As a child, Eduardo Capulong fled the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines with his family in 1979 and was granted political asylum in the United States. He credits that flight as being the first in a series of events that led him to lawyering and, more specifically, to CUNY Law.
“I didn’t really want to go to law school. I was sitting on the train, shortly after graduating from NYU. I was reading the paper, and I remember coming across an article about CUNY Law and saying to myself that this was a place where I could see myself going. I loved what it stood for,” he noted.
After Eduardo graduated from CUNY Law in 1991, he wore a variety of legal hats. As the Karpatkin Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, Eduardo clerked for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and practiced privately for several years, specializing in immigration, labor, and employment law.
He engaged in policy analysis and advocacy for an anti-poverty nonprofit and did pro bono work for several causes, in addition to delivering dozens of national and international presentations. He taught alternative dispute resolution, race and the law, lawyering, urban studies, and public interest law practice as a tenured faculty member at the University of Montana, in the lawyering program at NYU, and as the Director of Public Interest and Public Policy Programs at Stanford. He spent a year in residence at the Universidad de Granada Facultad de Derecho.
Eduardo joined CUNY Law in 2019 as a faculty member and director of the Lawyering Program and says the Law School has changed dramatically.
“We had to change, partly because of the bar exam, and partly because of the ambitious experiment the Law School’s founders set out to complete. We’ve matured a great deal in pursuit of our mission and accomplished a great deal delivering on our goals as a school, but we still have a long way to go. Now, we’re looking at how we teach race and racial justice to see how we can build on this success and revisit our core values.“
One of CUNY Law’s central tenets is using the law as a tool for social change. Eduardo says that there are many outside conditions that need to change alongside the Law School’s efforts and legal practice, in order to fully fulfill this mission.
Hard at work in the Immigrant Rights Clinic, circa 1991, with clinic supervisor Prof. Steve Loffredo.
“Capitalism is killing the planet. Everything’s at stake. Our socio-economic system, our political system, our priorities, our very identities—the makeup of people in power—need to change.”
Laws are a reactive institution, and Eduardo remembers coming to CUNY Law with the intention of using the law as a tool to socially engineer change.
“The laws that I was hoping to emulate, I realized, were reforms that came at the crest of social movements. They were merely codifications built on sand unless you kept pushing forward.”
Institutionally, Eduardo envisions some key changes to better prepare students for legal practice. In addition to being vigilant about what we’re doing both inside and outside the building and practicing what we preach, he believes we also need to better manage the many stresses facing the Law School. He suggests that we need to inspire students to engage in practices we value while implementing those values in the Law School itself.
“I’d like to spend more time with our community talking about the many issues we face. I want us to create a curriculum that’s integrated and well-designed to keep graduating and sustaining the kind of lawyers we’re known for.”
Eduardo is with University of Montana Professors Monte Mills and Andrew King-Ries, co-presenters at the 2018 Race and Pedagogy national conference.
2020 has been a turbulent year, between national protests, a pandemic, climate disasters, and fraught political discourse. The moment has reframed the challenges of creating curricula that embody the anti-racist and anti-oppression frameworks on which CUNY Law is committed.
Eduardo feels fortunate to work among colleagues dedicated to this project.
“We bring critical frameworks—realism, critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminist jurisprudence, queer jurisprudence, and others—into the classroom, so readings and materials raise the grain of those conversations.”
Eduardo notes that the biggest challenge the institution is currently facing is what transformative legal education looks like, both in content and practice. The current model of legal education is old and serves very specific interests, and it’s hard to incorporate these critical frameworks seamlessly into instruction, without them feeling like add-ons, he notes.
Eduardo maintains that both ironically and perversely, sometimes these incorporations marginalize the very things we want to center.
“As a teacher, I find it very difficult to do that because of the inherent tension between producing lawyers that can both function in the existing legal system and, at the same time, hold on to the concept of law as a tool for social change and transform it. These days, I’m finding sustenance in reading scholarship and literature in a number of areas—racial capitalism, critical race theory, and law and the political economy, especially—that center folks who’ve been erased from historical and legal memory.”
Participants in a forum on Spanish clinical legal education at the 2018 European Network for Clinical Legal Education conference.
Race and professional identity have been his focus of late, particularly how whiteness has been socially and legally constructed to constitute professional norms—for example of objectivity, reason, and merit—even as critical race scholars continue their scrutiny and quest for change.
“We have a long tradition of multiracial solidarity, and we need to stand in that tradition. Racism has always been about division. It’s brought enormous suffering and, with it, enormous, righteous anger—and we need to listen to that and absorb that. Voices who are not white, not male, and not straight need to be heard—I mean really acknowledged and listened to. Only through that process can we actually build a multiracial movement that can defeat the forces before us.”
At the same time, Eduardo worries that there’s a tendency to homogenize whiteness, and, as a result, the phrase “white privilege” sometimes serves as a barrier, rather than an effective call to action.
“Whites, as a group, have benefited from racism in many ways, but I’m not sure if most would consider themselves privileged because most white folks are working class. I sometimes have a problem with the word “privilege” on a theoretical level because privilege, to me, does not mean you don’t get shot by a cop. Privilege is buying a yacht. I think we need to raise the standards of what we expect society to be and what we believe our basic human rights are, in order to start thinking about what privilege actually means. Healthcare. Housing. Good jobs. Vacation. All of that. These aren’t privileges; they’re basic rights. Especially now, amid this election, there’s a lot of stoking of white, working-class anger. We can’t let Trump reify the privilege of being racist.”
In addition to dissecting the meaning of one’s identity as well as reframing privilege as a benchmark for equity-building, diversifying the legal academy is vital to building a more equitable legal world. Access to quality legal education is a series of hurdles even for people with the highest levels of access to basic needs, a good education, and mentorship by seasoned legal professionals. For students living with varyingly marginalized identities who are considering law school, interpersonal, institutional and systemic oppression make exponentially more difficult. This, Eduardo says, “that’s exactly why you should apply to CUNY.”
“We take our mission of providing access to legal education to people who otherwise may not even think of it seriously. There’s help out there! I’m on the Admissions Committee, and we read every single application closely. We really try to identify applicants who have a drive and look only secondarily at the metrics. Your LSAT scores and college GPAs are only predictive of success in year one, so we try to give as much support as we can to folks for whom the biases of standardized tests and high GPAs create barriers.”
CUNY Law students bring Eduardo joy and hope. “Our students—this generation of students, in general—are very empathic and very sophisticated in the way that they understand the world and react to it. I’m inspired by our students’ politics. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and are immersed in all sorts of activism,” he muses.
“An old friend said to me recently that CUNY Law is a hopeful place, and that’s the very first thing I notice when I enter the building or see folks on Zoom. When I joined the faculty in the fall, walking into that building was walking into a hopeful place. Everyone’s there to insist that another world is possible. We may disagree, debate, and even fight about how we do it, but we’re all trying, and that is inspiring.”
You can read more of Eduardo’s work on his SSRN page, check out his recent article in The Jurist about how the legal academia is rooted in white supremacy, and follow him on Twitter @ercapulong.