For William Treanor, studying the law was a vehicle for public service. After college he worked as a speechwriter for Shirley Hufstedler, then secretary of education in the Carter administration and a former federal appellate judge and quickly realized that most of the people making decisions around him were lawyers. At Harvard Law School, Treanor felt there was too much emphasis on corporate law, so he transferred to Yale.
He later moved to Washington to spend three years as a lawyer in the office of the independent counsel probing the Iran/Contra scandal before beginning his academic career at Fordham University School of Law in 1991.
