Week 4 José Padilla José Padilla opened the 16th Annual Ernesto Galarza Commemorative Lecture at Stanford last year with words spoken by renowned jurist Learned Hand to the New York Legal Aid Society in 1951: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice." Padilla, who is the director of the San Francisco-based California Rural Legal Assistance, went on to say that 50 years after Judge Hand said those words, justice is still rationed in the United States: "The ethnic poor Latino among [rural Californians] have been given a half plate of their due. They've been given a rationed portion of that equal-justice promise. And although the goal was always to provide the poor full and equal access to the courts, it has been an evolving race to the bottom rung." Padilla has dedicated his entire legal career to help remedy that imbalance, as a poverty rights lawyer for California's low-income rural communities. Padilla was born in a small rural community in Imperial County, California. He attended Stanford University, graduating in 1974 with an A.B. in Psychology, and then worked as a head teacher with a farm worker poverty group that provided preschool services to migrant children. He decided to go to law school, and in 1978, he was awarded a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. Before he went away to school, Padilla promised to return to his rural hometown to work for five years after graduation, unlike the many community scholars who left for school and never came back. After he graduated, Padilla made good his promise, and returned to Imperial County. He immediately began working for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) Inc. in its El Centro Office. In that position, Padilla helped develop a community-based low-income credit union, a bilingual community radio station and an immigration center to assist Central American refugees in political asylum matters. He also co-drafted the state's migrant education law. He later became directing attorney of that office, and in 1984, he was appointed executive director of CRLA. Twenty-five years after he started with the CRLA, Padilla still holds that job. The CRLA is viewed as one of the premier legal-aid programs in the country. As its executive director, Padilla oversees a $9 million statewide law firm with an 88-advocate workforce including 51 attorneys, which serves the rural poor in 23 California counties. CRLA's legal work emphasizes the defense of the rural farm worker community in cases involving pesticide exposure, housing, labor, education, civil rights, immigration and environmental justice. Padilla has also testified before a number of government commissions on bilingual education, Latino and other minority voting rights, race and poverty, and restricted legal aid, ensuring that the rural poor have a voice in the state legislature. In the course of those 25 years, Padilla has weathered rounds of budget cuts and changes in the culture of legal aid. Funding cutbacks between 1980 and 2000 reduced the number of lawyers working for the CRLA from 75 to 35. He remains committed to his job: "There were moments when CRLA, as a program, felt the most united because we were focused on institutional survival, a survival, we used to say, 'to let us serve the poor just one more day.'" Padilla also serves on a number of national boards, including the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, the Pesticide Education Center Inc. and the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is a member of the American Bar Association. In 1992, Padilla was the recipient of the California La Raza Lawyers Association's Cruz Reynoso Community Service Award. In 1994, Padilla received the Unity Award from the San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association and the Minority Bar Coalition. In 2001, California Law Business (Los Angeles Daily Journal) selected him as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in California, and in 2003 he received the Ohtli Award for Outstanding Service to Citizens of Mexico Living in the United States. Padilla and his wife, Deborah Escobedo, have been married for 23 years. Deborah is an education rights attorney for Multicultural Education Training & Advocacy (META) Inc. Photo Usage: Photo courtesy of Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service Hispanic Heritage Month 2003 | Links