Vast collection of landmark legal history

When a group of brilliant young lawyers walked away from promising careers to launch one of the nation’s first public interest law firms in 1972, they changed California, and the country, for the better. Now the Center for Law in the Public Interest (CLIPI) has donated 365 boxes of archival records to UCLA Library Special Collections, ensuring their landmark legal victories will inspire and inform scholars, lawyers, journalists and public interest advocates for generations to come.

In just 35 years, CLIPI played an outsized role in advancing environmental protections, safeguarding civil rights and liberties, fighting corporate corruption, and establishing a new model for using legal expertise for the public good. Among other influential cases, CLIPI attorneys represented the Sierra Club in one of California’s most important environmental cases, which ensured environmental impact reports were required for private development projects; their lawsuit against the LAPD opened the door for women to serve as police officers, and the Century Freeway case delivered thousands of affordable homes and the vital Green Line transit corridor after seven years of litigation and more than a decade of continued involvement.

Preserving and providing access to the records of these cases ensures their legacy endures and that the strategies and hard-won lessons behind these victories can fuel the public-interest battles of tomorrow.

The donation was celebrated last October at an event co-hosted by CLIPI co-founder Carlyle Hall and Brenda Jackson Drake and Michael Drake, president emeritus of the University of California.

University Librarian Athena Jackson noted that the Library’s dedicated team of archivists, conservators and cataloguing specialists are uniquely qualified to organize and describe the 396 linear feet of legal documents and case files. She also stressed the significant cost of housing, processing and preserving this powerful collection of legal history.

“It is vital that we find funding partners who can help us make this important and timely collection accessible to students, faculty and other researchers,” she said.

“When you support the Library’s work with the CLIPI Collection, you are helping not only make this important collection accessible, but activating it. Seeing students have access to these materials, to be able to hold a document—perhaps from the landmark case that ended hiring discrimination against women by the LAPD—in their hands, to see how it fires their curiosity and sparks their imagination, is nothing short of magic.”