Wednesday February 10, 2021

The First But Not the Last 

Mondaire Jones is a lawyer and one of the first openly gay Black members of Congress.

Today, I presided over the U.S. House. It was the first time in history that an openly gay, Black member presided over Congress.

Today was for the kids who wonder whether there’s a place for them in this world, or whether they can really be anything when they grow up. ✊□□️‍□ pic.twitter.com/uG57Q00M3X

— Rep. Mondaire Jones (@RepMondaire) February 5, 2021

Say it Louder Mother of 4 passes bar exam after 9 years of studying 

When Evelyn Uba first migrated to the United States from Nigeria in 1983, she dreamed of one day finishing law school and becoming a lawyer. Now, after nearly a decade of hard work and dedication, the California woman went viral when her daughter posted a video of her jumping for joy after passing her state's bar exam.

To say Uba's path to success has been a long, winding journey filled with patience and perseverance would be an understatement.

Uba always knew that she wanted to become an attorney and wasn't going to let anything get in her way. At 18, she left her home of Igboland, Nigeria, to start her college journey in America only to be faced with several financial difficulties when her father suffered a stroke soon after. Two decades later, after taking a prolonged pause to get married and start a family, she resumed studying law at California Southern Law School in 2005.

"I never stopped wanting to go to law school," she told "Good Morning America." "After my last child turned 2, I went to a school that I could afford that was conducive to being a mom, going to work and making payments.”

Since graduating in 2011, Uba has been on a mission to pass the bar exam, fulfilling the promise she made to her father years before he passed away. She would take the test time after time, sometimes coming close to passing, but finding herself disappointed after reviewing the online results.

"I took the exam more than ten times," she said. "I stopped counting after a while but giving up certainly wasn't in my dictionary."

With each less-than-satisfying result, Uba became even more determined to study harder for the next time. The mom of four came home from work as a welfare professional almost every night, opened up her textbooks and went straight to studying into the late-night hours. Although the lack of free time resulted in her missing out on several events in her family's lives, they continued to motivate her along the way.

"My daughter, Naeche, once said to me, 'Mom, if you give up now, you can't get your time back. Then what would you have gained out of all the missed time you could've spent with us?' So that always stuck in my head and I knew the only time I'd give up is when I'm dead," Uba said.

Read the story on GMA

More of This Meet the four law grads who are taking on the entire legal system

On a brisk morning in October 2019, a group of students from top U.S. law schools gathered outside the offices of the corporate law firm DLA Piper in Washington, D.C. They handed out leaflets decrying the firm’s mandatory arbitration policy, which had recently stopped a lawyer at the firm from taking her sexual assault claims to court, and called on law students to boycott interviews with the firm until it promised to end mandatory arbitration.

Half an hour in, a woman who identified herself as being from the firm walked outside and told the students she had called the police. A DLA Piper spokesman, Josh Epstein, said the firm had “no knowledge of any such interaction.” The police never came, but the students say the confrontation was telling. Corporate law firms aren’t typically the targets of boycotts.

The protesters who stood outside DLA Piper’s offices are part of a new legal labor movement hoping to eradicate sexual harassment in the legal profession. They were organized by the People’s Parity Project, a group founded by four women at Harvard Law School with the aim of eliminating mandatory arbitration provisions and ending what they describe as the legal profession itself allowing harassment of and discrimination against workers.

The founders of the PPP — Molly Coleman, Emma Janger, Vail Kohnert-Yount and Sejal Singh — had been in law school for less than two months when sexual assault accusations against Harvey Weinstein, reported by The New York Times, revealed the extent to which legal contracts had been used to keep his victims quiet. This, along with accusations about Alex Kozinski sexually harassing his clerks and reports of corporate law firms requiring employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements, raised a big question for the four women: How might they leverage their power as Harvard law students to change all of the institutions that perpetuate legal inequalities across the United States — not just within those institutions, but everywhere they exert power, too?

Within a few years of its founding, the PPP has become a national organization with chapters at a dozen law schools, successfully lobbying several big law firms including Kirkland & Ellis to drop arbitration agreements for staff members, and has gotten funding from progressive groups like Demand Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy. Ms. Coleman is now the organization’s full-time executive director.

Read the story on NY Times

More of This Too The most liberal justice on the Supreme Court

Pandemic life cannot be a welcome change for Sonia Sotomayor. The justice is a people person, so much so that her clerks have been known to gently encourage her to leave events, at which she can be the last one in the room chatting up the service staff. In normal times, Sotomayor lunches with those clerks in her chambers and personally fulfills their snack orders at Trader Joe’s (Sotomayor prefers the dried mango). She likes crowds enough to voluntarily go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to preside over the ball drop. Until the inauguration last month, where she swore in Kamala Harris, the biggest crowd Sotomayor had been spotted in was the one at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s funeral, where she was the only justice in a face shield. Sotomayor is 66 and has type 1 diabetes, putting her at high risk.
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COVID times have also robbed Sotomayor of her usual discursive style at oral argument. In the Court’s most recent full pre-pandemic term, she asked the first question of advocates one-third of the time, more than anyone else. Last spring, when the justices were compelled to switch to livestreamed phone calls, rigidly moderated by Chief Justice John Roberts, an analysis by law professor Leah Litman found Sotomayor was the likeliest to have her questioning cut short.

