law school berkeley and you know i think that where i came from and then going to berkeley for law school really dramatically affected what i wanted to do with my legal career i think because partly because i watched a lot of change really dramatically even while i was living there and also partly because the reason that i went to law school was because i wanted to find out all the information  know learn how to unlock all those gates and then just try to give away the keys you know figure out ways to to enable the public to truly have access to the law because the law is supposed to be our law right i mean that's the premise  when ronald reagan and the republican party took action to defund legal services there was this huge void that opened up in berkeley you know the legal aid office in berkeley closed and there were lost in this at the law school who were looking at that and thinking where these people supposed to go you know part of what makes a community is diversity and part of what is  important about a place like berkeley is making sure that diversity both socio economically racially diverse in every different kind of way doesn't get pushed out based on sheer economic reasons let me be frank you know you c personally the reason the reason why i went to law school and also the reason why i get up in the morning to go to work is because i want to do something that actually matters you know a friend of mine once compared those great big law firms clashing over you know samsung and apple and whatnot you know fighting over some patent he compared it to you know people devoting enormous time and money to making faberge eggs you know you make these beautiful briefs you write these elaborate arguments and maybe you're the best lawyer in the world writing that argument but what does it matter if it's one factory or tired or coal or sick or whatever right and it's easy for me to slot into this other role this more humble role you know there's that quote we like to talk about and in my office from anatoly france that the law in its majestic equality forbids the rich and poor alike from stealing bread or sleeping under bridges you know to me that's where the rubber meets the road right is the way that the law affects some people differently from how it affects other people you know and that that changes the way that we relate to what should be a fair system designed for all of us you know it's probably very hard to do the work that said we want this you know there wasn't a powerful interest behind it that was going to push it through and make sure that all of the elected people supported it but we're going to have income from the actual people what was what was just a year of the of this particular bill well so there was rent control in oakland but there wasn't any rule that said that you could you couldn't a vixen body for no reason so in berkeley when rent control came into effect there was also eviction protection because if your rent is lower than the landlord thinks they can get from some other person then they'll have an incentive to evict you and replace you with this other person who will pay more i arrange it right and in oakland they only have to reconcile peace up until two thousand and two so people were getting evicted for for no reason at all but we all knew what the real reason was and it was probably mainly financial and so the just cause for addiction ordinance says that there are a certain number of enumerated causes you know one example is not paying your rent another example is that the landlord wants to move in and live in your apartment for three consecutive which giffen to know your work in the three last year but also you work on the hack of accountability housing advisory method of government which i really appreciate and admire and one of the ways they do that is there are many many commissions in the city of berkeley populated by people who the city council believes have expertise in king can offer some advice in the nature try to look to the commissions for for information about things like housing and you know to me all the different levels of housing matter you know we shouldn't think of housing is building houses to sell to people we shouldn't think of it as condominiums we shouldn't think of it as just the housing for the super low income that the federal government tends to like to fine we need to be thinking about the whole spectrum everybody who is in this community needs housing and that's going to mean all kinds of different housing and the housing advisory commission is a place where we have people from many different backgrounds weighing in on what the priorities should be for the city where the blind spots are for the city in terms of the the housing that's available and what housing is being open to locate also we have a satellite office thirty one thirty shattuck which is where we were house for many years before we outgrew it and moved to the out of line office and so many of our workshops take place there and the opening hours are nine to workers rights clinic is actually staffed by attorneys from the legal aid society employment law center which is a different agency but they come to our office and they use students from the berkeley law school  support a high volume of employment questions people coming in just wondering do i have a right to this you know my employer did this is that against the law those kinds of questions just basic questions and then those lawyers supervise the last ins and the law students they find out the information from the tenant or the employee and then they go to the lawyers they find out what the law is they find out more information from the employee they give the employee that information that the lawyer you know has told them it's important you think eviction is easier now than it were i thought it was always been easy but you think it's easier now it's interesting there are a lot of things that have changed about the court system that have maybe not made it easier to fix somebody but they've made it harder for someone to defend themself in a lawsuit that made it harder for people who don't have lawyers to participate in the justice system and so one truly unfortunate example of that is the enormous cutbacks in terms of the clerk windows where you can go in the superior court so if you want to get a document and you go down to the berkeley