John Blomster: Welcome to ºìÌÒÊÓƵ, I'm John Blomster. And today we're speaking with Claudia Peña, lecturer in law at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. Claudia is an expert in civil, human and disability rights as well as trauma informed loitering, and has been a community organizer since long before her career in the legal field. She's also the co-founder of Repair, an L.A.-based organization that addresses how systems of oppression and exploitation physically impact communities.
Claudia's here at the law school as part of ºìÌÒÊÓƵ’s, Gates Public Service Speaker Series, and we're speaking with her today about her experience as an organizer and how public interest-minded law students can make an impact on the world through what she calls rebellious lawyering and legal training. So, we're excited to dive in. So, thank you very much for joining.
Claudia ±Ê±ðñ²¹: Thanks so much for having me.
Blomster: First of all, could you tell us a little bit about your background and why you wanted to get into law after working as an organizer.
±Ê±ðñ²¹: I wanted to get into law because my brother, my older brother was arrested when I was an undergrad. And when the police showed up with a warrant to search his home, they said they were at apartment 2B and he actually lived in apartment 2A. He told them that they were in the wrong place. And they didn't listen, they came in anyway. At the time, my brother smoke marijuana, they found evidence of such and they arrested him, even though they were originally looking for somebody completely different.
I was really close to my brother, still am. All of us siblings are close. So, I was really upset and outraged at the fact that he was in jail. So, I reached out to some friends who had been attorneys and talk to them about what we could do. And that was what got me started on wanting to empower myself with the tools that you gain from attending law school and becoming a lawyer.
Blomster: At UCLA law. You obviously work with myriad students who are passionate about social justice, public service. But you also hear about certain challenges they face just in terms of how law school is built, in essence. So, why can law school be a challenging environment to navigate, for public interest-minded students, at times?
±Ê±ðñ²¹: There are endless reasons for which law school is a difficult terrain for anybody who attends law school, but specifically for public interest-minded students, specifically for people who are interested in gender and racial justice, immigrant rights, serving communities that are working class communities, or in poverty. And the reasons are endless because there's so much about the law school environment that impacts people's ability to learn. So, for one, the law is taught in such a way in traditional law school classrooms as if the law is neutral. When anybody who lives in this world understands that it is not. The law has all of the biases that, you know, regular people like you and I are walking the streets with our own biases that impact the way that we look at the world. And the same thing is happening with a lot with policymakers, with judges who are making decisions, with attorneys who are making arguments, etc. There's nothing objective about the law, and yet it is taught in that way. And so students end up feeling maybe gas, like they're being gas lighted, right? Or they end up feeling very disconnected from the practice because it's not the way in which they're experiencing the world around them.
Another reason is that the law in the United States is an adversarial system, which means that two parties are fighting against each other. And that permeates the way law school is taught or legal training is affected in law schools. Students end up feeling as if they are fighting against other people. And there's enough studies that show that that is actually detrimental to your mental health, when you have an us versus them mentality.
And then the last thing that I'll mention here is that law school can already be an isolating experience. The way that it's taught from the very beginning, people are expected to know a particular language right from the beginning. And if you don't know it, then you end up feeling like you're the only one that doesn't understand what's going on. In reality, most people don't understand what's going on in their first year, but you end up feeling like the only one. And so you might feel like you're the only one that cares about the issues that you came to address, or you're the only one having these particular experiences. So, it's a very isolating experience and that it gets exacerbated by someone's identity. So, if you're a person of color, if you're the only black student in the room, if you are not documented, the levels of isolation, you experience feel even worse, and can end up having an impact on your ability to learn.
Blomster: So, as a law student, you know, you've spoken about how you sort of had to forge your own path, in  a lot of ways, to get what you wanted out of the experience. Can you can you talk a little bit about what that process was like for you as a student?
±Ê±ðñ²¹: Yeah, sure. I mean the most important part was I had to remember who I was. I started off attending law school and the first couple of months, I decided I wasn't going to talk to anybody. I wasn't going to make any friends. I just didn't want to be influenced by the type of people who I thought and I expected to meet in law school. I thought it was just going to be all folks who want to make the maximum amount of money possible and didn't really care about improving the world around them. And so I kind of came with a bad attitude and avoided as much as possible anybody else, because I didn't want to be tainted with hyper capitalism, or some of the other things that I took issue with.
