Nathan Ballard ’99 has no question about what he wants to do for the rest of his life. “I’ve made it my life’s work to serve as an advisor to political leaders who fight to make the world a better place,” he says. “I enjoy the fight, and I’m right…
April 29, 2019
Eric Casher’s gratitude for his gifts and opportunities goes hand-in-hand with a feeling of responsibility to those whose lives have turned out different than his own. “I feel really fortunate to have the opportunities I’ve had, and I try to make the most of them,” he says. “I ask myself…
When Claude Stern ’80 was five years old, his grandmother told him the Almighty gives each person a single box of energy to use during their lifetime. And at the rate he was going, she said his would be all used up before he was an old man. “I hope…
Vien Truong ’06 loves her community, and it seems the feeling is mutual. In 2017, Assemblyman Rob Bonta of Oakland told San Francisco Magazine, “In Oakland, it’s essentially unanimous. She’s a legend.” Among Truong’s most celebrated accomplishments in the fight against poverty and pollution, the passage and implementation of California’s…
Khaldoun Baghdadi ’97 has had a keen sense of justice as long as he can remember. At age 16, while working as an usher at a movie theater, he tried to start a union to address the issue of insufficient overtime pay. “I thought if we had some sort of…
Martha Mendizabal grew up during the rapid proliferation of PC and mobile-phone technology in the 1990s, but she had no access to those types of devices as a poor child in Tijuana. It forced her to play catch-up as an undergraduate at UCLA. Mendizabal is now working to ensure the…
Alex Sauerwein, 2L, had been interested in organic farming ever since he fed chickens and picked produce in his backyard while growing up in San Jose, Calif. But it wasn’t until his junior year in college that he decided to make sustainable agriculture the focus of his career. He was…
February 23, 2019
UC Law SF College of the Law Chancellor and Dean David Faigman issued the following message on the passing of San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi ‘85: Dear UC Law SF Community, Like everyone who knew him, or knew about him, I was devastated to learn that our good friend…
When she was a junior at UC Irvine, Victoria Ayeni read An Expendable Man in a course called “Miscarriages of Justice.” The book tells the story of Earl Washington, Jr., an intellectually disabled black man wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman in Virginia. He spent…