superior court that court won't help you unless you have a probate issue so if you go down there to ask about your housing issue they're going to say no you've got to go to this other court but the court closes at two thirty so by the time you got to the berkeley court found out you not supposed to go there and they tell you go to the mesa davidson courthouse in downtown oakland you get on a bus see right down to the renesas davidson courthouse you might get in line at two o'clock and they say at two thirty and i think you owe close on go home you know and and and i'm not trying to blame the clerks that's a that's a missed allocation of our resources the government has most misallocated those resources the people deserve access to this justice system and lawyers that have a problem we can just hire process server we can make sure someone goes there it doesn't have to be us and doesn't have to be our client but if you're a client right if you're representing yourself if you're an propre a persona which means you don't have a lawyer well then you supposed to figure this system out and with the windows closing closing narrowing narrowing and the price of things going up you know you have to pay now in order to access your case information on the internet you are used to be free now if you go on the internet onto the spear court website and you try to download a copy of a document you have to pay them a dollar page what if the lam are filed something that's thirty three pages long or what if you know you're dealing with somebody say you you filed a lawsuit against somebody and they owe you all these different corners of our legal system like i said about the berkeley court that's only probate well what if you don't even know what probate is you know then there you got a family law issue maybe custody of your kids you have to go all the way to alameda in order to deal with that one the law is divided up into all these little sectors right and so at the general in a legal clinic one of the things we do is try to figure out where where you know which corner of the law do you belong in for this issue what what area you need needing to research and then the hope is that we can assist people in figuring out what it dozens of these cal students you know these are these are people trying to make a better life for themselves for their for their future for their children their future children even you know and they show up in our lobby and they're all waiting to participate in this program this designed to avoid paralyzing somebody for something they don't have any control over like being born or bright or being brought here when you were child you know being brought here where your child what do you suppose you were five you know her however old and and this these people who are applying for this program they've been in school their whole lives they're working super hard and i've had clients who are that that in that situation and i've had to say to them before the program came into place you know i really don't know what it's going to take to to try to find you  mean if you can yeah well i have to note that i'm not actually one of the attorneys who works on the clean slate practice so i was very sparing things that i've heard from other from other fair enough your other colleagues you should bring some of them on as well ok i would be while i would t photos but i will say that you know we have this very problematic system in place where even a supposedly clean record is not really clean it doesn't look the same as the record of someone like me who's not been arrested you know and that's really problematic we were talking about is never letting someone live down you know with the worst thing they did or didn't do or work used you know to me we need to have a society that recognizes that people can move on people can change you know and we were talking before the show about change and how that's so important and so what clean slate does is is they work with people to use all the remedies that are available in california law and that that refers mainly to what's called a dismissal of the original conviction so when someone can show to the court you know look what i've done for the last however many years i've been living a good life a productive life you know take that thing off my record when it does it shows up as dismissed which is intended to show that it's no longer supposed to prejudice the person but it may end and you know some of the times the reason that it prejudice is the person is because they apply for employment and there's a background check company that's not being scrupulous isn't and isn't reporting it correctly and i'm proud to say that our office has been suing those companies and holding those companies accountable for violating the law but even if the company follows the law you know i  hate to say that it's not perfect the way that the law structure doesn't perfectly clean somebody's slate and that's wrong and so that's what we've also done some policy advocacy the work of rachel johnson faurisson my office worker has been particularly incredible around that working with juveniles and making sure th juveniles get an opportunity to what she calls start over strong because there's a you know getting back and with a clean slate do you consider yourself an activist lawyer ared what books are you reading now well outcome is of a community where you know and i say that just because you know in my view it's critically important that what we do has a solid grounding in the law and when the law is wrong we work to change it that's why i'm on the housing advisory commission that's why i've worked with the city of berkeley on certain policy issues relating to tenants rights to try to make sure that they get shaped in the right way but but the reason i put community in front of lawyer is because that's what makes me satisfied with the work that i'm doing that's why i'm doing and that's what's important about the work that we do you know it we're not we're not trying to get somebody you know a win for the sake of winning we're trying to get people sustainable solutions that will keep them here in this community and i'm sorry what was the other question you asked  some reading i mean i'm in the middle of rebecca so in its new book which is called the faraway nearby it's sort of it's about a lot of things but the reason i