Her parents were in attendance April 22 at the Bancroft Hotel, where Beri received Berkeley Law’s annual Sax Prize for Clinical Advocacy. She was honored for her exceptional efforts at the school’s East Bay Community Law Center and Death Penalty Clinic.
The board should vote yes on repeal and discharge because its most vulnerable constituents are being exploited for money they simply do not have. As detailed in EBCLC’s recent report, “Pay or Prey: How the Alameda County Criminal Justice System Extracts Wealth from Marginalized Communities,” the ripple effects of these debts are immense and reinforce systems of cyclical poverty, with families usually paying a significant price for their loved ones criminal justice debts.
As a law student, Montenegro worked at the East Bay Community Law Center’s Youth Defender Clinic and was a staff editor for the Berkeley Journal of Entertainment & Sports Law.
Dana Lueck-Mammen ’19 and Trevor Kosmo ’19 recently won the annual Continuing Education of the Bar (CEB) Award for Excellence in Legal Research and Writing at Berkeley Law. During a luncheon ceremony, each received a framed certificate and a $2,500 check from Stephanie Walker, CEB’s Product Strategy and Innovation Manager.
Eleven African-American Berkeley Law students and alumni were chosen for coveted federal judicial clerkships during the recent hiring cycle, the highest number in school history. It is a truly remarkable figure given the jarring lack of racial diversity within America’s judicial chambers.
Third-year UC Berkeley School of Law’s Ahmed Lavalais is a remarkable law student who came to law school specifically to do public interest work, and he’s been a tenacious advocate for juvenile defendants and the poor.
Laura Lane ’96 has represented low-income tenants in the East Bay for nearly 20 years. During all that time, she never saw a landlord go this far to drive out tenants as she did recently at a low-income residential hotel in Oakland’s Chinatown.
Fueled by the injustice he encountered as a student advocate, Phil Hernandez ’16 has turned a simple idea into a California bill to protect tenants involved in eviction lawsuits. While working with the Housing Program at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), Hernandez assisted clients who suffered from what he calls “a big flaw in landlord-tenant law.”
While working with the Housing Program at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), Hernandez assisted clients who suffered from what he calls “a big flaw in landlord-tenant law.” Under existing rules, a tenant must win an eviction suit within 60 days—or else the court records become public and end up on the tenant’s credit report.
It was high-stakes for the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), representing a trafficking victim for the first time. It was high stakes for EBCLC student Asher Waite-Jones ’16, pursuing a visa for a detained client badly in need of help. And it was the highest of stakes for Lynden, who asked not to use her last name, an undocumented transgender woman from Belize facing possible deportation.
