No one who's met Professor Deborah Gordon would call her a drama queen, but the newest addition to the law school's fulltime faculty has a decided weakness for well-turned tales of joy and sorrow.

For starters, Gordon can't get through a year without re-reading "Jane Eyre," the Charlotte Bronte classic whose heroine triumphs over decades of adversity while keeping a firm grip on her principles.

It's a habit she began while studying at Williams College and then teaching Shakespeare at New York's elite The Spence School, where her students included Gwyneth Paltrow.

An expert on wills and estates, Gordon went to law school after deciding not to pursue a Ph.D. in literature. After all, she reasoned, a lifetime of teaching literature had the potential to "tarnish" her passion for the written word.

So the New York City native went to law school at New York University, where she kept her hand in writing as editor-in-chief of the New York University Law Review.

After a clerkship at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Gordon worked with Sullivan & Cromwell and later with Day Berry & Howard.

Gordon handled commercial litigation for several years before the partners persuaded her to join the firm's major trusts and estates practice. The transition was even more fortuitous than she originally anticipated.

Helping clients with estate planning and will-writing, Gordon found herself probing deep recesses of their lives and finding sagas with plenty of drama.

"You need to know every intimate detail of a client's life in order to help her structure a plan that achieves her goals," Gordon said, noting that interviews could morph into discussions of lingering family rivalries and the potent anxieties that accompany planning for retirement or death. "There was always a story."

In legal practice, Gordon found narratives worthy of Bronte or Shakespeare. And so her career path circled back to her first love.

Three years ago, Gordon returned to her second love – teaching – joining the law school faculty as an adjunct professor. In July, she joined the full-time faculty, teaching Legal Methods and Trusts & Estates and serving as advisor to The Drexel Law Review.

Gordon, whose article, "Reflecting on the Language of Death," appeared this year in the Seattle University Law Review, finds it ironic to be teaching Trusts & Estates.

"As a student, I found this class to be exceedingly boring," she said. "I want to bring it to life."

So Gordon's students conduct a mock negotiation around a will peppered with complications. The professor sits back to watch the wrangling, and the students learn how to navigate around landmines.

Gordon especially loves teaching Legal Methods, which gives her a chance to dispense advice and sometimes tissues to overwrought students who show up at her office to go over her comments on their memos and briefs.