Interview with Professor Blum

Professor Blum is a Clinical Professor of Law, Emerita, at Berkeley Law and a leading authority in refugee, asylum, and international human rights law. She founded Berkeley’s International Human Rights Law Clinic and has directed numerous pioneering clinical programs in immigration and refugee law. After retiring, she worked in New York with major human rights organizations, and continues to teach and write on human rights and social justice, contributing over 25 years to Oxford’s Human Rights programs.

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Transcript:

Alice: Hello, Professor Blum! I’m Alice!

Yilei: And this is Yilei. We are both members of the Exempli Gratia Law club. 

Alice: We looked a lot into your background! We also read your book on your parents and some of your earlier interviews. So, we’d just like to jump right into our questions if you’re okay with that! 

Professor Blum: Great. I am okay with that. 

Was there any key legal precedent case in your career that you hope to overturn or establish through your work? What would have changed, and why would you want to change it?

Professor Blum: Well, that’s kind of a difficult question to answer, because pretty much everything I worked on was successful. In terms of the major litigation I did, there was an early case in 1982—which started an immigration proceeding, but a very unusual one—and we did lose that. We were trying to establish that a young man of a certain age and class background, in particular neighbourhoods in El Salvador, was being targeted by the military dictatorship, and we hoped to broaden understanding of that. We didn’t succeed, though. That’s probably the only one. There was also a major undertaking that took many months and even years of litigation. I feel lucky because most of the big cases I worked on did end up succeeding.

So, what’s the most profound transformation you’ve seen in a student—or anybody—you’ve mentored, and how did it affect you?

Professor Blum: That's a wonderful question. I feel really fortunate. I have worked with so many incredible students because I've been working in two different places. My primary career was at UC Berkeley in the law school. But in addition, I've been part of the Master's International Human Rights Law at Oxford, which is a part-time degree program. So, I've had the pleasure of working with young people who are just out of undergraduate, or maybe had taken a few years to work between undergrad and law school, which is a different kind of mentoring because you're really mentoring people to think critically, and also to think about what they want to do, how they want to use their law degrees. And in the Oxford program, it's primarily mid-career professionals, people from 35 to 45 years old, sometimes older, sometimes younger. Though for international human rights law, in order to enhance their knowledge base, and possibly pivot to something that is more human rights-based than some of the careers they're in, might they be working in a government agency, or working at an NGO that does a lot of humanitarian assistance. So, I've had such an array of people, and I try to keep up with a lot of people that I have worked with. And, especially now, it has definitely really affected me in terms of my hope for the future of the world, because I've been involved with so many people who are working in all different sectors, trying to do all different kinds of things. It really gives me hope, because I know that people are out there all over the world just trying to do good and change the world. Changing it, be it local or international, so…. Yes, that's kind of how it affected me, in that it keeps on feeding hope by knowing that there are all these amazing human beings out there that I've worked with in the past.

Yilei: I love that you keep up with them still and keep in contact!

Professor Blum: Yes, I tried to. I mean, it's hard. But it goes in spurts.

As we're on the topic of students, what is one thing that you would advise all students to do at least once in a lifetime? It can be legal-related or not. 

Professor Blum: I really, really recommend not going straight from undergraduate to law school. I think it's a big mistake. The students who have been out working are, first of all, they get way less stressed out by law school, which we could talk more about the nature of law school—but, just because they've been working, they have a more sophisticated life experience. People who come straight from undergraduate law school tend to have no kind of conception of what they're doing and how they're going to use their law degree. They are sort of a one-off, like a train that's going down the track. Because I taught or teach in very elite schools, people are usually from elite undergrad schools, they're just on a train instead of asking themselves, “why am I going to law school? What do I hope to get out of law school? What does this mean for me?” And the people who have been out for 3 to 5 years have just made much better use of their law school career, and are way less anxious about it. So, that would be a big advice—I don't know who your audience is, if your audience is primarily law students, they've already made that decision, but if it's also people who are in undergrad thinking about a law career, that is my best piece of advice. I do realize that it's now much more difficult to get a job coming straight out of undergrad, but there's always a possibility to work, in a big law firm as a paralegal or something like that, or a legal assistant in lots of different kinds of scenarios, and that's what I would recommend. 

