"I remember driving to work and every day there was a horrible Supreme Court decision that made me want to quit law and open a jazz club," she said Friday during an American Bar Association panel.
The memory was a timely reminder; the high court's conservative bench does not seem to be particularly open to the arguments of civil rights attorneys. Paterson's remarks coincided with the 56-year anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and also came about a month after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision
, which made it harder to bring claims under Section 2 of that statute.But Paterson, who is president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, said one of the joys of being a civil rights attorney is that your avocation is your vocation.
"I pick up the paper and I see something, and I go, 'I want to do something about that,'" she said. "And I get paid to do this. It's remarkable."
Paterson was one of four lawyers who spoke about their decades of experience during Friday's ABA panel on "lessons learned" and the road ahead. One of the lessons they strove to impart on young lawyers is that there are many ways to get involved with civil rights work.
"There's no one path," Paul Smith said.
After he graduated from law school, he'd hoped to work for a civil rights organization or for the government, but ended up at boutique firms and then BigLaw, taking on several pro bono matters. He honed his appellate practice at Jenner & Block, and now he works at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights watchdog group.
"There are so many different ways you can do a lot of this good work," he said.
The diversity of the panelists' careers seemed to reflect that credo as well.
Leslie Proll started out clerking for an Alabama federal judge who'd been appointed by Richard Nixon, then took a job with a private small civil rights firm before eventually going on to work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Paterson turned down a job at Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights four times before taking the gig that would span 26 years of her career.
John C. Brittain who won Sheff v. O'Neill, the 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court case improving education equity, said his work as a law professor and a litigator were equally important to him. Both bolstered his identity as a "social engineer," he said, quoting Charles Hamilton Houston, the first general counsel of the NAACP, who said, "A lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society."
The panelists also talked about the importance of sustaining their work, both by mentoring the next generation of civil rights lawyers and by practicing self-care. Brittain said he teaches the students in his torts class, "protect your mental and physical health, or the law will kill you."
They discussed litigation strategy, as well, and how they'd learned some lessons the hard way.
Smith, who won the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas
case, the high court's landmark gay rights decision striking down sodomy laws, noted that victory came after the high court's 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision upholding a Georgia state law banning sodomy. He said Bowers was filed too soon, and "cost us 17 years of heartache.""Those are important strategic calls that would add to the list of things that civil rights lawyers have to be especially good at — knowing when to go where on what issue," he said.
But there were lessons from the victories, too.
In 2015, Paterson said, the term "implicit bias" went from being a term that "everyone laughed at," to a concept that Justice Anthony Kennedy relied on in the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project
case. That case borrowed the social science strategy used in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Paterson said, to argue that racial animus wasn't necessary to show a discriminatory outcome in low-income housing.Proll, who now advises the NAACP on judicial nominations, noted that another recent victory for civil rights lawyers is that they can vie for a seat on the federal bench. Voting rights attorney and Second Circuit nominee Myrna Pérez and D.C. federal district court nominee Jia Cobb, a former D.C. public defender who has focused on civil rights lawsuits in private practice, both cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee recently.
That was one example of the many places a civil rights lawyer's career can go, according to Proll, who herself went from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to advocacy work on the hill. Her experience as a litigator gave her the tools she needed to assess the competence of judges. If a state court judge granted a summary judgment motion and prevented a case from going to trial, she said, that might suggest something about the sort of jurist they'd be on the federal bench.
Her career, she said, was just one example of why there ought to be "a broad definition of civil rights lawyering."
"Sometimes people think it means you're litigating at one of the national civil rights organizations. And that's true, they're civil rights lawyers. But there are many more opportunities to do civil rights lawyering," she said. "You can be an organizer, you can be an advocate, you can be a litigator, you can do policy work."
--Editing by Emily Kokoll.
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