Spouses have different ways of showing each other they care. Some buy flowers. Others prepare a candlelit meal. Those with a creative streak write poetry.
Then there’s Joshua Anderson, who found what might be a wholly unique way to express love to his wife: He cowrote a bill.
It’s more romantic than it sounds. Anderson’s wife, Molly, has a disability that prevents her from speaking, so she communicates through sign language.
In 2017, the couple was struck with the notion of writing a bill that, once passed, would allow high school students to take ASL and receive credit for their foreign language requirements.
A self-professed political nerd, Anderson worked on statewide political campaigns throughout high school and college, so he not only understood how to draft a bill, he also knew his way around Capitol Hill in Nashville.
When Anderson knocked on the doors of Sen. Becky Duncan Massey and Rep. Roger Kane, the legislators happily took on the task of sponsoring the bill, which passed.
“It took more effort than we thought it would because it was an unusual concept,” Anderson says. “But we wrote emails, met with people and testified to committees – and were able to get it passed.”
Anderson and his wife then turned to Massey and Kane a second time for help passing a bill that requires colleges and universities to accept ASL credit for the purposes of admission.
This bill passed, too, but not without a little wrangling.
“We started broad and had to negotiate down,” Anderson recalls. “One of the things I learned about legislation is you have to be willing to compromise. I wanted colleges and universities to accept ASL for all of their degree programs, but a certain orange university I won’t name resisted that.”
A third bill Anderson wrote taught him how to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat.
The bill, which would have required every 911 district in Tennessee to implement the ability to send text messages to the service, passed the Senate but encountered resistance in the house due to budgetary concerns.
Undeterred, Anderson convinced the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board to pass a policy to requiring text-to-911 to be implemented in every district in the state by 2023.
Clearly, Anderson is not content to merely complain about the government and its laws when he sees an issue he says needs to be addressed.
“I like fixing problems. That’s what attracted me to the law,” says Anderson, an associate with the Chattanooga firm of Gearhiser, Peters, Elliott & Cannon. “I was looking for a career in which I could help people find solutions to their problems.”
Anderson primarily does commercial litigation work, as Gearhiser needed more hands on that particular deck after he was sworn in in November. Under the guidance of firm partners like Wayne Peters, Sam Elliott and Wayne Cannon, Anderson has lent a hand on matters ranging from simple cases in General Sessions Court to multimillion-dollar lawsuits.
“The firm has given me more responsibility than I was expecting at this stage in my practice, which has been incredible,” Anderson says. “I learned about these things in law school and immediately saw them being applied to different cases.”
Anderson says the size of the firm, which he describes as being small enough to allow for a good balance between work and his personal life but prestigious enough to attract significant cases, has made his early baptism in deep waters possible.
“There’s a substantial amount of interesting work to do here, so there’s plenty to share with an associate like me.”
Anderson has not allowed his workload to hamper his efforts to author and pass the occasional bill. As he was assisting a client who was having an issue with a probate matter, for example, he wrote a bill that would resolve it.
“It’s a very technical bill that aims to repair an obscure part of Tennessee’s probate code, but it can be important to the people who are dealing with it.”
With the help of Sen. Mike Bell and Rep. Eddie Mannis, the bill has passed the Senate and is poised to clear the house, says Anderson, who will then have a story about going the extra mile for a client that will be tough to top.
“It’s all in a day’s work,” he smiles.
Anderson enjoys tackling challenges at home as well as work. As he was preparing to graduate from law school, for instance, his wife told him he was going to be a father.
“Little Lucy,” as Anderson calls his daughter, then arrived two weeks before he was scheduled to take the Tennessee bar exam. Fortunately, he says, he’d started studying early.
The same could be said about Anderson’s initial forays into the world of elected officials and legislation. After developing an interest in these topics at a young age, he spent his high school and college years working on political campaigns.
While taking classes at Maryville College and then the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Anderson interned with Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Bell, among others.
The relationships he developed along the way helped to open doors when he began to write bills.
Although Anderson was born in Chattanooga, his family moved to the Knoxville area when he was 15. An offer to work for Gearhiser brought him back to the city, his wife and child in tow.
“I was attracted to not only the work but also the culture of the firm,” Anderson explains.
Given everything on Anderson’s plate, one might wonder if there’s any room for enjoying life. He insists there is.
From cooking for his wife and daughter at their Hamilton Mill home (where his homemade pasta sauce is a hit), to spending time with his family on or near the water, he’s taking full advantage of the work-life balance he says Gearhiser encourages.
Anderson and his wife also volunteer for a Cleveland nonprofit called Servant’s Heart Jamaica, which works with deaf individuals in the Caribbean island nation.
And, as time allows, Anderson does something to show his wife he cares about her. Although this takes time and thought, there’s always flowers, a candlelit meal or poetry if he’s out of ideas for a new bill.