Today's Featured Biography

 
Lucas Guttentag

It’s great reading about everyone. Since I shouldn’t just be a voyeur, here’s my story –going back a long ways. If you want to skip the tedious details to the bottom line: I’m a civil rights lawyer living in the Bay Area after many years in New York, married with two stepsons and currently on leave from my job at the ACLU to teach at Yale law school for a year.

After UC Berkeley, bummed around the Bay Area a year or so, taught a bit at College Prep School, worked at the original Williams-Sonoma store before it was an empire, and then traveled slowly cross-country through the south by Greyhound bus ending up in to New York City. Spent a year in joyful poverty on the lower east side, and then to Harvard for law school determined to become a civil rights lawyer. After graduating, went down to Texas for a year to be inspired by one of the great federal judges of our generation. From there to a public interest law firm in LA working on civil rights cases under wonderful mentors and hoping to learn to be a real lawyer.

After four years in LA, the lure of going back to NY was irresistible. So I accepted a job teaching at Columbia law school. A few years later I was hired by the American Civil Liberties Union to start a program of immigrants’ rights litigation. It was a new field then and a great opportunity and challenge. And that’s what I’ve been doing for more than 25 years – trying to defend vulnerable and powerless immigrants through constitutional lawsuits around the country, building the ACLU program, and working with others on social justice and civil rights. Some great highs, including arguing and winning a case in the U.S. Supreme Court, and of course setbacks too.

I moved back to the Bay Area (to Albany -- a few steps from Berkeley) in 1996 when Debbie and I got married to form a family with her two wonderful young twin boys, Ben and Nick. We met working on a big lawsuit filed in San Francisco against the Reagan/Bush administration for its discrimination against Central American refugees. One thing led to another and back to the Bay Area I came, moving my job to San Francisco and traveling back and forth to NY.

This year Debbie and I are back on the east coast for the academic year living in New Haven while I take a leave from the ACLU to teach at Yale law school.

Debbie’s a lawyer too, now at a national non-profit that trains immigration lawyers and advocates to represent low-income immigrants. Ben and Nick have just finished college at UCLA. Ben is in Chicago in medical school in an MD/Ph.D program, and Nick just got back from backpacking around Europe planning a career in psychology.

It’s amazing to think back on PHS, our class, the times we grew up in and how much I learned from all of you. It’s great to read about everyone’s lives, families, sorrows, accomplishments and changes. I too am shocked and saddened to learn of those who are gone. All the more to celebrate being able to see everyone who’s planning to come in October – and the many more I hope will make it.

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