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MC: So given that you had these ideas when you started law school, what was your reaction then, particularly to your first year of law school where the curriculum is very, very regimented?

LB: The reality of law school was a huge shock to me, as I think it is to most people who start law school. You go to law school thinking that you'll become a lawyer, and you'll learn how to talk in the courtroom and learn how to present your case, learn how to be an articulate advocate. And the reality is you enter your first year and you find that you have to read these huge, huge casebooks, by and large very dry stuff, lots of theory, with what it seems almost no practical application. The first year of law school, basically, I felt like all I was doing was reading this stuff that didn't make any sense to me at all and that I couldn't connect to anything in my life, reading about torts and civil procedure and rules of pleading and whether covenants run with the land. I had no idea what these things were. Number one, it was a whole different language. And number two, I couldn't fit it into my life and my experience.

So it was a whole different way of studying and a whole different reality than anything I had ever known. And it was a shock to my system. It was isolating. It was alienating. There were people who were there I felt weren't like me, although there were a number of people who I connected with really well. But by and large, a lot of it seemed very competitive, very cutthroat, and that's not at all the person I was.

MC: Did, did that experience change after your first year? Were you able to find more connections with things that you had previously learned or were active around such as the environmental movement or the Civil Rights movement?

LB: Fortunately, when I went to law school, it was a period of great change in law schools nationally. It was a period of time in which schools were just starting to admit minority students for the first time. In fact, while I was in law school, the Bakke decision came down, which was a decision about special admissions programs designed to get more minorities in. And I think probably my class in law school was one of the first large classes of minority students entering law school. And because of that, there were really wonderful people I was able to connect with my first year of law school.

There were some minority students who were second- and third-year students who were very committed to making the law school a place where minority students felt they belonged and they were entitled to be. And some of these students really reached out to me as a first-year student, and walked up to me and said, "Hey, you want an outline?" "Hey, can I give you some practice exams?" "Hey, we've got a tutorial session. You want to come to it?" They really reached out to me and some of the other students who entered that year, and tried to really make sure that we got through this really tremendously alienating experience as well as possible. And I connected with these people immediately. These second- and third-year students, there were fewer minority students in the second and third year, and I connected with a lot of my colleagues in my entering class, and they've become lifelong friends. We spent hours and hours sitting together in the law school lounge, talking about how we felt like we didn't belong, but ironically, we felt like we really did belong because we were there together, talking about how we didn't belong, which is really, certainly one particularly powerful reason to have these programs and to have minority faculty and have a critical mass of minority students, so that law schools are, number one, more representative of the community that the law schools are supposed to serve, but also so that law school's not such an isolating, intimidating place for a person of color to be.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.