Not Bad for a High School Dropout

Kristin Franceschi practices corporate, securities and public finance law at DLA Piper. She represents clients and helps colleagues on structured financings, conduit deals, tax increment financings, defeasance transactions, arbitrage issues, and general municipal law.

Her path to her career in law has been an interesting one. She was born in Los Angeles where her father, Orest Ranum, now one the country’s best-known experts on 17th-century France, taught French history at the University of Southern California. She moved to New York City in 1961 as a toddler when her father became an associate professor of history at Columbia University.

Ranum was there just six years and was 35 when he got caught up in campus protests.

He was initially sympathetic with the protestors’ demands that Columbia cut its ties to the Institute of Defense Analyses, which was involved in Vietnam War research, and shelve plans to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park, in Harlem, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a Washington, D.C.-based newspaper. But he strongly believed that professors should be able to teach and pursue research free of harassment by political activists.

On May 21, 1968, a protest got out of hand and his office was set on fire, along with 10 years of research papers that were to be the basis of a textbook on early modern European history that he had been commissioned to write for a series edited by the British historian Sir John Plumb, according to the Chronicle.

The newspaper wrote an article on Ranum last year when Mark Rudd, a former prominent member of Students for a Democratic Society, finally admitted after four decades that a fellow radical, John “J.J.” Jacobs, set fire to Ranum’s office and that he, Rudd, went along with the plan.

After the fire, Ranum abandoned the book project, returned the advance and left Columbia for Johns Hopkins University, where he is now an emeritus professor of history.

Franceschi went to Roland Park Country School in Baltimore through the 11th grade. She never technically finished high school because the upper school building burned down and she decided not to continue taking classes at the elementary school gymnasium. She defied nay-sayers and began taking classes at Johns Hopkins University when she should have been in high school.

She was later denied a high school diploma because she was short one gym class. The state of Maryland did not recognize her participation on sports teams as qualifying for gym credits and Hopkins did not offer gym classes. And she did participate on sports teams, spending much of her time playing basketball, running on the cross country and track team, and fencing.

Franceschi likes to point out that her fellow-high school dropouts are all now highly paid professionals and that the lack of high school diplomas did not hinder her or their progress.

She received her BA from Johns Hopkins University in 1981, then an MBA from Stanford University as well as a law degree from there in 1985.

She met her husband, who is French, at Stanford. They married in 1983 and moved to Paris in 1985. She worked part time at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie in Paris. They moved back to Baltimore in 1987.

Today Franceschi lives with her husband in Baltimore and speaks French at home. She has a daughter in New York and a son in the Baltimore area. She spends her spare time playing golf and indulging in her current passion of ballroom dancing.

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Washington
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