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 newly opened Basic Needs Center will centralize our UC Basic Needs Model into a single location. We are grateful for the multiple generations of ASUC executives who helped secure a five-year contract in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. We are grateful for our UC Berkeley Basic Needs Security Committee that includes five campus divisions, the ASUC, the campus Graduate Assembly, the Alameda County Community Food Bank, Alameda County Social Services, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, the East Bay Community Law Center, individual alumni and individual community members committed to improving the basic needs of our community.
As part of their year-long research for the project, López and Cruz interviewed seven Dreamers who attend UC Berkeley, all currently protected under an executive order signed June 15, 2012, by then-President Barack Obama, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The university has an entire department — the Undocumented Student Program, which is part of the Centers for Educational Equity and Excellence — devoted to the roughly 500 Dreamers currently enrolled. The program assists students with academic support, provides free legal aid by East Bay Community Law Center, and offers other resources to help obtain financial aid and scholarships.
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.
Over the years, we realized that there was enough consumer law work to fill another clinic at the East Bay Community Law Center. They already had immigration law and landlord tenant and other clinics. But this one would focus on consumer law defense. They called it the Consumer Justice Clinic. And it is thriving.
The racial justice work churning within Berkeley Law is expansive and inspiring. Yet the people leading that work—clinic leaders, student advocates, faculty scholars—acknowledge that confronting racial inequities in America demands confronting them in its legal institutions. “Racial justice work is disingenuous unless it’s connected to that acknowledgment,” says Tirien Steinbach ’99, director of Berkeley Law’s East Bay Community Law Center (ECBLC). “People talk about leveling the playing field, but very few legal entities actually do it.”
With the recent uncertainty surrounding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and undocumented people generally, “we’re seeing fear and confusion within the entire immigrant community,” says Linda Tam ’00, who directs the East Bay Community Law Center’s Immigration Clinic. “This work has become more important than ever.”
The University of California Berkeley School of Law is launching the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, a new center that will position the school as a leader in the study, research and practice of consumer law. […] Berkeley Law is also home to the Consumer Justice Clinic, which operates within the East Bay Community Law Center.
Following a five-minute hearing Wednesday, an immigration judge ordered the UC Berkeley junior’s release from custody on the minimum possible bond, $1,500, while his case is pending. Lawyers for ICE made no arguments against bond and waived an appeal, said Prerna Lal, Mora’s attorney.
Mora, a 20-year-old pre-law student, was detained Dec. 30 at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint roughly 25 miles from Mexico in the Jamul area of unincorporated San Diego County. He was in Southern California over the holiday visiting with his partner, according to Attorney Prerna Lal with the East Bay Community Law Center.
