Eva Paterson, founder and president of the Equal Justice Society in San Francisco, urged an audience of 60 summer law clerks and interns to never underestimate their power to affect social change.
Kicking off NCYL’s 2009 summer law clerk seminar series in June, Paterson stressed the immense and urgent need for public interest advocacy and encouraged her audience of college and law students to pursue public interest careers. The students, from schools across the country, are all spending the summer working at both public interest and private firms in the Bay Area.
Paterson stressed the important role law students played in the strategic litigation that led to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education. She briefly described the history of Brown, explaining that the Court’s decision was the result of an extensive and prolonged litigation strategy. Paterson said law students played a key role in shaping and implementing that strategy through extensive research and other means.
Paterson said that bright, passionate law students and a well-conceived litigation strategy will be needed to tackle one of the next major civil rights issues, addressed in Washington v. Davis. In Washington, the Court rejected disparate impact analysis for civil rights claims, which allowed plaintiffs to challenge practices that were not intended to discriminate, but which had a discriminatory effect. This change in law has severely hindered advocates’ ability to challenge systemic racism that is not demonstrably intentional, but nonetheless has a racially discriminatory effect.
Paterson, who spoke at Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco, headlined the first of 8 lunchtime seminars hosted by NCYL. The series, which is in its 20th year, features guest speakers from around the Bay Area on a range of legal topics.
Founded by Eva Paterson in 2003, the Equal Justice Society engages in political activism and legal advocacy on civil rights issues at the local, state, and national levels. Paterson graduated from Berkeley Law (then known as Boalt Hall) with NCYL Director John O’Toole.
