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Qualified Immunity and Statutory Interpretation: A Response to William Baude
Professor William Baude asks, “Is qualified immunity unlawful?” He refers to the § 1983 defense, under which officers avoid liability for damages unless they have violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Baude concludes that qualified immunity is unlawful because…
Eviction: How Expedited Process and Underfunded Legal Aid Contribute to Our Housing Crisis
The word crisis has lost its essence through overuse and exaggeration. Still, looking through the dictionary, I find myself quietly nodding along with how fittingly the definition describes the current state of housing in Alameda County…
Community Lawyering: Direct Legal Services Centered Around Organizing
In June 2017, Susan Burton, founder of the successful prisoner reentry program A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL), spoke to students and staff at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC). Ms. Burton’s story is profound…
Holistic Healing: From Medical-Legal Partnerships to Future Collaboration with Community-Based Organizations
Founded in 1989 as one of the pioneer clinics at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), the Health & Welfare Practice provides holistic legal services through a medical-legal partnership model to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable individuals. Our experience over the last three decades…
Energy, Skill, and Outrage: How the Clinical Model Can Support Law Students and Clients as Drivers of Social Change
In Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice, Gerald P. López advocates for an inclusive model of progressive lawyering that acknowledges and employs the varying expertise of all the participants in the struggle for social change. In a similar spirit, the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) was founded in 1988 by Berkeley Law students who were immensely…
Developing Lawyers: the East Bay Community Law Center’s Impact on Law Students’ Professional Identity Formation
I was recently at a conference of lawyers where we were asked to reflect on how we developed our professional identity. Not easily defined, professional identity is “a way of being” that encompasses the skills, values, roles, and behavior patterns of the profession. For most of the lawyers in the room, the answer lay outside their law school experience. For many of these lawyers, their professional…
Sitting in the Front of the Bus: Belonging at the East Bay Community Law Center
It was a weekday afternoon, and my last meeting of the day was a community forum in Oakland hosted by Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson to discuss African American achievement. The convening was at an Oakland high school that was not on a BART line. But rather than drive, I decided to take the bus. AC Transit buses were my primary form of transportation in my youth, taking me…