Daring to be a doer
This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. Clara J.K. Long is graduating from Harvard Law School — surely the only member of her class who once lived in a landfill. That was in 2001. Long was a Brown University undergraduate helping to organize trash pickers in Brazil. She lived next to sliding mounds of trash for a month, the experience an emblem of the eccentric verve with which Long has so far lived. As a teenager, she toured Russia, roamed Central America with just a backpack and bravery for company, and hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. In her 20s, she worked alongside peasant socialists in Brazil, summered as a grant writer in Tanzania, spent a year on human rights work in the Amazon basin, lived as a “fixer” in Venezuela for visiting American reporters, and took a year off from law school to...