<Begin Segment 15>

TI: About this time, there was an important legal case, the Bakke case, that happened. Can you tell me about this and your involvement, or the Asian Law Alliance's involvement with this case?

RK: So we, as I stated, we had like an admissions committee where we would screen the applicants and then we would write letters of recommendation for some of the applicants who tried to help encourage them to be admitted into the school. And so there was a case involving, I think it was U.C. Davis medical school, and it was a case which was called "reverse discrimination" where Bakke -- I think his name was Allan Bakke, said that he was the victim of reverse discrimination. And so for us, we were concerned because we felt that the efforts that we were putting toward this admission work would be jeopardized or what have you. We entered into different negotiations with the administration at Santa Clara, and as it turned out, they changed their admissions policy so that it became a, what they called a "disadvantaged law student admissions policy." Which in effect impacted a lot of the applicants that we were really looking at, but it could also, a person who was disadvantaged from a poor white background could also qualify. But at that time, we were, again, concerned about maintaining our program, so we held a rally in protest at the university and we invited Professor Harry Edwards from Berkeley, and he spoke and a lot of us spoke and it was something that drew together all the different ethnic organizations, whether they'd be the African American law student group, the... at that time it was called the Chicano law student association, and the Asian law students, as well as the Native American law students. So all of us kind of cooperatively put together this rally and again, had Harry Edwards come down.

TI: And what was the reaction of the administration?

RK: They listened to us, they were open to hearing our concerns. And again, after a number of negotiations and discussions with them, they came up with this new program where it was called this kind of Disadvantaged Law Student Admissions Process.

TI: And how did you feel about the program that they came up with?

RK: I think we were okay with it, 'cause it worked for us. 'Cause we were able to continue to do the work we had been doing previously.

TI: So Santa Clara is a private university. Did this work impact, say, the other Jesuit schools like USF and other ones that were affiliated, or the other California schools? I mean...

RK: Well, yeah, all of the different law schools were looking at this case, and all of them tried to figure out ways to insulate themselves from possible lawsuits. So, again, that's why this particular program was established at Santa Clara.

TI: And so was this, in some ways, groundbreaking work, or did you just follow the policies of another university?

RK: I think most of the different schools were doing similar kind of activities. I think the thing that was kind of neat for us is that we actually used the university equipment for our protest and rally. Put the, got the sound systems and whatever from them, and they allowed us to have our free speech moment, and their security kind of watched us, but they just allowed us to go ahead with it.

TI: And so for you personally, going through this, what did you learn from this experience?

RK: I mean, to me, it was... to work with the other groups, the African American group, again, it was called the Chicano law student group at that time, it was really, it was really an empowering thing. And the other thing that occurred is that shortly thereafter, we actually elected an African American guy as the president of the Student Bar Association, which I think had been the first time there had been an African American elected to that. And a lot of us from the other ethnic groups joined together to kind of get people to vote for him. And I remember walking around campus with him and introducing him to people that I knew and encouraging them to vote for him. And it was, it was a good experience.

TI: And during this time, was there a sense that Asians were underrepresented in the legal community?

RK: Oh, for sure. I mean, when I got out of law school, and if you look at the number of Asian lawyers in this era, it was miniscule. I mean, it's changed a lot since then, but there were a few kind of Nisei lawyers and a few Chinese American lawyers, but that was about it.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.