<Begin Segment 21>

MC: This is a continuation of the interview of Lori K. Bannai. Lori, you just described an instance in which something in the law school curriculum actually connected to some larger issues that you really cared about. Were there other instances or examples of that happening during your law school education that you can remember, some important examples?

LB: Well, certainly Constitutional Law, at least the portion dealing with individual rights, not the portion dealing with government power, really connected with me. Issues involving race discrimination, civil rights, First Amendment, I think probably really that was the first time that law school really started to make sense in my life and made me feel like this was something that I could understand and something I could do and connect with. And not only that, the experience of being in Con. Law, and in particular being in Professor Lawrence's Con. Law class, made everything else just make so much more sense. I mean, I could then think back to first-year Property and the conversation about covenants running with the land, and suddenly realized that probably racially restrictive covenants, the question was whether those covenants ran with the land or not. And I could look at other issues in other classes and start seeing them as they related to people of color or to poor people or to other marginalized groups in society. And, and suddenly, I felt like all of a sudden all I really needed to do was to learn the vocabulary, learn the vocabulary and learn the doctrine, and that the connections between that doctrine and that vocabulary and my reality were vast.

But during the first year, there was no way to see that. But I think after taking Con. Law and really getting to know Professor Lawrence, to get to know some of the other professors who I connected with personally, then all of a sudden the whole experience just started to make more sense. And there were some great revelations. I was able to see law as not some static set of rules that had to be memorized and learned and spit back, but actually law as a social institution itself and as a set of rules that change and evolve, or should change and evolve, to better reflect our values as society and concepts of what's right and wrong, and that law really then really is a changing and very much alive entity to be used rather than just read and understood. And again, I don't think that those realizations could have or would have taken place had there not been some professors there who I could identify with and some students there who helped me get through every day. And I was real fortunate. Unfortunately, I think that those things don't exist at all law schools. And one reason I'm teaching now is because I think it's so important to help students get there and understand what the law is, and that the law is their tool, and it's not something that controls society, but in fact, should be something that responds to society.

MC: So it's fair to say that law school had a pretty major impact on your thinking, and it, it empowered you?

LB: Uh-huh.

MC: Right?

LB: And I suppose I would say it's not law school that empowered me. It's the particular people who I met at that law school and who I had the ability to learn from who really empowered me. Law school, in general, I do not think is a very empowering place. And in fact, I think it can be a very demoralizing place. And so it's really more of an issue of creating a situation where students can find that light go on for themselves.

MC: Do you think that by the time you finished law school, your goals and ideals about how you would practice as a lawyer had been sharpened and more defined?

LB: Uh-huh. I think while I was in law school, after the special admissions struggle, after taking Con. Law, and while I was in Con. Law, I started getting much more involved politically on issues of race and class. I tutored special admissions students while I was at law school. I got very involved in admissions work to try and recruit more minority students and admit more minority students. So as I went through law school, I certainly started to focus my interests more in the area of civil rights, public interest work. But in addition, much more interested in probably smaller practice, more community-based practice. Certainly decided I had no interest at all in corporate practice because I had just gotten a much clearer vision about using law to help everyday people.

MC: Did you feel that you were in a minority within your law school class in your decision to go with a smaller practice or more civil rights practice as opposed to a large corporate practice?

LB: I don't think that I was in the minority per se. USF is very much a regional law school. So probably many of my colleagues went out to smaller, medium-sized firms or even solo practice. So I don't think I was unusual in that respect. I do think probably some might think that I didn't aspire to everything that I was capable of. I didn't go out for law review. I didn't go out for a judicial clerkship. A friend of mine told me at one point, "You have an obligation to fulfill your potential. You have an obligation to do everything that you can possibly do," and this was in the context of talking about well, you could be president of the bar association if you wanted to. And my response is well, "I don't want to be president of the bar association." So I don't think what I ended up doing was unusual, but perhaps some people might say I was not ambitious enough. I don't think that's true. I had my ambitions, and I was really happy with them.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.