Lara Bazelon on building a meaningful life

Bazelon, who runs a racial justice clinic at the University of San Francisco School of Law, believes deeply in due process and representation, even when facing criticism.

When I was in college, I went to as many campus speakers as I could. Most often, I’d listen to a writer talk about a new book or story and I’d call my dad on the walk through the snow back to my house in Illinois, explaining to him that I had to be like [insert speaker here]. I have a note on my phone “Best Northwestern speakers I’ve been to,” and one of those is a writer and attorney named Emily Bazelon. In the years since, I discovered another writer and attorney whose work inspired me—her sister. Lara Bazelon is a law professor and clinical director of the Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinical Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She also writes about her relationships and work in a variety of writing styles, from essays to novels to nonfiction.

I heard Lara speak at a Berkeley Law event on the influence of narrative on public perception of the law moderated by former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin and connected the dots to her sister. During our conversation, she told me about staying true to her beliefs of innocence and due process as she transitioned from a federal public defender to running a law school clinic, even in the face of being called a rape apologist. Building her career, which she describes as her purpose, has involved personal sacrifices. She no longer lives in a city where she formed close personal friends at the start of her career and ultimately ended her marriage that brought her to San Francisco.

At USF, Bazelon supervises students defending and advocating for those who have suffered racial discrimination, including investigating claims of wrongful conviction. In the past few years, her clinic has started working on Title IX cases. Title IX, a federal civil rights law, protects people from discrimination based on sex in education or activities that receive federal funding. Most commonly known as the statute that equalizes spending in sports, it also governs college sexual assault proceedings, and demands colleges must act upon complaints of misconduct.

Schools handle proceedings differently but most often the adversarial process is modeled after the criminal legal system, with an investigation, a live hearing and cross-examination of witnesses. Bazelon’s clinic helps students through the adversarial process or facilitates restorative justice when applicable.

Bazelon first got involved in Title IX investigations as a favor to help a young Black man in upstate California facing expulsion from college after an accusation of sexual assault. Hesitant, her students encouraged her to take the case. Throughout her “two-year odyssey,” learning to litigate this type of case at the appellate level, she found the process unfair and lacking due process. She discovered “so many other kids” kicked out of higher education after being accused in a cross-racial identification.

Representing students accused of sexual assault is in line with Bazelon’s beliefs about the criminal legal system that inspired an early career at the Federal Public Defender’s Office. But she has come under a lot of criticism for representing folks accused of sexual violence crimes and has been called a bad feminist. 

“People just think it’s Brock Turner,” she said of cases she takes. “To me, [the process on college campuses] is perpetuating racism, our clients are all people of color… you’re removing young people of color and separating them from their education permanently.”

I graduated from a university with a Title IX office and watched classmates attempt to navigate a process in which it seemed difficult to find justice. I also came to law school believing I wanted to be a public defender and believe the criminal legal system is inhumane. And yet, when she first described her Title IX work, I had the same reaction. How do you balance a belief in representation with a desire for survivors of assault to find justice? Kicking someone out of school doesn’t bring anyone closer to justice or being more whole, and Bazelon said she’s seen a lot more success through restorative justice processes.

Some schools allow for mediation or restorative justice, a process Bazelon believes is “a better outcome for everyone and I say this even for clients who ‘won’ through the adversarial process.”

But some students might have done what they’re accused of doing, just like some clients Bazelon represented at the public defender’s office were guilty of gruesome crimes. Bazelon believes with Title IX, “there is an assumption (that is not correct) that our clients are somehow privileged […] There is an assumption that our clients are guilty of whatever the complainant accused them of doing […]There is an assumption that because I can choose who I represent now I should not be choosing this population and to do so is to side with rape apologists.”

“There is an assumption (that is not correct) that our clients are somehow privileged […] There is an assumption that our clients are guilty of whatever the complainant accused them of doing […]There is an assumption that because I can choose who I represent now I should not be choosing this population and to do so is to side with rape apologists.” -Lara Bazelon

Bazelon thinks folks who believe in redemption and can understand why someone might get caught up crime, like growing up in poverty or being a victim of abuse, struggle when they’re challenged on issues like sexual assault. She described how those same progressives might “personally identify with the complainant--something similar happened to them or someone that they knew--whereas with people accused or convicted of serious crimes in the criminal legal system there is such a remove that there is no personal resonance,” she said.  

Bazelon resonates with criminal defense work perhaps because it runs in her family. Growing up in Philadelphia with a doctor and lawyer as parents, she saw both relationships and careers she hoped to model. By the time she went to law school, she knew she wanted to work directly in courts, reforming a broken system. Her father practiced as a trial lawyer and her grandfather, David Bazelon, was an influential Federal appeals court judge whose opinions expanded rights for criminal defendants. At home, Bazelon saw her mom make career sacrifices about the type of doctor she became to keep peace and happiness in her own marriage, and Bazelon looked at her dad, with a thriving legal career who perhaps did not make those sacrifices and said to herself “I want to be him.”

Some of us spend years trying to find a path and a career that match our ideals and intellectual curiosity. Others, like Bazelon, have known all along where to build a career.

She went to law school knowing that she only wanted to be a federal public defender. When the judge she clerked for after graduating warned her against applying for only one job she told the judge “I guess I just have to get this job.”

“I had this weird narrow minded uncompromising view, that makes it hard for my life but on the other hand I just knew what I wanted to do,” she said.

Bazelon came to San Francisco to be near her then-husband’s family and before she ran USF’s clinic, she was commuting weekly to Los Angeles to teach at Loyola Law School for nearly four years. She had pivoted into academia after seven years of Federal PD work, concerned she didn’t have the bandwidth to raise kids when trials demanded so much of her attention. For nearly four years, she flew to Los Angeles on Mondays and returned on Thursdays.

“Most mothers don’t do that,” she said, and it caused tension in her marriage. But to Bazelon, the stakes were too high for her clients, and she needed to do everything in her power to get that client out of prison.

Looking at her choices juggling family and work, she sees “the path not taken […] that we might have an intact family,” she said. Bazelon is divorced and hasn’t had her kids for more than 50% of the time since her daughter was one. “I don’t think that’s for everyone, but it’s good for me because I just felt like if I didn’t do meaningful work, I didn’t want to be alive. And I was unwilling to compromise.” 

I envy the work that makes you feel like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. I’m searching for something that gets me out of bed with as much excitement as my dad gets going to a 7 a.m. round of golf (and hoping to trust I find some of that in interviewing and writing). Bazelon found that early and has clung to that throughout different era of her life—throughout moves, a divorce and career changes.  

Moving first for her career and then for her relationship, Bazelon has left behind groups of friends that she has been unable to re-create in her adulthood. When she left New York City, she left her best friend since birth, who she was living with at the time, her Philly high school friends and New York City college friends. Though in Los Angeles, she found a close group of girlfriends, “I understood that I would never have that again. It’s just too hard, I’m not a San Francisco native, I didn’t live here in my 20s,” she said of building a life in San Francisco.

So San Francisco took her from her community but brought her to a job that gave her meaning.

“[A few weeks ago], I saw my core group of girlfriends in Los Angeles, and I was reminded what I used to have in LA,” she told me. But “I have a calling and a purpose on this earth and it’s to do this.”