The law did not initially attract Stacie Caraway with its practical applications, but rather with its philosophical underpinnings. As a pre-law student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, her interest was purely intellectual. She liked learning about the reasoning behind the various passages of the U.S. Constitution, and enjoyed studying the personalities of the nation’s presidents.
“Political science is about figuring out how people think,” Caraway says, a moderate Southern accent giving character to her voice. “For example, I was intrigued by how you ask questions a certain way to control how people answer them.”
When Caraway took a class taught by then Circuit Court Judge Mickey Barker, her thinking changed. As Judge Barker discussed the law, he presented scenarios based on cases on which he’d ruled, and asked his students what they would have done.
“Until that point, I had thought of the law only in terms of theories and philosophies, but his pragmatic approach brought the law to life for me,” Caraway says. “He showed us how he used the law to resolve the issues of the people who had come before him.”
Today, as a labor and employment attorney at Miller & Martin in Chattanooga, Caraway can look back on 18 years of using the legal knowledge she has acquired to find practical solutions to problems. “I still find the intellectual side of the law useful in solving problems, but [Judge Barker] taught me to not stop there,” she says.
Caraway describes her labor and employment defense work as a hybrid practice with three facets: litigation, hotline calls, and education.
Her words about litigation are brief and matter-of-fact: “A client laid someone off, and the person believes they were discriminated against, so we go to court.”
Caraway perks up while discussing the hotline calls she takes from clients around the country: “Someone will say, ‘I want to terminate an employee, but I want to find out if I can.’ Clients come to me when they want to know what the law says.” Caraway spends most of her time on the job taking these calls, which require her to think on her feet and draw from her years of experience doing labor and employment work. As a result, this aspect of her work has never grown boring as she’s handled questions ranging from pregnancy leaves to transgender restrooms.
“I like taking what I know about the law and applying it to people’s day-to-day lives,” Caraway says.
Caraway is equally passionate about the third aspect of her practice: education. In this capacity, she informs supervisors and human resources professionals about developments in labor and employment law. She likes helping them take a proactive approach to these matters.
Caraway also enjoys how one dimension of her practice will sharpen another. “When I teach clients, I have to express the law in practical terms. That hones my skills for when I’m presenting information to a jury during litigation,” she says.
Another area of the law in which Caraway practices is media and entertainment, which sometimes involved pouring over a 30-page contract for a new artist. She’s been admitted to all state and federal courts in Tennessee and to the U.S. District Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit. Her professional memberships include the Chattanooga, Tennessee and American Bar Associations.
Caraway grew up in Morristown, Tenn., located between Knoxville and Pigeon Forge. Based on her academic performance, she received a scholarship to UTC, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1992. Caraway’s exceptional academic performance as an undergraduate student earned her full scholarship offers to the law schools at the University of Cincinnati and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She went north. “I had lived in the south all of my life, and I wanted to try something different for a few years,” she says.
Well-placed calls from Barker to colleagues in Chattanooga opened a door for Caraway to return to the city as she launched her career. She got her feet wet doing employment and labor law for plaintiffs at a firm called Brown, Dobson, Burnette & Kessler, then moved to Miller & Martin in 1998 and began doing defense work.
Caraway spent the next ten years living in hotels across the country. “I went from Hamilton County’s little circuit court to trying cases in Texas and California. I was doing things I’d never even dreamed of doing. One year, I did 17 states while working on a class action law suit,” she says.
Fortunately, Caraway was married to ans empathetic spouse: public defender Christian Coder. As a lawyer, he knew his wife was paying her dues. “If I had married someone who wasn’t an attorney, he might not have been as understanding,” she says.
Although Caraway and her husband do not have children of their own – which she jokingly says is due to the decade she spent traveling – they do have six nieces and nephews. “We have a calendar with all of their events, and go to as many things as we can. Having no kids of our own allows us to be involved in their lives,” she says.
Caraway says she and her husband like being “the cool aunt and uncle,” but she takes their roles in the lives of their nieces and nephews seriously. “You can feed into the lives of children who aren’t your own. My husband took the kids on their own personal ‘scared straight’ tour,” she says, laughing.
Caraway also focuses her civic work on youth. For the past 15 years, she’s sat on the board of directors at Bethel Bible Village, and for the last four years has served as chairman of the Christian ministry’s executive board of trustees. She and her husband also host a Bible study for young people in their home Sunday nights as part of their service at Calvary Chapel, where they are members.
Caraway also sings professionally. She sang in college, so many people in Chattanooga know about her musical talent, and sometimes call upon her to perform at special events. She says her deep Southern accent isn’t as pronounced when she’s singing. “No one around here talks like this,” she says. “Actually, no one back home talks like this, either.”
While Caraway’s interest in the law originally might have been a result of intellectual curiosity, the Honorable Mickey Barker’s pragmatic approach struck a chord in her and set her on a path she’s still walking. The law not only challenges her mentally but also allows her to serve others in a way they need and she finds gratifying. What’s more, each step along this path gives her more experience and knowledge to apply, which she hopes she’ll be able to do for many years to come.