That is very unique advice for that question! Since we talked about the nature of law school, many say law school teaches you how to think like a lawyer, but not how to practice law. Do you have an opinion, or would you please elaborate on the nature of law school? 

Professor Blum: Sure. Well, I was, predominantly for most of my career, a clinical legal professor, which is a different methodology of teaching law that is pretty ubiquitous in American law schools. It's not as ubiquitous outside. I think it's pretty ubiquitous at Canadian law schools as well, which is a form of teaching by doing. So, there are clinics in all kinds of areas of law. There are housing clinics, which are related to economic development, or clinics related to immigration, which are what I started with. I was the first clinician at UC Berkeley, and my area was, at that point, immigration and refugee law. Then, I moved and pivoted solely into refugee law for a period of time, and then I moved into another area of international human rights and justice and accountability. And so I taught clinics in all those different areas. Though I must say, absolutely, the first thing you should do is to take clinics in law school, and not just one clinic. Then, work as much as you can. While you're in law school, either with the clinical programs that are available to you or internships with organizations, don't just sit in classrooms taking notes and being in the ivory tower. Law school is an opportunity because there are so many connections that law schools have to local law firms, to local non-governmental organizations. That's very, very important to get out there and be working, either inside your law school with the clinic, or externally in an internship, for example, with judges in the summer. Use your law career well. And I would say things have changed a lot in the legal academy. I mean, yes, there are a lot of people who think that a theoretical approach to a topic is still the way to go, but most law professors now recognize that students need to come out of law school understanding the nature of what they're going to be doing, like for example, using the Socratic method, because of the demands of students are seen to be changing. They don't want to graduate from law school, not really knowing how to be a lawyer. So nowadays, there's a lot more simulation classes; there's a lot more opportunities to get involved in moot court competitions, which are going to help you learn how to write a brief well and are going to help you understand how a case proceeds. I mean, it's not enough. I think the law school community could perform itself better, and really have a lot more of an attitude that it's really okay to be training law students how to actually be lawyers. There's one thing that I've done in teaching, which is I've shown students jury instructions that we used in one of our human rights cases. This is a team effort. I asked every student if they'd ever read jury instructions, and they all said, “No, we never read jury instructions.” They are 3rd-year law students! It's actually a really important part of the case if you're going to litigate, to understand how you make jury instructions, how you put them together. So, yes, I try to teach them these, and I have a lot of colleagues who do the same thing. We try to mix it up and expose students to things that they will really have to deal with in the future. Thought for the first year in law school in the U.S, at least, it is still pretty constrained to certain subject areas, which are very important subject areas, especially for passing the bar exam. We need to be realistic that the bar exam is still, to a large extent, a predictor of what kind of courses you're going to take in law school.

So, while we're on the topic of clinics, when you founded Berkeley's International Human Rights Law Clinic, what were some of the challenges in designing the curriculum to help the students get more real-world practice?

