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EY: While I was in school, several things happened. One is, I knew I was going to get through it, so I didn't want to go through the traditional program and compete with everybody else to try to get the traditional plums of legal education, I really wanted to learn. So I did several things. One is I decided which classes I wanted to go to and work at and which ones I didn't. Probably shouldn't say that because I'm a law professor now, some of my students might misinterpret that. So I actually read a lot of things outside of the legal class syllabi. And so I read about politics and law, and legal history and legal theory and things that helped me gain a much deeper understanding of how law operates, both as an instrument of oppression and sometimes as an instrument of liberation, and to understand those dynamics. And understand the traditional way of teaching and learning law, about law as neutral and objective, and therefore necessarily producing just results, how that was not an appropriate jurisprudential model. So I really started to train myself in doing that. And had courses that helped me do that. But more importantly, had lawyers who were legal activists. So all the way, this is not that long after the Oakland trials of the Black Panthers, and the political World War II -- not World War II -- Vietnam War protestors and free speech movement. So a lot of the lawyers there were in the community. And more important, there was the Asian Law Caucus that had been formed. And Dale Minami in particular had then just left Asian Law Caucus and formed his own law firm. And so I remember his offices, little tiny offices, and that's where you started work, too. And so I did work with Asian Law Caucus people, but also, Dale told me, "Hey," he said, "you know what? You can come do some work with me." So that was really great.

So that was, it was my second year of law school, second semester, and it really helped change my life, too, again. Because in addition to doing regular work, Dale did some tort work and I did some -- because I didn't know how to -- 'cause I didn't pay attention in the first year -- how to do legal writing very well. But I did memos for him and wrote, and he gave me good critiques and feedback. But more importantly, once a week, he would spend three hours with me talking about political lawyering, and the importance of understanding the dynamics of law, and understanding how law can be really oppressive as well as potentially liberating. And to understand -- so I read Marxist theory, I read all kinds of different theoretical schools, and he and I would talk about all this stuff, and he'd use his experience as a base. And it really helped me understand that to do what I wanted to do, I needed the traditional legal training, but I needed much more. So that was very inspirational to me. And that he would spend so much time, and here I was just a second-year law student, this was Dale Minami, already much older than me, just six years, actually, but accomplished so much. But he was spending the time to help bring me along, which really influenced me in my work right now about the importance of young people who were interested, to really help them and really spend the time. And Dale was a very important role model, and since then we've become really great friends. But he also laid the intellectual foundation for me. And combined with that, the resources at Berkeley, and the political activity and being part of it, really sort of connected all the pieces for me.

And so being at Berkeley law school was just the perfect thing. Because it was also, being a Hawaii boy, even though being at New College was like being away in some respects in terms of the racial environment, it still was Hawaii. So being in Berkeley opened my eyes to politics, to culture, to just travel, to communities that were different from my own. My roommate, Gary Maestes, a Chicano law student, he was very involved with La Raza, Centro Legale in San Francisco, and a leader in the Latino American law student group, and a wonderful person. And so I got to become a member of his community, and in fact, I played a lot of sports, and so I was second baseman for the Latino All-Stars, Chicano All-Stars. It was a group in the Bay Area and they go around and play. And so finally one of the other teams said, "Hey, wait a minute, you guys are Chicano All-Stars, they guy playing second base is not Latino." Said, "Yeah, he's half, his father's Mexican American, his name's Eric Garcia." [Laughs] So I went through part of my law school as Eric Garcia, second baseman for the Chicano All-Stars. But anyway, really formed, helped me understand the significance and the dynamics of reaching across lines.

So Berkeley was just really fabulous in so many ways for me. And I met wonderful professors like Richard Buxbaum, who taught corporations, but who was just this giant international human rights law, who had such a gentle touch. And he really looked out for us struggling law students, and to this day, I'm really grateful to him. To this day, whenever I speak in there he comes out and we talk. And so it turned out to be a fabulous experience for me.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.