And then I spoke to my mentor who reminded me that I needed to be who I was, and that before law school, I was a community organizer. And part of what I did was I always built community everywhere I was, to get buy in on whatever issue we were trying to address. And so I finally plugged in and connected with other students who had similar goals. And we ended up building lots of community. At one point we were rolling with, like 80 people to any given event. And we use the power that we built together as a community for good at the law school. We affected much change.
So, for example, we didn't have a disability rights class at the time, a course that I now teach, but it just didn't exist for our cohort. And so one of my colleagues decided to put together a course that the students were going to organize, and we pulled together all the readings and we put together the schedule, the syllabus, etc. And we lobbied to get credit for it. So, we ended up getting two units of credit for something that we were doing ourselves. That's on the small end. On the big end, we organized a demonstration on the anniversary of Proposition 209, which in California got rid of affirmative action or Equal Opportunity Programs. Post-209, our public schools in California do not represent the population of California. We've seen huge decreases in the numbers of people of color, specifically indigenous people and black people. And so our schools, including the law school at UCLA are not representative of the communities it should serve. And so on the anniversary of that passage of that 209, we had a death of diversity demonstration. We invited students from the undergraduate part of the campus to come stand in our classes. It was a walk in as opposed to a walk out. And we read a statement that said that this is what our classroom should look like, if we had equal opportunity in this state. And it was a whole day of programming. It was really lovely. But I think the best part of it was, since I had relationships with students in the class who had no interest in racial justice, no interest in equal opportunity. It was curious to me to hear what they might think about the demonstration. And so all of those conversations after that were indicative of the power of having that sort of a protest. Many of them shared that they were frustrated by the distraction in their own classrooms. But of course, they also learned from the material that we were sharing with them. And the fact that someone could walk away knowing something more about the issues that we care about is really the whole point of doing this kind of work, because it's my perspective that the more people understand the impact on folks around them and folks they care about the more likely they will be to join.
Blomster: A couple of really great terms that you use that I've not heard before but love: rebellious lawyering and rebellious legal training. What do you mean by those terms?
±Ê±ðñ²¹: Rebellious layering is actually a concept that was created, written about, thought of by Gerry Lopez. He's currently a scholar and professor at UCLA, but he's been doing this work for decades. Although don't say that in front of him because he likes to act like he's still really young—and  he looks it. So, rebellious lawyering, it's just this idea that you would take your legal training and do something completely different with it, right? So, we imagine lawyers becoming elected officials, we imagine them being involved in nonprofit work or policy making or even indirect services. But the idea of rebellious loitering is taking it to the next level, using it creatively and an imaginary way in order to serve the common good, but in order to serve really the vulnerable communities that we care the most about. So, sometimes it looks completely different than maybe what you were taught in your law school classroom.
I'll give me an example of rebellious lawyering. Before I ever attended law school, I was part of juvenile justice work in Oakland, California. And one of the things that we did was we planned protests and demonstrations in order to support the ideas that we cared about. And one of the lawyers that was part of organizing us, gave us all the information that we needed in order to be able to engage in civil disobedience. And so they taught us the rules about what resisting arrest looks like. And to avoid that, but also not helping someone arrest us at the same time, and what the different consequences would be for being arrested. Now, most lawyers don't go to law school in order to instruct people how to be arrested in a manifestation of their first amendment rights, and in order to protest something they believe is unjust, but that is a version of rebellious lawyering.
Now, rebellious legal training, to me, is something that I hope to write about at some point. But it's this idea that you don't have to wait until you're a lawyer. You don't have to graduate before engaging in some of those tactics. So, there's a lot that needs to be changed in our legal training. There's a lot that needs to be changed about our law school environment, and students are really the ones who will be able to push for those changes, as long as they engage it like rebels.
Blomster: So, we talked about your experience and then as you've transitioned into an educator now, what are some opportunities that you see or that you foster within students when they are in law school to get involved and to attack those social justice issues that were what draws a lot of people to law school in the first place? What are those different kinds of opportunities that people can do right now?