Professor Blum: Well, one of the big challenges in international human rights law, as a subject for a clinical program, is that International immigration law work is extremely varied. It's not repeating the same thing each time. Every kind of project that you want to work on, or litigation you want to work on, a lot of it's very different from each other. There’s another challenge to it, which is that a lot of these projects we have in the clinics are longer-term. They're not geared towards a student's one-semester or one-year-long clinical experience. The job of the clinician is to figure out how a student is going to enter a bigger project and feel that they are really doing something important and that they have ownership of their work. So, a lot of this is about engaging with the students about every aspect of the case. For example, when I founded the International Human Rights Law Clinic, the first project that I was doing was a piece of litigation. There was an analysis of whether a particular situation was amenable. The students were involved in asking, “Is it amenable to litigation?” Then, “Who were the plaintiffs for this particular piece of litigation?” It turned out to be a four-year project because it took four years to get to trial. It was in the summer, and unfortunately, a bunch of the students that have been working on it couldn't come to the trial because they were taking the bar exam. So, in summary, you cannot plan that kind of timing. That was certainly unfortunate, but they had done so much great work at all stages of the case, from the beginning of creating the complaint, leading discovery disclosures, presiding over depositions… They had had an incredible experience of learning how to actually pursue a civil lawsuit. And, I think they all would say that it was a really great experience, even though they couldn't be there sometimes. I was really trying to bring them into the web at each stage. Unfortunately, no one person was working alongside me the whole time because it was a four-year project, and students don't even come to me as a clinician until their second year of law school. Overall, a lot of it's how it's structured at that time. We had students work on one big project together and one individual refugee case in which their client applied for asylum at the lowest level in the United States, which is going to an asylum officer. There is a hearing, but not a formal hearing. It's an informal interview, basically. So everyone was working with a real human being, and we're working in a team. So, the students were getting to know somebody, and they were trying to learn about how to do that work, and it was extremely well done. It was like the gold standard. I’d say, if every immigration lawyer had the ability to do what these students did, the grant rates would have gone very high. I don't know so much about the current environment, but in the past, we almost won every case because the students had done such a thorough job. Well, I mean, partly because they only have one case to concentrate on, which is obviously not the typical caseload of someone who's trying to make their living as an immigration lawyer. 

That’s a lot of insights! So, from a professor’s perspective, what would you recommend to students for securing internships and expanding real-world practice opportunities?

Professor Blum: First of all, students don't talk to their professors enough. I think people are very intimidated by their professors, and maybe their office hours are not that many. It's really good to relate to your law professors because, first of all, you need them to recommend you. So just from a completely utilitarian perspective, if I'm being asked to write a recommendation letter for a student, and a student's definitely going to need that going forward, if I don't know the person very well, if they were not talking up in class a lot if they were not stopping in at office hours and talking to me, I wouldn't have as much to say! And I wouldn't get to know them as a full person. That's less true in clinical education, because it's much smaller, but in general, I would say, anybody who's at law school should take advantage of relating to their professors, and not feeling intimidated by them, and feel like their job is to help you learn and understand. Plus, they have lots of good ideas for things that you were just raising, and I think of it in terms of, “how you want to use your law school time? What are your goals for being in law school?” And these may change as you get further and further into it, but students who come to a particular law school, because they know that it has a robust international human rights law platform, it might have a center, for example, an international community health center, affiliated with it, which might have some other good process to take. If I'm meeting with that person when they first come into law school, I would say the resume that you have at the end of law school has to screen that you're really interested in international human rights law, which means you took every course you could take in the law school, you've got—if the school has certificates, which a lot of schools do—certificates in public and international law. You should also spend every summer working in some sort of institution, like a UN institution, a governmental institution, or a non-governmental organization. This shows that this is what you're committed to. And, plus, at the time you're doing all that, you're also networking with people within that organization. I’m glad that it's not an old boys' network anymore, which is really good, because international rights law is now dominated by women, actually, but it definitely still works the same way. For example, if I met you at law school, and I knew somebody had a position or authorization, I could recommend you to that person. So it still works the same way, and that kind of networking is just really important for students. It really is, I would say, a generic principle. No matter what field you want to go into, and you may not even know what field you want to go into when you come into law school, is that you really think very intentionally about how you're using your time during law school, and what kinds of internships you want to have, what kinds of summers do you want to have. On the other hand, I know that debt is a concern for a lot of people. If someone is intent on a particular field, but that field is not very remunerative, then they are going to have to try to maximize their law school experience and gain as much knowledge in the field. Immigration is a great example of that. It actually can be a very lucrative field in private practice, but if you say your aspiration is to work with immigrants from a particular region of the world, you're probably going to be working for a non-governmental organization that doesn't pay a huge amount of money. But another way is that you can spend a whole lot of time working in a bigger law firm and utilize their pro bono program. So, that way, you can be a lot more proactive with the pro bono and try to get your partner or coordinator, whatever it is in that particular law firm, interested in something you're interested in. So, it's not an either-or situation of “oh, my route is going into a law firm or working a corporate environment for corporations, or I'm going to be absolutely poverty-stricken, working in the legal aid office in a small town in Texas.” That is not the choice. There are so many gradations in between that. Right now, it's a little hard to talk about government as a possible place to work in the United States, because most people wouldn't want to work for this federal government, but the state government is excellent. If the state government hires a lot of lawyers, you can get a lot of good experience in government work. Overall, it's definitely finding your passion and being able to accommodate for that when taking in multiple factors. I mean, there's a thing among law school faculty that every single student who applies for law school basically writes a very similar essay: “Okay, so, I want to do good. I believe in the rule of law. I want to change the world for the better. I really care about environmental issues…”, whatever. And I think it's true. I think almost everyone who goes to law school sees it as a route for change. That is something to really hold onto. You didn't come to law school to make a lot of money. I mean, of course, some people do come to law school thinking to make a lot of money, but really, I think the motivation of most, at least for all the students I ever worked with, was because they wanted to help bring about social change. Though I’m beginning to think that people start to lose that passion. You came to law school for a reason, because you cared about something really deeply. You need to keep that alive for yourself, no matter what route you're gonna take in terms of your career.

