SERVANTS TO JUSTICE.
Author | Mesiwala, Shama Hakim |
The law school I attended and where I now teach Appellate Advocacy is named after the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The year was 1968, and the students and faculty of the University of California Davis School of Law "were actively involved in the legal, political, and social debates of the time." (1) They urged campus administrators to name the building for Dr. King after he was assassinated on April 4 "as a way of honoring the slain civil right leader and dedicating the [l]aw [s]chool to King's ideals of public service and social justice." (2)
Exactly two months before his assassination, Dr. King gave a sermon called The Drum Major Instinct, in which he spoke about the value of service. (3) He told congregants of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta who were gathered in the audience:
[H]e who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness.... You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. (4) This is my call today--that we be servants to justice in honor of Dr. King's legacy. In this article, I provide examples of what that service may look like in the context of civics education, character, democracy, unity, and redressing wrongs. My hope is that judges, lawyers, law professors, and students will find practical ways to serve the communities of which they are a part.
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SERVANTS TO CIVICS EDUCATION: BRINGING THE APPELLATE COURTROOM TO STUDENTS
When starting my career as an appellate attorney in my early twenties, I received my first notice to appear for oral argument. still new to appellate practice, one thing I thought I knew for sure was the location of California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, where I filed most of my briefs. It was in Sacramento, just across the street from the California State Capitol. So I thought it must be a mistake when the notice told me to appear at a high school gymnasium in Redding, California. But it was no mistake. "[T]he [c]ourt decided that the time had come to encourage interested individuals to attend argument and learn firsthand how appellate courts operate." (5) It "chose to hold court in a school setting so that we could make it an educational opportunity for students." (6)
I arrived in the high school auditorium not knowing what to expect. The bailiff asked the lawyers to check in with our business cards at a makeshift clerk's counter (a white plastic folding table at the front corner of the gymnasium) and then take a seat in the front row of court. The front row was a series of brown folding chairs placed on the gymnasium's wooden floor, facing the makeshift judges' bench that consisted of more folding tables pushed together and covered in black drape cloths. As I settled into my folding chair and nervously looked around, I was pretty sure I was closer in age to the high school students than to the other attorneys or justices. I took a deep breath and waited for my client's case to be called. And then it was: People v. The Minor. The minor was my client and a high school student appealing his juvenile adjudication for battery on a substitute teacher.
I approached the wooden podium and began my first oral argument. There were about 300 students behind me on bleachers, and three justices in front, asking questions of me and my friend on the other side, who represented the People of the State of California. Those justices were Arthur Scotland, the court's presiding justice; (7) Vance Raye, the court's first African--American justice (who would later succeed Scotland as the presiding justice); (8) and Consuelo Callahan, the court's first Latina justice (who would later be appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). (9)
When my client's oral argument finished, I realized that this was the second day of the court's two-day outreach program. The first day, Presiding Justice Scotland had given "an overview of the appellate process to teachers and students studying American government." (10) The second day included a question-and-answer session at which the students were "invited to ask questions about the appellate process and the role of the courts of appeal in our system of government." (11) One question that elicited laughter from the audience and justices alike was how much the justices got paid. If I were a teenager in the audience, I would have probably asked that question, too.
The innovation of this court outreach program was it brought the courtroom to hundreds of students who otherwise would have had almost no opportunity to see how an appellate court functioned. The California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District is geographically vast, "stretching] over 23 counties... [and] is larger than the combined area of Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and vermont." (12) It was not feasible that students would be able to travel to Sacramento from these outlying counties to see justice in action. This innovation received statewide attention when the Third Appellate District was recognized by the administrative arm of the California court system in January 2002 with the Ralph N. Kleps Award for Improvement of the Administration of the Courts. (13)
Almost two decades after this first outreach program, I came across a public letter by United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor calling for "leaders to make civic learning and civic engagement a reality for all." (14) Justice O'Connor had seen "first-hand how vital it [was] for all citizens to understand our Constitution and unique system of government, and participate actively in their communities." (15) She asked our leaders to "commit to educating our youth about civics, and to helping young people understand their crucial role as informed, active citizens in our nation." (16) Presiding Justice Scotland's prescient court outreach program was just the type of civic learning and engagement our young people need to take their place as informed and active citizens of our country.
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SERVANTS TO CHARACTER: INSTILLING CHARACTER AS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF LEGAL EDUCATION
About five years after I began arguing cases before the California Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal, I transitioned to working as an appellate court judicial attorney at the Third Appellate District--the same court in which I had argued my first case at the high school gymnasium. The supervising appellate court attorney, Timothy Schooley, was finishing up many years of teaching Appellate Advocacy at UC Davis King Hall, and he asked me if I might be interested in taking over. I was excited at the possibility of teaching a subject I loved at my alma mater.
In preparing to teach, I came across an essay entitled The Purpose of Education that Dr. King wrote for the Morehouse College newspaper in 1947. (17) Dr. King explained that "education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture." (18) Education needs "to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.... We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education." (19)
At first, I thought teaching Appellate Advocacy would not lend itself to teaching about character. But as I thought about the better appellate advocates whose briefs I had read and whose oral...
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