Adam Winn graduated from the University of Arizona with an M.A. in Sociology. Realizing that law, and not academia, was where social theory could have a practical impact, he attended law school at Wayne State University on a full three-year scholarship, won the Joseph P. Grano Prize for Constitutional Law, and interned for United States District Judge Terrence Berg before graduating with a top-5 class rank.
After law school, Adam served in the Michigan Court of Appeals as a research attorney and in the Michigan Supreme Court as clerk to Justice Elizabeth M. Welch. He joined Fieger Law in May 2022 and was appointed by the Michigan Supreme Court to the Committee on Model Civil Jury Instructions in December 2022. He practices appellate law and assists with complex legal questions in the trial courts.
An adherent of sociologist and lawyer Max Weber’s insights on the irrationality of rationalization—the idea that institutions tend to become distracted from their purposes while trying to articulate rules of regularity and uniformity—Adam tries to distill the irrational (and often illusory) complexity of legal issues down to their impact on real people. The law is not “as written” in any one place; it is laboriously worked out by judges and lawyers. In every new case, someone must decide (1) what the true facts are from multiple conflicting sources and (2) how the abstract statements from multiple (and often conflicting) legal authorities apply to those facts. There are no answers in the back of the book because it is still being written. What it will say depends on how lawyers conceptualize and explain the law’s past in light of the realities their clients live. At Fieger Law, Adam works to amplify that strain of the Michigan legal tradition that declares “This is the law . . . . It is because life has value.” Courtney v Apple, 345 Mich 223, 238 (1956)(Smith, J., dissenting).
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