Alice: Thanks for the answer! I think every law student has to make this hard choice. Well, since we are a little tight on time—

Professor Blum: Oh, I mean, I'm free to stay for a little bit longer if you'd like me to. 

Alice: Well, that would be great, that would be wonderful.

Professor Blum: Absolutely. Yeah, so—Oh my gosh, I have to see the transcription from the AI companion after this! I always find them really funny. But they also miss things. It's the new age of getting used to them.

As we’re, in a way, the newer, or the “next” generation of law students, we are wondering, do you think there are any research topics on any blind spots in the U.S. International Human Rights Law? Are there any sort of injustices you really want to research? Or ones that we can research? 

Professor Blum: Oh, I mean, that's a 5-hour conversation. The U.S. is currently committing so many international human rights law injustices. It’s like they put a bunch of guys on a plane and try to send them to South Sudan. I mean, that is so despicable. I was speaking to a very, very prominent person in immigration law who's worked inside administrations and been outside administrations. I was saying, when Trump was elected, did you think he would take 300 Venezuelans and put them on a plane? None of them had any idea where they were going, and they ended up in a prison outside. Would you take some guys, put them on a plane, not tell them where they're going, and only because of a federal judge could they land in Djibouti, where they're put into a container. It's inconceivable. So, there are huge human rights problems going on in the U.S. Right now. They're so extensive that it's impossible to summarize them. But, certainly, in the immigration and refugee law area, the U.S. is basically violating every single treaty that has anything to do with immigration. Treaties or customary international law that are relevant are being violated by the United States. It's an area… It's hard to even pick out one thing. I mean, I just mentioned that topic of being peripherally involved in some work around it. It's just inconceivable that people are going to be blocked up and sent to other countries where they're not the citizens of those countries, and they don't know anything about them. So now these Venezuelans are basically “disappeared people”. They can't reach out and talk to their families, they can't have family visits, and they don't have and can't have lawyers. So, in International Human Rights Law, folks refer to them as “disappeared people” because no one knows where they are, and no one can find them, and they have no external contact with their families. So essentially, they've “disappeared”, and that's a violation of the most fundamental things.

Alice: Yes! I'm in Canada, actually, and I saw the news on what's happening these days. It's quite heartbreaking, to be honest, because I'm also aspiring to go to the States for law school and such.

