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LB: Okay, so tell me what you did after law school and how you eventually ended up getting back to Hawaii.

EY: Well, when I was in law school I knew I wanted to go back to Hawaii. I was torn. There were some wonderful things going on in the Bay Area. When I was in law school, several people said, "Gee, maybe you'll be a professor someday," a law professor. And I said, "No." I saw my dad's life and no, I'm not going to be a professor. After my first, during my, ending of my first year in law school, my legal writing instructor, Abby Ginsberg, who is a filmmaker here in the Bay Area now, had told me, she said, "You write really well, and you should try to write into Law Review." She said, "You'll get on if you do it." And I think most of the slots then were, there's a few at the top that got in automatically, but most were write-ons. But at that time, we were politically opposed to Law Review people, the "Red Hots," and they were part of the establishment of the law school, so no. So then she said, "Well, if you're ever going to be a law professor, you need to be in Law Review." So I thought I'd closed that door.

And so I wanted to go back home to Hawaii and I wanted to do some kind of legal services work. But it was right at the time that Legal Aid had its budget cut. And so not only weren't hiring, but they were actually retracting. And there were no other kind of positions that I could really want to do. So what I did was I went back to the firm that I clerked for after my second summer. And it was a regular law firm, but it was a law firm that had a community service emphasis.

LB: And what firm is this?

EY: This was then called Case, Kay & Lynch. And I went to the firm in part because it was a good firm. I had actually several other offers from so-called more prestigious firms that I didn't choose to go there. Because this firm was doing pro bono representation of the very first two native Hawaiian protestors who had trespassed on the island of Kaho'olawe, which was being bombed by the military, in order to stop the bombing. And so they were arrested and it was a big case. And so this law firm was representing them. And so I thought, "Well, that's cool, that's what I want to do." Of course, I went there and the attorneys told me, "Don't think that this is what the law firm does as its law firm work." But I went back there and I got wonderful training in litigation. And it turns out that I wasn't good at a lot of things, I would have been very bad at tax and real estate conveyancing and whatnot, but I was very good at litigation and big picture things, and sort of planning it and seeing strategically how it works. And so that's what I did at the firm, and I very quickly got involved in complex cases, large document kinds of cases.

And the wonderful thing is the firm also, because of its emphasis on community service, said, "Do whatever you want but do something." And so very early on, in fact, my first year, I wanted to join the board of Legal Aid Society. It was a very controversial organization then, it was class-action suits against the state and a whole range of things. And I thought, well, Dan Case was a Republican from Hawaii, head of this pretty big firm, would probably not like it. So I went to talk to him and I said, "Mr. Case, this is what I want to do." And, but I said, "I'm not sure if I should do it or not, and I'm just a beginning attorney." And so he said to me, he said, "You know what? I'm not sure I personally like what Legal Aid is doing right now. It does some very good things providing services, but these big class-action suits are destabilizing government," lot of things. He had a lot of good points. Then he said, "But if you believe that it's important that you use your time and energy, and this is going to make Hawaii better, then go ahead and do it. Then you have the firm's blessing." I thought, "How wonderful is that?" And so I did. And true to life, the firm supported me, he supported me.

So I started to do more and more pro bono work. I served on the board of the native Hawaiian legal corporation that did all the native Hawaiian litigation at the time, for a number of years. I worked on a number of projects, and I took on all these small cases. And, in fact, the sort of joke, my friends in the firm made a card for me. Because I would win these little tiny cases on behalf of poor people or disabled or whatnot. And so they made up this lawyer card which they passed out around town which said, "Eric Yamamoto, Lawyer Extraordinaire. No case too small." [Laughs] It was goofy. I walked in one day and people in the streets had these cards. But it was because I figured, big firm, you might as well do something. And people liked that and supported that. So I got to do all the civil rights, all the good plaintiffs cases, all the discrimination cases on the good side, all this really great stuff. And so it was wonderful training for me in this very intense kind of way. But as I progressed, third year, fourth year, I get more deeply involved in the cases and in managing cases and in managing younger attorneys, paralegals. And it became harder and harder to do the kinds of stuff that I wanted to do. And I realized that I really wanted to do things that had this justice emphasis on it.

And so as good as the firm treated me, I knew that I didn't want to become a partner. I don't want to make this my life's work, and that was fine with me. So I chose an office away from the partners, the head partner, so I could have my friends. It was really a nice, nice working environment. And then I worked on a couple of really big cases and we did pretty well on those cases. And I learned from the partners I worked with that they were planning to make me a partner early. I was into my fourth year, and into my, beginning fifth year, and that created a crisis in me, because that's not what I wanted. It was actually not a good thing to become a partner, especially early. And because I felt like if I did I would be making a commitment, and I believe in living up to my commitments. And so I didn't know what to do. And so I told the firm that I was going to resign, that I didn't want to do this. Because I didn't want to accept the partnership and then resign two years down the road. And that created quite a stir in the law firm. And part of the reason I was able to do that is, I'm trying to think, "What am I gonna do?" It's right at that time that the coram nobis cases were filed.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.