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“The Stigma is real and incredibly damaging for depression, anxiety, panic attacks, ptsd and suicide. Millions of us suffer daily, yet we have been taught through shame that we don't talk about it. Mental Health challenges are commonly caused by either brain chemistry issues and/or experienced trauma. Both of which we normally have little control over. If you have struggled, you are not weak, or lack character. The exact opposite is true. We get up everyday and fight and struggle. We courageously deal with these challenges in all aspects of our life. We must change the perception of ourselves. If you are struggling right now, you are not alone. You are brave and courageous. Make sure you know that. #stopthestigma#strengthinnumbers”

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

Yesterday we celebrated the life of one of our Nation’s greatest visionaries.  Many of us went to church services and together with friends and family offered prayers, praise and song to his memory.  Others of us revisited his teachings by reading, again, his speeches and quotes.  Still others, longing for a return to his powerful oratory that sprung from his deep faith in the essential good of humanity---and his unshakeable faith that one day our Nation, and the world, would wake up to the racial and economic injustice plaguing it and by so seeing it, end it---may have watched some of his speeches preserved for our viewing.  Some may have watched for the first time, others for the hundredth.  And after a long and tortured course, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was finally granted federal recognition as a holiday, permitting those businesses offering non-essential services to close in honor of this man.

Many of my clients, after they have read the biographies of myself and the other lawyers in the Locks Law Firm on our website, have asked me to explain to them the meaning of my membership in the American Law Institute. The American Law Institute was founded in 1923 because of the perception at that time that American common law was uncertain and complex. A group of judges, lawyers, and professors recommended that an organization should be formed to improve the law and its administration. The American Law Institute (ALI) was created as a response to that recommendation. The mission statement of the ALI is “to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work.”