Professor Blum: So, it’s a really tough time for foreign students. I was just talking to a colleague yesterday, and he teaches at NYU, and we were talking about whether anybody is gonna come? The vast majority of people come in to get an LLM, which is a Master's in Law. They're foreign lawyers who want to come to the U.S. because they want to either learn about the U.S. Law, so they're more knowledgeable about it for their own practices in whatever country they're in. Or they want to educate themselves further than what they have. But now, why would someone who's not a citizen of the United States want to come here? Because you don't know, you literally cannot guarantee that you're gonna make it through 3 years of law school, because who knows? And a list of people is being put on a no-entry list, which keeps growing. Every other week, Trump adds more countries to it, and there's literally no rhyme or reason. It's not like he picked the 40 countries that have the worst dictatorships. No, that's not his criterion. I don't know what his criteria are, actually. I'm sure it's going to be litigated, so there'll be more information. But yeah, this is really tough to think about coming to the United States as a student. However, there are some really fantastic law schools in Canada.

Not even 50 years ago, we were still fighting the same issues in the U.S, and finally made some progress, but now that we've kind of gone backwards, what's your opinion on the colleges that are fighting back against the current government administration? 

Professor Blum: I think it's a really, really big deal and really important, because this is a very common playbook, and the conversion from a democratic regime to an authoritarian regime is going on after the elites. So, going after elites is not a win for Trump. I mean, it may be a whim because he sort of seems to be driven by wind, whim and vindictiveness. But it's also very deliberate in the sense of going after institutions that are seen as reputable, credible, and important parts of the ecosystem of a country, that there are colleges and universities that are independent. The fact that he goes after two or three of the top universities in the country is a very deliberate act. That is a very deliberate thing in a dictatorial playbook. A capitulation to Trump by Columbia University, for example, is something that most people like me in academia would think was completely necessary. The same thing with the law firms. He started issuing these. He was trying to roll by fiat, so he's just creating executive orders, so many more than most presidents ever did in their whole term, their whole 4- or 8-year term. And, he has no control over these lawyers. And the first law firm that supported, which was one of the ones named in an executive order, led to 8 other law firms, and we're talking about big, multinational, extremely wealthy law firms, to add plenty of money. Everyone I know thinks it is really despicable that those law firms did that. It was completely unnecessary. He should have no control over them, and if they weren't worried, they might lose some clients. Well, that's just the way it goes. So you lose those clients, but you'll get other clients, because people will admire you for not perpetuating. It's putting law students, actually, in a horrible position, because people accepted a job after their second year. They got an offer and accepted a job, and now they're going. I'm going to such and such place, but I don't want to work at a place that would do that. And so it's not only unnecessary from a legal perspective, but it becomes a place where not a lot of people want to be affiliated. So, I think it's really important for elite institutions to fight back and stand their ground. This is about to happen. Now, the University of California system is in his sights. In fact, all this stuff sort of originated in the idea that all these universities are anti-Semitic. I'm a Jewish person. I've been teaching at a university. Yeah, there was some stuff that was complex and concerning from the perspective of being a Jew, and seeing more what I think was anti-Semitic activity on campuses, but it's not a reason to try to bring down our whole university. Our chancellor just got called for a congressional hearing, so he's gonna be in the hot seat, and the whole UC system's gonna be in the hot seat. We're just hoping they stand firm because it's really a major thing to capitulate to. A government attack on a university. If Harvard fell, what message would that send to immigrants?  They’re gonna think, “Oh my god, they’re bringing down Harvard University. I have no possibility of being protected.” Even an institution of Harvard’s stature would be vulnerable, so immigrants feel no protection. And I mean, I think every immigrant in the U.S. right now doesn't feel safe. There's no reason why you should feel safe, because people are being picked up off the streets in horrible situations. There’s another example. The main thing going on right now, besides field raids, going out and raiding fields or factories, is people showing up for a hearing they have. They have to show up for their hearing. They're told that if you don't show up for your hearing, you'll be arrested. Now, they're getting arrested at their hearing. You go, you get arrested; you don't go, you get arrested. There is no more rule of law. People feel like, hey, I kept being told that the most important thing is that I go up here in my hearing. And anyway, I want to have my hearing, because that's how I'm going to get asylum, or that's how I'm going to get some other benefit. I got married to a legal citizen or whatever. And for the people without these opportunities or access, they live in fear. I think it’s really those of us with privilege who must stand in solidarity; if we don’t, who will? We have to hold the line. It's like, how do you see that if you watch a big, major law firm capitulate to Trump? Right now, there's over a billion dollars worth of pro bono activity that these law firms gave to Trump. But he hasn't started taking and putting in the chip yet. He hasn't come to them and gone, oh, what I want you to do is I want you to fend and help my Justice Department defend such and such a case, or I want you to look more at some election he's claiming, because, of course, any election in which a Republican doesn't win, he's gonna start examining. So, he's gonna go to these people's law firms and go, like, that's what I want you to work on. That's what you're gonna do with your pro bono time, and in fact, a bunch of law firms, not just the ones who capitulated to Trump, but other law firms who used to do a lot of refugee and immigration representation, are concerned about doing it. They're concerned about publicly going into litigation. I mean, there are hundreds of lawsuits right now. It's the most that he's lost. I think the statistics are around 95% of the cases he's lost, but they're also working their way up the system, so we don't know what the Supreme Court's gonna deal with them. Not every case can go to the U.S. Supreme Court; that's the good news. But lawyers really need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So, I think it's a good… It's a good time to become a lawyer in the sense that there's lots to be done and lots of things to fight for and to stand by people and to walk alongside people who are in terror. One of the guys who just ran for mayor of New York, who's not the one who won the Democratic party, but one of his other people was running, had been arrested at an immigration court. He was trying to accompany a guy who was going to immigration court because he thought that’s where his asylum case was going to be heard. So, yeah, it’s people like that stepping up that really are giving me hope again. Also, I just feel that that's really what everybody has to do, is find your moral compass and do what's right.

