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LB: Okay, so you started to talk about your decision to go to law school. Tell me how you, why you decided to go and where you ended up going.

EY: The decision to go was really based on that sense that so much in Hawaii was changing, and that I wanted to be a part of that and steering it in a good direction, whereas a lot of it was heading in a bad direction. And so I realized that I needed to learn, I needed to have something more. So actually, one of my projects was to interview lawyers in town just to see what they thought about their careers, and particularly those that might do something significant with their work. And so that's how I started out, and I realized that's what I want to do, but I want to go to a school that would foster a desire to do some kind of justice work, some kind of community-based work. And so Boalt Hall... and I'd heard about the Asian American law students, and, "That's where I want to go." But I thought, "Wow, how am I gonna get in there? I don't have any grades." And I did a very stupid thing. I've sort of... always never followed the straight and narrow course. I didn't go to school with grades, saying, "I don't care if I get into graduate school." Then I wanted to get into graduate school, "What have I done to myself?" So the thing I had to do was do well on the LSAT. Instead of preparing for it, I went the other way and said, "It's an aptitude test, an intelligence test, I'm not going to prepare." Well, for anyone who has taken LSAT, it's very complicated. And just understanding the instructions is really difficult and time-consuming. So I went in to take the exam not having prepared at all. I read that pamphlet when you sign up, it's like twenty questions, that's the only thing I did. And my sister, who was four years younger, did better than me on that one practice. And so I was overwhelmed, and I got my results, and it was very mediocre. And I thought, well, now I've really blown it. No grades, experimental school which actually was closed down by the regents for lack of funding, and a mediocre LSAT score. I said, okay, now I better be serious. And so I went ahead and my mom bought me all these study books, and I just worked through them. And I took it again, and then my score went up really a lot. And so the LSAT people wrote to me, they kind of thought, "Maybe this guy cheated. Because maybe he had someone else take it," 'cause it's not supposed to go up that much. But I explained to them, I wrote to them, and gave them a second sample of my signature and all that stuff, and it was okay.

And I'm really good at big picture things, I'm good at seeing things into the future, and if this happens, then this, and if you do this and work this, then these things can happen. And it's been very helpful for my social justice work. I'm very bad at the detail part of it. So when it came down to six schools that I wanted to apply to, I prepared these big packets describing my history, the written evaluations from my professors for all my courses, a long statement about my justice work in Hawaii and what I wanted to do, it was this thick packet, six of 'em. And I got the checks from my dad, and I mixed them all up. So I sent the wrong checks with the wrong packets. Two of the places out of the six didn't even process my application, and a couple mixed them back and forth. Anyway, long and short of it is Berkeley was one of the two that actually took my application seriously. And I got a letter in the mail and I thought, "There's no chance." And it was just one page, but I got accepted. I don't know exactly why, but I'm sure it was because at that time, there were students on admissions that really wanted people who would do community work, I'm sure of it. And so I got to go to Boalt Hall. And that really changed the whole course of my life, going there.

LB: When was this? When did you start Boalt Hall?

EY: That was 1975. Way before your time, Lori. But 1975 was very significant because I stepped right into the heart of the law school's special admissions controversy, the affirmative action program. And the faculty had abolished Asian American special admissions. It was really looking at special admissions for all the groups. It was really kind of a wedge issue. And so I came to the school, came to the law school there my very first semester, where there were some "giants" to me, sort of "giants," who were law students, who were organizing the struggle. And Lowell Chun-Hoon was from Hawaii, he's now practicing law back in Hawaii, and several other people had written this magnificent study, report, on special admissions in general, Asian American special admissions. And that became sort of the intellectual, political foundation for the political organizing. And people like Don Tamaki, you know, this kind of quiet, self-effacing guy, was just a magnificent speaker. You put him in front of a stadium in front of thousands of people and this guy just brought the house down. And there's so many wonderful Asian American people, and then the bonds forged with the Latino organization, La Raza, and with African American groups. And so it was a really exciting, wonderful time for me to come to law school, exactly what I wanted to do. And there were very few of us from Hawaii, which was probably a good thing. We were very close, but we didn't just stick together as just Hawaii, but we really became integrated into the Asian American Law Student Association. And so it was there I got a very significant kind of grounding and made friends that are, I'm close to forever now. Leigh-Ann Miyasato, Ed Chen, and many others.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.