bring up rebecca sonet is because she's she's been one of the people who's written most eloquently about the google bus protests and all her heard of it out of either your or your she's got some interesting ideas about that i think it's fascinating to watch how how you know this whole sort of separate private set of transportation for the people who you know they don't need public transportation so they get luxury public transportation built for them by their employers i mean it's really a symbol it's a symbol of how our our government is failing you know the lower middle class the working class the people who you know we're not talking about people on welfare we're talking about people scraping by in a place where we've been house where my sister thirty years i mean as long as i've been alive this is there's been a housing crisis here they've been talking about a housing crisis since before i was bor and it just continues and so you know like you were saying about working for minimum wage you can't you can't pay rent on minimum wage but nobody's going to house you because people the programs are set up for people who have  income you know and so there's this huge hole in what we're doing it's a hole in the safety net and it's a hole in the in the lifting people up you know the bootstrap net it's a hole in whatever you want to call it the the uprising the uplifting the major an educational development project there and this is nice because it ties into that the people who i lived with in all salvador major influences on my life i would with a man they minnelli oh who taught himself to read and who put his children through college and that that transformation you know for someone who was he was a guerilla soldier when he was my age and then he teaches themself how to read and then he puts his kids through school you know and  live with him and hear from him and learn about the way that he was able to have that focus you know that drive to change his life and to and to work for the community around him and the way that he instead of getting insular and focusing on just his family and focusing on ok you know i got to go get money so that i can pay for my kid's school he was dedicated to the community and he gave so much to the community and that's actually how i knew him because he was one of the leaders on this educational development project his kids weren't even in school anymore they were they were already in college and he was working to help other people get their kids through the public school which was in dire need of support and so you know that was that was an incredible experience for me and at the same time as i was there i read this book called hope in the dark and it was about the idea that you know we have all these movements you know as progressive as liberals we have all these movements that we work incredibly hard we try to get an outcome you know and a lot of times the outcome we're demanding just never quite happens right but that doesn't mean that  that the world isn't changing for the better and if we could take snapshots of where we are today and show them to the leaders who demanded more than we have now back when they were making those demands they might be truly impressed by how far we've gotten because i think a lot of people recognize when they're making those asks the that you know there's incremental change the needs to be appreciated too and that helped me to understand how humble job like the one that i have where i work with individuals that can be as impactful  discussion about how far we need to come you know a good lawyer is a good lawyer good dogs not a good female lawyer or a good middle doctor told them we need to move those way bills out so i was as i thought about it yeah no  and i think i'm sure that my life is actually helping me to be the best lawyer that i am or that i can be as well i think that you know some of that is vestige of right is left over from a different era you have occasionally have a judge who's you know from a different time and he's just you know he's harbors these these things these beliefs about women but sometimes it's about implicit bias right it's about the way that you know people don't even realize that they hold a bias and you know i've had experiences where even just recently there was a lawyer much more experience than i am who's a woman who was working in the case she was the lead lawyer she was always in charge she'd been in charge from the very beginning yet and the man that you would think the people more progress or more intelligent because one reason i'm glad you're here because you know i think your kind of progressive not progressive but progressive thinking and looking at the world view now you doing that but put in an action is what makes the world war as far as i'm concerned so i really am aware that you came on my exactly right to we got has been a big undertaking but i don't think that my colleagues who are working on trying to understand what's new and i think have now figured out what's new i don't think they resent the change i think they're really excited because one of the things  that is clear is that people who didn't have any coverage and didn't have anywhere to turn but the emergency room and rack up some bill that was never going to get paid anyway yeah you know those people are starting to get phased into a program that ultimately will be i think  way you know to patch some pieces of the safety net that are broken so i i you know i i think we've got to we've got to be realistic and recognize that this is something that you know it's good it's incremental you know you've got one side saying it's the end of the world and the other side saying it's not good enough and i think you know it's important that we made this little bit of progress and we got to keep building on it we can't just try to tear it down we can't just decry it as not being perfect always you might guess  appreciate that this is a place with with with incredibly valuable history is what drew me here and that the changes that are happening in berkeley some of them are not good and some of them are unavoidable and some of them a bit are ok you know some of them are things we can work with and that we need to be thinking carefully and openly and having a constructive dialogue about how we change in a way that doesn't lose the essence of a place you know that doesn't