Name: Robert Rubin
Age: 63
City: Mill Valley
Position: Voting and civil rights attorney
J.: You’ve been a civil rights attorney for more than 30 years and recently started your own law practice focused on voting rights cases. How do you decide which cases to take on?
Robert Rubin: I’m not interested in winning lawsuits; I’m interested in changing people’s lives. My first screen in a voting rights case is what difference will this make for people on the streets. We had a case in the Madera school district in which the interests of the Latino community were not being met. The composition of the school board had one Latino, despite a 40 percent Latino population. We won the lawsuit, and the school district was required to convert from an at-large system to a district system. As a result, by the next election, four of the seven members of the school board were Latino. They went from being a lone voice to a controlling power on the school board.
J.: In 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How has that decision affected your work?
RR: The Supreme Court decision was devastating. I sat in front of [civil rights pioneer Rep.] John Lewis during the Supreme Court hearing. [You could see] the look of despair on his face and what he must have been thinking having his head cracked open 50 years ago [during the 1963 march to Selma], and what it meant today. Just hours after the decision was handed down, North Carolina was already considering a law that would require photo IDs, ban early voting, ban Sunday voting. It had an immediate and direct impact on people’s right to vote, particularly in the wake of Citizens United and the limitations on campaign finance [reform]. We can say on paper we’re a one-person, one-vote nation, but in fact we’re more of an oligarchy where people like the Koch brothers exert more influence on the political process than you and I do.
J.: You’re giving an April 22 talk at Urban Adamah in Berkeley called “From Selma to Ferguson.” As former legal director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, how do you view the recent cases of alleged police misconduct in the news?
RR: I think it reflects quite poorly on our society that police officers can act with such impunity. Many of us thought that Rodney King might be a turning point. That’s 20 years ago; what has changed? We supposedly have a right to a trial by a jury of our peers with full due process, but instead we’re summarily executing people in the streets.
I think there are many issues in the criminal justice system that cry out for attention. The racial disparities are un-conscionable; blacks are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites, yet they comprise only 13 percent of the U.S. population. To top it off, we disenfranchise them after they’re released from prison.
J.: How does your Jewish identity impact your work?
RR: I feel that the work I do embodies much of how I feel about Judaism. In fact, in terms of career path, it’s almost as if I had no choice. Judaism makes it easy for us because it incorporates so many of these values of welcoming the stranger and recognizing the stranger as one of us. Jewish values so strongly propelled me in the direction of representing the unrepresented and lending voice to the disempowered that my walk in life had already been neatly laid out for me.
J.: You’ve appeared twice before the Supreme Court. What is that experience like?
RR: The Supreme Court is the ultimate venue for constitutional law litigators, and to go there and try to anticipate the questions of nine justices who have very bright clerks working for them and are looking to probe the weaknesses in your case — it’s a daunting task. But the atmosphere itself is not that intimidating. You’re actually very close to the bench; you’re standing no more than 10 feet from the justices. I’ve been in courtrooms that are more intimidating than that.
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