And yet a dozen years into her tenure, Sotomayor’s voice is resounding far beyond the audience of Court watchers. She has won over those skeptical of her nomination, among them law professor and journalist Jeffrey Rosen, whose 2009 New Republic story infamously quoted anonymous doubters calling her “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench.” Rosen told me, “In 2019, I had the opportunity to apologize to Justice Sotomayor for that piece, which was rightly criticized. Justice Sotomayor has proved to be a powerful voice of liberalism on the Court, and her role has become all the more central since Justice Ginsburg’s passing.”

Sotomayor is also poised to take over Ginsburg’s role as the functional minority leader. There are calls for 82-year-old Stephen Breyer to retire while a Democratic president and Senate can replace him, and Joe Biden has promised to nominate the first Black woman to the Court. On a Court that runs on seniority, Breyer’s move would anoint Sotomayor as the most senior justice in what is usually, in the most heated cases, the resistance — the true heir to Ginsburg and, before her, John Paul Stevens and Thurgood Marshall.

This would make Sotomayor the commander of the losers, at least in the short term. Just in time for Democrats to gain a fragile governing trifecta, the far right has captured the Court with a six-justice majority, ready to thwart whatever Biden may attempt. The undignified assaults of the Trump era are now mostly behind the Court, leaving the conservative justices free to resume their long-standing wish lists — taking a buzz saw to reproductive, LGBTQ, workers’, and civil rights and to remedies to racial injustice or curbs on criminalization. At this point, with Donald Trump having named three youthful justices to lifetime tenure and liberal calls for packing the Court a distant dream, it would take an untimely death or unforeseen retirement to change the basic, Sisyphean math.

Read the story on New York Magazine

Less of This The prosecutor’s union suing DA Gascon has a history of opposing reform

On Dec. 30, the union representing Los Angeles County’s deputy district attorneys sued their new boss, DA George Gascón, who ran on a platform of criminal justice reforms. It claimed his order to forgo sentencing enhancements violates California law.  

The Association of Deputy District Attorneys of Los Angeles County (ADDA) framed its opposition to Gascón’s order as an ethical imperative to “neutrally and impartially enforce and apply” existing law. In California, that includes the STEP Act and the Three Strikes law, which allow the state to pursue harsher sentences if the defendant is accused of gang affiliation, or has been convicted of prior serious or violent crimes.

Gascón’s office contends that moving away from these laws is a moral issue, and that their enforcement has until now been anything but neutral—the directive notes that 45 percent of people currently serving a life sentence in California are Black. Prosecutors have discretion on how to handle individual cases, the directive argues, and studies have exposed wide racial disparities in their charging and sentencing decisions.

And a look at the ADDA’s history suggests that this lawsuit is part of a longstanding pattern of ideologically motivated advocacy and commitment to tough-on-crime policies, rather than a show of blind allegiance to the law.

Over the past several years, the union has made clear its position on reforms to the criminal legal system—and, by extension, the organizations and leaders who promote them. It has promulgated its views in writing, funded and lobbied hard for the propositions and candidates it supports, and expressed vocal opposition to the ones it doesn’t. Throughout, it has remained committed to the notions that criminal justice reform endangers communities, the death penalty is a useful tool, and harsher sentences are synonymous with justice.

Read the story on The Appeal

Navigating the Clerkship process for BIPOC Students

A distinguished panel shared insight into the application process, what the advisory committee is looking for, and how an applicant may be disqualified. 

February 22, 2021 4:00PM. Register here ​

How to become a Federal Judge

A distinguished panel shared insight into the application process, what the advisory committee is looking for, and how an applicant may be disqualified. 

Webinar recording available here

LSFN Fellowship Debrief Call

The LSFN Post-Graduate Legal Fellows Program (the LSFN Fellows program) was designed in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic to address the needs of Bay Area Legal Services Organizations to increase their capacity to serve more clients, as well as May, 2020 graduates of Bay Area law schools, who were faced with a delay in their ability to take the California Bar Exam.  


February 11, 3-4PM PST. Learn more here

Class Action Conference 

Each year, Impact Fund hosts this invitation-only event to bring together leading plaintiffs' class action practitioners to discuss important new developments, share knowledge and ideas, and develop strategies for the future. The Conference provides an unparalleled opportunity for attendees to connect and forge relationships with like-minded advocates across the country.

February 25, 2021 via Zoom. Register here (pw: CL@55)

Senior Director of Legal Advocacy Job Opportunity

NCYL seeks a Senior Director to lead existing cases and develop new impact litigation. This position offers the unique opportunity to contribute to and develop litigation at the intersection of immigration and other priority areas for the organization including education, child welfare, mental health and juvenile justice. Learn more here