<Begin Segment 10>

NN: So I said, well, I got that, so I went there later on, and then the People's College of Law was founded by the Bar Sinister, and the Bar Sinister, I guess, they prided themselves on being like a progressive liberal organization, Bar Association, and they created this school on this, it was like a two-story old business or whatever. It was right across the street from MacArthur Park that I met the, her name was Lee Salomon and she was like the administrator there. And she was really happy to see me because they were just starting and they wanted Third World students. And the whole thing was they didn't want to produce, manufacture corporate attorneys, but people's attorneys, whatever that might be, like Barefoot Doctors, kind of thing. And then I was telling her, I'm in these organizations, I can't come to school all the time. But she said, she explained, well, "As a student, you've got to pass the baby bar." Because being a nontraditional school, it means that you have to, instead of three years, you have to go, like the first year you go, and you can't continue on to get accredited to take the bar exam as a law student until you pass the national exam called the baby bar examination. So you've got to pass that before you could even continue to progress, to get a license if you pass the bar. So, you know, okay. And it was very affordable, I think it was like, to go to law school, three hundred and eighty dollars. And if you can't afford the books, they would Xerox printouts of stuff for you. But the first year you've got to take contracts, torts, criminal law, and civil procedure, or criminal procedure, yeah. There's four classes that you had to take that you got tested on for the baby bar exam. It's just like the bar exam, but it's four subjects instead of twelve. So I signed up, and lo and behold, I was able to pass the baby bar exam, so now I'm an accredited student. And they loved me over there because they wanted, I think I was the only Asian, but they had a couple more came in, right? But same deal, I let 'em know I can't always come to class, but I pay my dues and all that. And they said, "You know what? We don't flunk anybody," we understand. So, I mean, it was perfect, literally perfect.

BN: Who were the professors there? Were they, is that what they did or was it a side...

NN: No, it was like they were attorneys. They were attorneys, and they were, they wanted to chip in.

BN: So in that respect, you might have gotten a better education than at a traditional law school in some way, because these are people that are actually out there doing the work.

NN: I mean, yes and no. Like I remember my immigration law attorney, that she got deported or something like that. I mean, it was like...

BN: It was your final exam?

NN: You know what? I don't even think I ever took a final there. Very loose, I mean, it was like you kind of make it up as you go along. And I was a willing participant. And I had no... you know, I'm going to step back a little bit. Like my mom, bless her heart, she had this ESP kind of quality, right? And when I was, got out of the service and everything, I was doing okay for a while, then I started to get involved in the revolution, for a while I'm still living at home, and then she's telling me that, "I want you to take the LSAT test." I'm going, "Why?" So she signed me up, and then I'm living under my parents' roof, I said, okay. So Saturday morning at SC, so Friday night, I'm partying, then you got to get up early Saturday to take this test, which I didn't even know what an LSAT was. And I went there, I'm looking up all this stuff, so I take this test with no prep. And then I get the results, and it's terrible. I thought, okay, I got that out the way, and then maybe the next year she re-signs me up again, same results. And I say this because I'm up in my room Sunday, and I'm cleaning up some stuff, and I find this old memorabilia box. And I look at these, I got these scores from my LSAT exam, and then I'm looking at it, and I think they had two different dates, the first time I took it and the second day. The first time I took it, I got 340, and then the second time, I got the same score, 340. And then they have a writing part, and looking at that, I got twenty-nine, and then the next time I got twenty-eight. And I'm going, "What does that mean?" And I flipped it over and they give a chart, and I guess a hundred is perfect. Anything like ninety-five, you're ninety-nine percent, and you go all the way down, and 340 is like fifteen percent, and then twenty-nine, in terms of writing, from 100, that's like seventeen percent, right? So I'm going, you know what? This ain't going to get me into no law school. But somehow, like my mom saw it in me, and it kind of turned out that way that she had this way of doing stuff like that. Because growing up, back when I'm real young, I got arrested. Like I got pulled into the police station two times as a youth. And each time, that it was at nighttime, and before I got picked up from my friends to go out, we're going to do whatever we're going to do, that this part of the dancing, kind of shit. But whatever that... or a party, but whatever that happened, that that night, right before I got picked up, twice, my mom looked at me and she asked me, "You'd better stay home tonight." I swear, said, "You better stay home tonight," and she gave me this look. I said, "Why?" She said, "No, I want you to stay home." And I said, no, no, I know what you're talking about, right? And I get arrested that night. And then the second time, same thing, she's telling me, "Nick, don't go out tonight." She put the bachi on me. [Laughs] Anyway, that's my law school story.

BN: Yeah, kind of predicted it.

NN: But I lasted four years, and I think some of my mentors at that time was Marion Fay, Mike Murase, and then this other brother by the name of Steven Nozaki, right at the end of my fourth year, that I didn't even take all the classes that were required to take the exam, like Wills and Trusts, and a bunch of stuff, Real Property. So this guy gave me some study books, because they have these bar exam courses, so he gave me the books, what they do for a bar review course. So I studied those things really hard, I mean, really hard. And through that, second time I was able to pass. So I got my bar card and became a public defender for about five years. And I think that was probably one of the hardest things that I ever had to do within the working environment was to defend someone in the jury trial. It was quite an experience, and I kind of learned a lot, because I think what it came down to was that I would summon the DAs that were kind of using their DA's office like a stepping stone to practice and all that. That they come from pretty good schools, like Duke law school and all this shit. And here I am, but then I kind of learned, too, when you're talking to, like they call "twelve in the box" that they're more or less talking at them, trying to show how smart they are, where it's a whole big difference when you either talk with or talk to people. You try to just connect, and I think like most, what you have to do is, because you're basically selling something, so it's very, very, very important that whoever you're representing, they see that person as a human, and then you've got a chance. And it really doesn't matter whether they did it or not, it's more or less did they prove it, did the other side prove it? Anyway, so I did that for about five years in the public defender's office.

BN: And then most of your legal career, though, was in another area.

NN: Right, it was called Dependency Court. And what my job there was to represent abused and neglected kids that were a lot of times removed from their families for abuse or neglect issues. And they were removed by Children and Family Services, a social service agency, and we had court hearings onto, everything from, at the end of the day, whether they should be adopted or whether they should return home or placed with a relative or put in foster care, and everything else in between. And like the kid, the children that I represented, was like all the way from a newborn baby that had a positive toxicology for drugs, so a newborn all the way up to twenty-one years old, so everything in between.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.