Carmina Ocampo ('08)

Skadden Fellow, 2008 - 2010

"The academic rigor and intellectual community of the Critical Race Studies Program were the highlights of my legal education."

   Three UCLA law school graduates, incuding CRS graduate Carmina Ocampo ('08), were among the 35 fellows selected by the Skadden Fellowship Foundation, for its public interest Fellowship in 2008-2010.  The Foundation received close to 160 applications in 2007, including Carmina's proposal to work at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) in Los Angeles.

     With her Skadden Fellowship, Carmina will support APALC's advocacy, community education, litigation and worker leadership development for homecare workers enduring exploitative and unsafe working conditions. The Fellowship will allow her to continue working under the supervision of Julie Su, one of the nation's leading civil rights attorneys and an icon in Asian American public interest legal practice.  Ms. Su was one of the attorneys who provided free legal representation to several Thai immigrant workers, who had been held as slaves, in El Monte, California in the 1990s. 

     By attending UCLA School of Law, Carmina was able to volunteer at the local offices of APALC during law school, and given their shared interest in racial justice issues, developed a strong application for the Fellowship. "I chose to attend the UCLA School of Law because of its Critical Race Studies Program. The opportunity to volunteer at national civil rights organizations like APALC, whose work I had long admired and read about, was an added value of being a law student at UCLA and made my application for a competitive program like the Skadden Fellowship stronger."

     Before law school, Carmina graduated from UCLA and then interned at the Democracy Council and The Nation magazine.  She hopes to use her law degree to build coalitions between Asian, African American, and Latino civil rights organizations.

     The CRS Program's commitment to multiracial literacy and coalition-building was an excellent venue for her to put her aspirations for cross-group and multi-issue advocacy into practice.  

     She says, "CRS is a unique space in legal education, because it creates a community of students and faculty members of all races that comes together to confront the hardest questions facing civil rights lawyers and social justice advocates.  In the process, we become a source of support and creativity in our lifelong passion: fighting injustice."    

     In 2004, The Nation published an article Carmina wrote on the tenth anniversary of California's law banning affirmative action and its impact on racial diversity on campuses, such as UCLA.  

    "As a Pilipino American, I feel compelled to speak out about the racial crisis in California's higher education system because it not only deprives individuals from specific communities access to the highest-ranked schools, but because it makes coalition-building more difficult when communities are simply not represented in the student body. This creates conditions for law schools to fail at an important part of their mission, which is to develop future leaders for a diverse world," says Carmina, who was was only one of 2 Filipino women and 1 Black woman in her graduating class of more than 300 people.

    Carmina applied her philosophy to the development of her own skills, rising to leadership roles in her own community's organizations, while seeking to learn from others. She worked as a legal intern at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York after her second year of law school, where she focused on education and voting rights projects. She also served as Co-chair of the Asian Pacific Islander Law Student Association (APILSA) and as a Comments Editor for the Asian Pacific American Law Journal at UCLA

     Skadden Fellowships, which are awarded for two years, provide each Fellow with a salary and benefits to work at the sponsoring non-profit organization.  For those Fellows not covered by a law school low income protection plan, the firm will pay for a portion of a Fellow's law school debt during the fellowship. The Fellowship, which has been described as a legal peace corps by the Los Angeles Times, has been awarded to 536 academically outstanding law school graduates and judicial clerks to work full-time for legal and advocacy organizations.  Five former Skadden Fellows have taught at the UCLA School of Law, including three current members of the faculty of the Public Interest Law and Policy Program at UCLA Law.

     Carmina was selected for a California State Bar Foundation Scholarshipin 2007 to help pay for her legal education.  Together with the Skadden Fellowship and loan forgiveness programs, Carmina can maintain her steadfast commitment to becoming a public interest lawyer.  Currently, less than 5% of the nation's law school graduates pursue a careeer in public interest law and the State of California estimates that 2/3 of all of the legitimate legal needs of the state's poor residents go unmet.

     "The shortage in legal services is not due to the shortage of exceptionally talented and well-trained people like Carmina who want to work in racially diverse and poor communities," says former Skadden Fellow and current PILP faculty member, Jyoti Nanda.  Professor Nanda, who was a civil rights lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and serves as the faculty advisor to the South Asian Law Students Association & the Asian Pacific American Law Journal at UCLA, adds "Carmina is the perfect example of the type of the lawyer we could provide to society when we ease the barriers facing public interest-minded students, such as poorly funded loan repayment programs and high tuition.  She is a shining example that it is possible to provide excellent legal advocacy for racially diverse communities, in defense of the public interest."