Chapter and Verse

Northeastern Law graduates are shaping policy and conversations on justice, philanthropy, migration, history, aging, viniculture and so much more. Check out these great books written by our graduates and get inspired!

Kenneth Allen
HiTek JD: Memoir of a Silicon Valley Patent Lawyer

For over four decades in Silicon Valley, veteran patent lawyer Ken Allen '75 served technology clients during an extraordinary period in modern history. From offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, he represented and encountered companies, inventors, scientists and engineers from around the world. HiTek JD: Memoir of a Silicon Valley Patent Lawyer offers rare behind-the-scenes glimpses into the legal battles, breakthrough innovations, and colorful personalities that shaped the digital age. Also included in this book are guidelines for lawyers as well as independent and employed inventors.

Peter Orner ’96
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter 

In The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, award-winning writer Peter Orner brings to life Chicago writer and professor Jed Rosenthal — obsessed with the 1963 unsolved murder of Hollywood starlet Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet, daughter of legendary gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet and close friends of Jed’s grandparents. As Jed investigates the decades-old case through family documents, crime reports and photographs, he seeks to understand both Cookie’s mysterious death and the subsequent rift between the families, while confronting his own personal failures and stalled career. Orner is the author of seven books including Esther Stories, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. A Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize recipient, he chairs the English and creative writing department at Dartmouth College. According to The New York Times, Orner has constructed “a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”

Urvashi Vaid ’83
The Dream of a Common Movement (posthumously published)

The Dream of a Common Movement (Duke University Press, 2025) collects essays, interviews and speeches by the late feminist and civil rights activist Urvashi Vaid, whose pioneering writing and organizing over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ+ movement. Whether she was focused on the Donors of Color Network, the 22nd Century Initiative, the Lesbian Political Action Committee or other initiatives she launched, Urvashi was steadfast in her vision of a more just society and believed deeply in the power of people coming together to effect change. Offering a window into the breadth of her progressive vision for social change, this volume inspires readers to never stop organizing and marching.

Gail Marlene Schwartz ’92
Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Raising Sons

Gail Marlene Schwartz has co-edited Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Raising Sons (Motina Books, 2025), which weaves together interviews and personal essays by LGBTQ+ mothers who seek to dismantle outdated narratives about gender while providing a blueprint for progressive parenting. Gail also has two essays in the collection: “The Salad Spinner Chronicles,” a comical piece about her son’s early obsessions with domestic tools, and “Guy Time,” a more serious reflection on her son’s relationship with her nonbinary partner.

Chanda Ouk Wolf ’10
A Dozen Delicious Donuts: A Sweet Cambodian-American Story

In this children’s book, A Dozen Delicious Donuts: A Sweet Cambodian- American Story (Blackstone Publishing, 2025), Chanda Ouk Wolf tells a story of growing up between cultures, American and Cambodian, and of food bringing communities together. Her book touches on the universal theme of family and has a message of love and resilience that captures the journey of the immigrant experience. Wolf brings young readers an enriching tale that encourages them to foster a sense of self and celebrates the sharing of traditions across generations.

Dimple Abichandani ’02
A New Era of Philanthropy:Ten Practices to Transform Wealth into a More Just and Sustainable Future — How We Fund in Times of Crisis and Opportunity

On the cusp of the greatest wealth transfer in history — with $84 trillion moving between generations in the next 20 years — this book by Dimple Abichandani, former executive director of the General Service Foundation, explores how philanthropy can be transformative and transformed. Can philanthropy be an anti-racist, feminist, relational and joyful expression of solidarity? Abichandani argues that it not only can be — for the future we seek, and for philanthropy to achieve its greatest impact, it must be.

Stephen Casscles ’84
The Wine Grapes of Chungcheongbuk-Do, Korea

Stephen Casscles, a viticulturalist based in Athens, New York, has co-authored a groundbreaking new book on Korean and North American cool climate grape varieties. The Wine Grapes of Chungcheongbuk-Do, Korea is the first winemaking grape book devoted to Korean and American native grape varieties published in Korea.

M.T. Connolly ’84
The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money and Meaning Later in Life

Writer, lawyer, researcher, policy expert and elder justice pioneer M.T. Connolly offers a sweeping and intimate portrait of the elder justice movement in The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money and Meaning Later in Life. A founding head of the US Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative and a MacArthur Fellow, Connolly offers a new map of aging, one that helps us understand and navigate practical challenges and fragmented systems while also showing how connection, purpose and awe can protect and enrich us as we age.

Roger Levine ’96
The Borscht-Meister of Babi Yar

Roger Levine, an estate planning and elder law attorney, has penned a historical novel stretching from the Holocaust to the current war in Ukraine. In 1941, two young lovers, Yakov Levin and Katya Luvshenko, living at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv, witness the murder of 35,000 Jews. Yakov, a cooking savant, is soon captured by the Germans and becomes the “Borscht-Meister of Babi Yar” on a journey that takes him to Berlin, the gulags and, finally, Moscow, as a cook privy to Joseph Stalin’s inner circle. Katya, his beautiful Ukrainian wife, follows him every step of the way in a love story encompassing 85 years.

Ragini Shah ’99
Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities

In Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities, Ragini Shah, a clinical professor at Suffolk Law, examines migration from the perspective of Mexican migrant community members, including migrants themselves, their family members and community organizers. These perspectives, gathered over five years and in four diverse geographic areas of Mexico, form the basis of the book’s key insight that migration is part of a larger cycle of colonial extraction from marginalized Mexican communities to benefit Mexican and US elites. Professor Rachel Rosenbloom, who provided expert feedback to Shah in the writing process, calls it a “paradigm-shifting book [that] makes a timely and important contribution to the literature on migration, gender and racial capitalism.”

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