Alice: Yeah, I believe so, too. Well, we’ve talked for a long time, and thank you so much for staying with us. I hope you like our questions. These are just questions that we thought of.

Professor Blum: Well, you have great questions, thoughtful questions. Thank you so much. But tell me more about what you do.

Alice: We’re both high schoolers. I'm from Canada.

Yilei: And I’m from Indiana. 

Professor Blum: Got it! 

Alice: We started a nonprofit law organization for high schoolers. We just want to make the law more accessible to different people since it is a really mythical thing. It was mythical for me before I met some lawyers, and they have a very prestigious job. So, our goal is to make this field more accessible to students and let them see or clarify if they really want to pursue this area of education. That’s our goal. We’re publishing reviews and have panellists who are writing for us. We are planning to publish magazines with different themes throughout the year. For example, immigration law. 

Yilei: Yeah, our theme for the summer is Law Across Borders, so our focus is on immigration law and human rights, which you are perfect for.

Professor Blum: Oh, you really need to talk to people who are working on the border. because some people who work on the border are really, like, the front line. These organizations, in San Diego, for example, have these borders. They're artificial in many ways, all over the world, obviously, especially in countries that have been colonized. There’s work taking place on both sides of the border. So, those are the kind of people you might be interested in talking to.

Alice: Great. Do you have any tips on recruiting interviewees? We are emailing and calling potential participants—lawyers and activists—and hoping they respond. 

Professor Blum: I believe that doing work on the border will be a great hands-on, clinical experience.  If you search “U.S.–Mexico border nonprofit organizations,” you’ll find plenty. 

Alice: Thank you so much; it’s been great meeting you. 

Professor Blum: Are you keeping these interviews on record?

Alice: We are. We will be transcribing this interview and posting it on our website and social media. 

Professor Blum: Okay, will do. Well, thanks so much. Well, it's very nice to meet you. Thank you for your excellent questions.

Alice: If you're open to doing a re-interview, maybe, like, next year or something like that, are you open to that? 

Professor Blum: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. All right, take care. Thank you so much. Bye!