Litigation Section

Imagine being a teenager; not just the awkward moments, but the moments we live to reminisce about. Now imagine being a teenager arrested, accused, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder you did not commit. That was the reality of Zavion, and Franky, Arturo, Obie, Armando, and countless others. Read more

My grandfather was a well-respected, reasonably successful lawyer in post-colonial India. Lawyers also seem disproportionately likely to lead nation-states, movements, and revolutions, and to transition seamlessly into politics and government. But I didn’t become a lawyer to pay homage to family tradition. Nor did I aspire to lead a movement or rise through the ranks in the public sector. Read more

An essential prerequisite to an impartial jury is that it be drawn from a representative cross-section of the community. Courts at the federal and state level have been grappling with this issue for decades in cases where prospective jurors who were members of a minority group (typically based on race or gender) were removed from venires by peremptory challenges. The law has evolved from allowing attorneys to make peremptory challenges without showing a reason (see Swain v. Alabama (1964) 380 U.S. 202) to adopting a methodology to test whether members of cognizable groups were improperly removed from juries. The process began with two cases. Read more

In view of recent events in our communities and through the nation, we are at an inflection point in our history. It is all too clear that the legacy of past injustices inflicted on African Americans persists powerfully and tragically to this day. Each of us has a duty to recognize there is much unfinished and essential work that must be done to make equality and inclusion an everyday reality for all. Read more

Happenings in the United States were frenzied and chaotic after the Civil War. Besides attending to matters of Reconstruction, the country was engaged in wars with Native Americans, a transcontinental railroad was being built, and record numbers of people were immigrating to the Western Territories. Many of the bills Congress passed to aid the freedmen were vetoed by Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. Sometimes Congress was able to override those vetoes, but not always. Eventually Johnson was impeached, surviving conviction in the Senate by one vote. Somewhat amazingly, it was amidst such turmoil that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments were written by congressional supporters of recently freed slaves. Read more

America has always rested upon the proposition that "all [persons] are created equal." Judicial analytics have a crucial role to play in redeeming that promise by showing the degree to which extra-legal factors such as judges’ personal values, ideology, life experiences, race, and gender impact decision making — a study which has never been more important than now, with the fight for racial and gender equality dominating the news this year. Read more

Like me, some 46 million Americans —roughly 20% of the adult population — trace their roots to settlers under the Homestead Act. Like my family, the vast majority of homesteaders were White. (Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites, Slavery and Capitalism in the Deep South (2017) p. 38.) As an heir to homestead land, I cannot ignore the role race has played in my family’s generational upward mobility. My immigrant forbearers established their citizenship while they perfected their claims by living on and cultivating their 160-acre parcels. As they did so, Native Americans, who had inhabited the lands for millennia, continued to be dispossessed. And emancipated African Americans, who had labored over two-and-a-half centuries to bring land in the American South into productivity, remained destitute. Read more

I am the great-great-great-granddaughter of Isadora Thompson, a Black woman who survived chattel slavery in the United States, and died free. In 1855, Isadora was listed in the property inventory of Baker Boswell Degraffenreid, one of the largest slaveholders in Fayette County, Tennessee. When Baker Degraffenreid’s daughter, Sarah, married Dr. Solomon Green, Baker’s wedding gift to his daughter consisted of various land holdings as well as 14 human beings, including Isadora. Baker drew up a "Deed of Gift" attempting to convey the women, men, and children, and their issue, to Sarah, as separate property, out of reach of her husband. Read more

"A rather interesting case has been commenced in the Superior Court of this city," reported the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1870, "out of the custom of slavery, now supposed to be extinct." The plaintiff, Henrietta Wood, a former resident of Cincinnati, had sued Zebulon Ward, alleging she had been abducted by Ward’s slave trading agent, and delivered to Kentucky from Cincinnati, the place where she had enjoyed her "sweet taste of liberty." She was then reenslaved in Kentucky and sold to subsequent plantation owners, "remaining there in the bonds of slavery until her shackles were knocked off by the lamented Mr. Lincoln." She asked for $20,000 in damages, including years of lost wages. Read more

It is an honor and a privilege to be the Chair of the Litigation Section of the California Lawyers Association during one of the most consequential moments in American history. There are three major challenges facing the legal community and, more broadly, our society. First, we are living through the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the worst global pandemic in the past 100 years. Second, we are facing the most devastating economic crisis to hit the United States since the Great Depression. Third, we are living in a critical moment in the struggle for racial justice, civil rights, diversity, and inclusion. The way that we respond to these challenges could result in life or death consequences that could last for generations. Read more