWithoutWalls, Michael Bossone has an additional talent – poetry.

By UM News 07-06-2012

In a free-verse composition that he recited publicly for the first time at Law Tech Camp in London on June 29, Bossone – via long-distance stream from his office in Arizona – hammered away at what he sees as timidity and lack of daring in some of the more traditional areas of the law. The rap-like work, titled "PUSH: A Spoken Word Poem about Law, Technology, and Fear," holds courage as a virtue in a changing technological environment and asserts that those in the law should be "always ready to push the limits" and "ready to take a chance."

"What are we so afraid of?" Bossone asks, insistently. "We're satisfied being Neanderthals in a digital age."

Bossone, a former Assistant Dean at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where he worked with Dean White during her decade-long tenure there, helped to create LawWithoutWalls with Miami Law Professor Michele DeStefano. The course is a collaborative academic endeavor that brings together students, faculty, practitioners and entrepreneurs from around the world to explore innovation in legal education and practice. One of its signature aims is to adapt to emerging technology by finding new ways to both teach and practice law, and to find entrepreneurial avenues for the profession.

"Let the slumbering Luddites know what you've become," Bossone urges in his poem. "What we do we can do better, and more efficiently."

This is not a time "for egos and safety," he says, but rather "a time for boldness."

Law Tech Camp was a one-day conference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals, among them bloggers, Twitters, legal-technology lawyers and social networkers, according to its website. Professor DeStefano attended, as did her LawWithoutWalls colleagues John Flood, Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Westminster; Moray McLaren, an Associate Professor for the MBA program at IE Business School in Madrid; and Renee Newman Knake, an Associate Professor at Michigan State University College of Law, among others.