Legal Profession

In 2015, more than a century after Hong Yen Chang, a Chinese immigrant who had graduated Columbia Law School, was denied a license to practice law in California because of laws that discriminated against Chinese immigrants, the Supreme Court of California granted him posthumous admissi

Rural America lags behind the rest of the nation in access to health care, broadband, quality of education and nearly every other measure of well-being. On July 28, the American Bar Association hosted an online program featuring leaders and scholars of the legal profession discussing ways to address another rural deficit: the painful shortage of lawyers.

In Digital Realty Trust Inc. v. Somers, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 9-0 to narrow the definition of "whistleblower" under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

The Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies presented a screening of Cruz Reynoso: Sowing the Seeds of Justice, filmmaker Abby Ginzberg's documentary on the life of Professor Emeritus Cruz Reynoso, at King Hall on September 26. 

I've been guest blogging for the past few weeks over at Concurring Opinions and invite you over to that blog, on "the law, the universe, and everything" to see what I've been writing.  I've done a four-installment review/commentary on J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

I have attended the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting for many of the 17+ years I have been a law professor, but I experienced something at last week's annual conference in San Francisco that I had never before seen or heard, something that came as a pleasant surprise.

The 2015 issue of California Legal History could easily be titled the King Hall issue. A publication of the California Supreme Court Historical Society, it is an annual journal that publishes scholarly articles and the oral histories of prominent figures of the bench and bar of California.

Here are some of the articles in the new issue:

Is this the "Age of the Wealth Gap?"

Investigative reporter and Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi says yes. His New York Times bestselling book, "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," is the featured work in this year's UC Davis Campus Community Book Project.

About a month ago I wrote an essay for this website commenting on the drop in bar passage rates in many states in the fall of 2014.

More than a century after a New York lawyer was denied the opportunity to practice law in California because of state laws that barred Chinese immigrants from most careers and opportunities, UC Davis law students are seeking his posthumous admission to the California State Bar.

The students in the UC Davis School of Law Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA) are asking the State Bar of California, and eventually the California Supreme Court, to admit Hong Yen Chang, who was denied a license to practice law in California in 1890.