Marcin Jacek Zurada

Martin was born in 1974 in Gdynia, Poland. The economic conditions were generally bleak under communist rule and became bleaker in 1981 as the military instituted martial law to crush dissenters. In 1983, when Martin was 9 years old, he and his parents moved to a small desert town in Libya where his father taught at a university and his mother worked as an engineer in a factory to earn dollars and make ends meet. In 1986, after three surreal years of living in a country ruled by Muammar Gaddafi, Martin and his parents immigrated to Germany where Martin attended middle school without knowing any German. Martin and his parents then immigrated to the US in 1987. However, to keep Martin on his toes, his parents decided that he would skip several grades at his Louisville Kentucky middle school while still learning English. Martin then attended a wealthy private high school on a scholarship driving a beat-up Ford that stood out among other students’ BMWs and Volvos. Starting in 1991, Martin began attending the intensely academic University of Chicago (where one of its presidents is credited with saying “When I get the urge to exercise, I lay down until it goes away”), earning a scholarship along the way, and graduating in 1994 with a BA in English literature and Polish literature in a little over three years. Martin then attended Cornell University Law School graduating with a J.D. and LLM in 1998. He earned a scholarship and attended a summer program at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Martin clerked for the Kentucky Supreme Court and two law firms during law school.