Public defender role lets Bell help others

Law Talk profile for The Memphis Daily News

April 26, 2013

For assistant federal defender David Bell, the urge to be a lawyer was precipitated by the urge to help people.

“I always thought I wanted to do something where I could help other people, certainly people less fortunate than me, and I decided on law,” Bell said. “I knew that whatever I did with a law degree I would be able to help people and … I realized that whether I loved the law or whether I didn’t love the law, I could make a living doing it as well.”

As it turns out, Bell loved the law since his first days at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. Before becoming a student there, though, he graduated from White Station High School and studied politics, legal studies and religion at Earlham College, a small, liberal arts school in Richmond, Ind.

A spiritual man who has served as deacon for Idlewild Presbyterian Church, Bell considered the seminary before deciding on law school where, as a student, he met Robert Jones, the Shelby County chief public defender at the time.

“He asked me to come over there and interview with them for a summer clerkship,” Bell said. “I liked their office and I liked the idea of the mission of what they did there, so I went over there and I clerked that first summer after my first year in law school and I just kind of fell in love with the place and the people there.”

That mission, Bell says, is to help the indigent who are seeking justice. Problems in society such as lack of education and substance abuse, he said, all tie back into the issue of poverty … (read more)