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MC: Is there anything else about your early experience practicing law that you might want to share?

LB: My law firm was a really special, great place. Again, it was a small practice with Dale Minami, Eugene Tomine, Garrick Lew, and we had a lot of fun. We were all quite young. We were fairly new out of law school. And what was really special about it is that it was very much our firm, and we ran the firm the way we wanted to rather than following the LA Law model or some traditional model of the way a law firm should be. Because it was our own firm, it was our own time. We worked really, really hard. We played really, really hard. Dale and I made it a point every day to go down at 4 o'clock to the local ice cream parlor and play a few rounds of Space Invaders before calling it a day.

And we took cases we wanted to take. We helped kind of a lot of mom-and-pop kind of clients. And it was a really, really nice way to practice law. We practiced on Lake Merritt in Oakland with ghetto blasters kind of going by on skateboards and things like that. We didn't have much money at all. We sat down every month and tried to figure out what bills we would pay and what bills we could maybe hold off on for another couple months. And it was very difficult obviously financially at times. But it was a wonderful sense of freedom and camaraderie around the firm. So I think back on it very fondly.

MC: At this time, which is the late '70s, early '80s, were you or anyone else in your firm aware of what was going on in the redress movement as a whole, or were you involved in the redress movement?

LB: Uh-huh. One of the things about the law firm was that it was very, very much committed to community lawyering. The law firm had been involved in a number of different community-based issues before I got to the firm and after I joined the firm. They were involved in issues, a case involving rounding up young Asian American men in police sweeps. They represented Wendy Yoshimura, who had been picked up with Patty Hearst. They were involved in suing a university for not having an Asian American Studies program. So the, the firm itself was very interested in doing political work.

When I joined the firm, the redress movement had just started to kind of come together. The Japanese American community had talked for many years about seeking redress and about legislation, and had just started to kind of come together about then. About that time, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was formed, and Congress started to hold hearings nationally to receive testimony about the internment. And when we learned about this, we decided to start a group, which we called Bay Area Attorneys for Redress, BAAR, with Dale, from my firm, with me, with some attorneys from the Asian Law Caucus, and some other community lawyers. We decided to prepare a brief to the Commission on the Constitutional issues raised by the internment. So we started to meet, and we put together this brief, which we submitted, and we also offered testimony before the Commission in Washington, D.C., and in the San Francisco hearings. So we were very much interested in the redress movement, and certainly tried to play what role we could play in seeking redress.

MC: And this was about 1981, right?

LB: Uh-huh.

MC: And around the same time, a legal historian by the name of Peter Irons was also preparing testimony before the CWRIC Commission...

LB: Uh-huh.

MC: ...and found some documents that the Justice Department had suppressed during the original trials involving Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui. So how did your law firm hook up with Peter Irons, because eventually you all ended up working together.

LB: Peter had discovered these (documents) when he was researching his book -- he was researching a book on the lawyers, the government lawyers who were involved in the wartime Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui cases. When he was researching his book, he found some startling documentation, startling records, from the U.S. Government showing that they had lied to the Supreme Court while they were prosecuting the cases during World War II. Peter immediately recognized that this could present an opportunity for challenging those wartime decisions, and contacted Fred, Gordon, and Min, and asked them if they would be interested in pursuing a case that would reopen their convictions. Peter realized that he would be unable to prosecute or defend these cases, bring these cases on his own, so he was really interested in finding a group of lawyers who would be willing to work on the case. Because of our work with BAAR, and that we had been out there on the redress movement, I'm not sure, I think perhaps Min Yasui might have recommended to Peter that he contact Dale. So Dale got a phone call from Peter asking if we'd be interested in the case. Dale walked down the hallway and asked me if I'd be interested in it, and we got on the phone to, again, some of our friends who had been involved in this BAAR testimony to set up a meeting with Peter to talk to him about what he had found.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.