<Begin Segment 8>

PI: And I don't remember how, but I learned of a job at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, which is ninety miles west of Boston. They had a program called the Law and Society Program, teaching legal issues to undergraduates. It was the biggest and the first program of its kind in an American university. And these were, there were seven instructors in the program, and they all taught law and society. And they needed somebody to fill in for people who were on sabbatical, and I got the job. And I stayed there for three years, and I commuted twice a week out to Amherst from Boston. I still lived in Boston. But that was for me a teaching experience I really enjoyed. And it was what I wanted to keep doing, preferably by staying there. But that job, which did not have any tenure attached to it, ended after three years.

And one of the other fortuities in my life, the day after I learned that that job was ended, that I would not be rehired for the next year, I got a call, telephone call, out of the blue from the University of California in San Diego, asking if I was interested in a job teaching law in the political science department at U.C. San Diego. I'd never heard of the school. I'd never been to San Diego. And to me this was like, you know, a bolt of lightning because I had really been, I had no idea what I would do if I left the University of Massachusetts. And I knew a lot of people who were taking jobs, teaching jobs, that paid very little, that had no tenure, no job security. They were sort of itinerants like migrant farm workers. They were migrant academic workers. And particularly at this time in the, in the late '70s, early '80s, there weren't any really good prospects.

I did, however, have one advantage. While I was working at the University of Massachusetts, I finished writing a book that I'd started in law school. It was my third-year paper at Harvard Law School. And it was a study of the litigation strategies of lawyers who worked in the New Deal agencies in the first administration of Franklin Roosevelt. It might sound like a really boring topic, but I did a lot of work in the files of these agencies -- the National Labor Relations Board, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and the National Recovery Administration. I went down to Washington and dug into their files. And it was fascinating to see how lawyers actually picked cases, tried to find cases back then that they could take up to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of Roosevelt's program, which was a very radical program at the time. So I, I did this research. I wrote a paper at Harvard, which was about 250 pages long. It was three or four times the average first- -- third-year paper. But I kept working on it, and I found a publisher, Princeton University Press, to publish it. So I had this book done. And that made me much more attractive as a junior professor or as a candidate for a teaching job. And so when I came out to San Diego for that job interview, it turned out once again to be very quick. I gave a talk, met people, and they offered me the job the very next day. So literally within a very short time, I had left total insecurity about my job prospects for a new position that was in a totally different place that I'd ever been to, and I'm still there.

AI: Well, now, this was such a major change in your life, and that, leaving Boston, where you had been for so many years and engaged in many activities in addition to your work and your school. What was it like for you to then be transplanted to San Diego, completely way over on the West Coast, a very different mix, a social mix, population-wise?

PI: Well, first of all, it was a tremendous cultural shock. I had been in Boston for thirteen years and was basically a New Englander or at least an East Coast person. And moving to southern California where I knew nobody and not having any real connection to the place, the... I think the thing that made it the most and the easiest for me to adjust is that I brought with me from Boston the coram nobis cases. I immediately became involved when I moved to San Diego in working on those cases, spending lots of time in San Francisco and Portland and Seattle. And so at the time I was starting my teaching at U.C. San Diego, I was also virtually full-time working on the coram nobis cases. And the story of how that started really begins before I left Boston.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.