±Ê±ðñ²¹: Well, one of the things as a professor, as an educator that we have to do, when mentoring our students is, we must be mirrors for them to remember who they are, and remember why they came, to remember what's important to them. So, I view my role as a mirror as a pertinent one, in order to ensure that students are pursuing the goals that they came to pursue. I try not to tell them what to do, because I think they know the issues better than I do. They're the ones that are facing whatever it is that they're facing, right? So, I see myself more as a support system rather than a leader at this point. But I do think it's important to use the power in the institution that I have to help community build. Because I think it's really difficult to pursue any sort of social justice as a singular person or as an isolated individual. I think that power can only come from the group, power comes from community. And in order to build the trust that it takes in order to move something forward together, you need to community build. And so I encourage students to engage with one another, to find both like-minded and similarly-minded people that are with you on some of the issues but maybe not on the others and maybe you'll be able to get them on the others down the line as you've built a relationship based on trust and can have honest and interesting conversations about the issues. I think that's one of the roles that's most important to me is getting students to see that they need each other,
Blomster: Touching on private practice. The vast majority of attorneys, of licensed attorneys in the United States, work in private practice, despite the fact that the legal field is, you know, incredibly diverse in what you can do in law. But I think that there are a lot of misconceptions within students or people going into law school with how do private practice and public service fit together. But you, you talk about a number of your inspiring colleagues, who are very much making a difference on the issues that they got into law to address that they really care about through their work in private practice. Can you give me some example?
±Ê±ðñ²¹: Yeah, of course. And I'm so glad that you brought this up because I remember as an activist before law school and as a continuing activist in law school, I certainly had the mindset that anything in the private sector or anything that I viewed as private work wasn't, had no role in social justice work, that it wasn't part of the movement, that it was actually outside of the movement. And as I've grown into a more seasoned attorney, I see lots of examples of this.
So, one is that in immigration. So, we have lots of nonprofit organizations that offer free or low bono services to immigrants. But the constituency they serve is quite narrow. You have to make below a certain amount of money. You have to maybe be in removal proceedings. Sometimes there's a particular focus on women with children, right? So, it's really easy to be an immigrant who requires legal services, but you're outside of the box for many of these legal service providers. So, of course, we need private attorneys to be filling that space. And from my perspective, many of the immigration attorneys that are my colleagues or are my friends. They do it in a really just way. They have sliding scales. They might set up a system where they provide a certain number of clients who really needed free services, but then that gets subsidized by clients that can afford it. They have more flexibility to serve the needs of the community. I find that to be very powerful work.
On the other hand, on the almost, on the other side of the spectrum, I have friends who are in-house attorneys for big corporations or companies. I'm not a fan of big corporations or companies, I think that they play a huge role in why climate change has taken place and the hyper capitalism that we experienced here in the U.S. But when it comes to employment defense work, something that I used to highly critique because I didn't understand why people would want to defend the employer over the employee, right? Because it's defending the powerful over the powerless. But I've spoken to some people who are in-house counsel, and they see their work not just as defending their employer, but also teaching managers and supervisors how to treat their employees with dignity and respect and to follow the law. So, when it comes to people with disabilities, it's really important to have a wonderful in-house counsel who believes in the rights of people with disabilities that pushes for accommodations to be made available to the employees and from one perspective, of course, there doing this to avoid a lawsuit. But from the other perspective, you can almost look at that as advocacy in support of the employees who need reasonable accommodations in order to be able to continue to have their job, right? Access to jobs and being able to financially afford taking care of yourself is a huge component of disability rights work. So, if we have people in the employment sector that are looking out for that I'm always going to support that.
Blomster: Finally, given the makeup of the legal field today, given the challenges students face in law school and in practice, moving through your career, what advice do you give students who are in school right now, for them to put themselves in a position to be successful while also not losing sight of the passions that brought them to this calling in the first place?
±Ê±ðñ²¹: I think one of the things that I'm noticing right now with students all over the nation, in law schools, but also in other disciplines is there is so much going on that it makes it really difficult for students to focus on their mental health. We're seeing a push, and I certainly am including it in my courses, pushing students to take care of themselves and to take care of each other. So, engaging in self-care and community care practices. I think those are necessary in order to be able to put your best foot forward or your best self forward. And that also means on the flip side is not feeling obligated to do things that you don't actually have capacity to do. So oftentimes, public interest-minded students or students dedicated to social justice will continue to push themselves to attend something, to be present, to be in solidarity with etc. And I find that admirable, and I think that people should push as far as they can, but to be mindful of where the line is for them, right? So, if it's pushing them actually past their capacity, and into the danger zone of potentially impacting their mental health, that's a line they shouldn't cross.
Blomster: Claudia Peña is a lecturer in law at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, a longtime community organizer and activist and co founder of Repair. You can learn more about her work and all of these different spaces by visiting our website at law.uw.edu to check out the show notes for more on Claudia's work, and all that we discussed today.
Thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed this.
±Ê±ðñ²¹: Thank you for having me.
