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RB: And I understand you recently retired. How many years were you with the Justice Department, and are there any moments in that particular position as particularly memorable? I don't know if you're allowed to talk about casework or any sort of highlights of that position that you'd like to share?

PU: So I was there, I think, fourteen years. And so our office was in D.C. because the whole division was located in Washington. And my wife had no interest in moving to Washington, which I didn't think to ask before I took this job. [Laughs] So I got an apartment down there and I would just go back and forth every week and stay down there during the week and come back on the weekend. Which, it turned out, being kind of a funny reenactment of what my mother did, because she used to... my dad used to drive her down to the Wilmington Amtrak station and she got on the train, go to D.C. and do, work on redress, stay there at a hotel, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, come back to Philadelphia or to West Chester on Thursday and work from home Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then go back. So it was the same kind of thing, isn't this kind of funny?

And I think in terms of noteworthy stuff, it was kind of an interesting experience as a lawyer to make a transition from being a legal services lawyer where the nature of your work is kind of pushing against the system and trying to change things and representing people that are kind of excluded from power and authority and everything, to being inside the government, carrying a good amount of clout just because your client, instead of being Joe Blow as the United States of America, and it was very interesting, especially in the beginning, interfacing with people on the outside. And you call people up and say, "This is so and so from the Justice Department," and realize that these people are really paying attention to what you're saying because you're from the Justice Department and being able to compare that very directly to making those kinds of calls or sending those letters from Community Legal Services and they were like, yeah, whatever, "Thank you for your input."

So that was a big change, and one of the things is because I had, at that point, a lot of legal experience, a lot of connections, ties to other people and so on, I kind of brought that with me to that work. And so when we would get complaints, I was doing investigations. I mean, to me, it was natural that if you're doing an investigation of a court system, that I would turn to my former colleagues, and people in similar programs, wherever this complaint was filed, or community based organizations that were like those that I had worked with in Philadelphia, and directly involve them in helping to gather evidence, and reaching out to witnesses and analyzing what the situation was. Because one of the difficulties of working in the Justice Department on local issues, especially if they were in the legal context, because a lot of the complaints that I worked on were against court systems. So one of the challenges as a lawyer is that you're dealing with a state entity that operates under state law, state constitution, that you're not familiar with. Because I knew Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent New Jersey law systems. But when you're in Washington, you could be, one day you're working on North Carolina, another day you're working out of Los Angeles County, and it's like that. You have to get your bearings and understanding the terminology and the power structure and everything. So having those connections to those sources of information and partnering with them to get a really good understanding of what the problem is and what the remedies are, and then being able to negotiate a good resolution of problem, and then to enforce that agreement with continuing input from those same entities with something that I helped establish as a good way of doing business and enforcing the law. And it's something that some people within the Civil Rights Division, it was very foreign to them. And the whole idea of being, they thought it was like being biased that you would reach out to certain organizations to look for evidence and to fashion remedies and stuff. And to me it was like, how can you think you're going to understand a problem and design a good solution without having the people with the expertise with the day-to-day operations of that police agency are like, what the power structures are like, what the history has been over the years and put everything in context and make for more effective change.

So that was all kind of good stuff, and one example of that was very early on when I started working there, I helped arrange a meeting with the managers from my section with my former colleagues and people like my former colleagues that were attending National Legal Aid and Defender Association Conference in Washington. So I said, working with them, I was like, "Let's get your people together, put together an agenda. I'll bring the leadership from my office there, and you can lay out what you think the office should be working on." And so they did that, and it was, my managers thought that was pretty cool because they were getting really high level feedback from people who knew what they were talking about, and were actually actively working on these things. And a list of things, problems that they wanted attacked either within the government, or for the government to focus enforcement activity on through the different civil rights offices in different agencies. And one of the things that they complained about was language access for their clients when they went to court. And I still remember that the chief of my section was sitting at tables up in the front, and when they mentioned that, she turns to me and she said, "Oh, looks like you got a new assignment." [Laughs] And I started working on that actively, and I remember spending a year and a half or so drafting a letter that was to come from the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division. I was going to go to the chief justices of all the state courts and the state court administrators to tell them that the Civil Rights Division is very concerned about practices that we were seeing in courts around the country with litigants being unable to have access to the court system, because they don't understand English, and the courts basically said, "Well, that's your problem, you need to figure out how to communicate with the court." "It's not our responsibility." And so the letter kind of said, "That's not acceptable under the Civil Rights Act, and we hope that you're going to work to fix this." It was just a letter, and again, it kind of exemplified the difference between being an advocate on the outside, being on the inside, where I was able to help, along with other people. It's not like I did it by myself, but to go up through all these layers of leadership, to get the person at that level to sign the letter, and why it took so long, but that letter was kind of an earthquake in the courts around the country when it came out. And they had engaged in some pretty fierce lobbying, including with the attorney general, to stop us from sending this letter out because they kind of understood we were working on it. And I ended up spending most of my work time before and after the letter, working on cases involving court systems. And it's something that had, in that time period, had a measurable impact in the sense that the courts are doing much better, and the expectations have changed. Not that the problem is solved, but things are much better than they were before and the culture is different.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.