Loren
Miller winner Sid Wolinsky sees no end to his long public interest career
By Diane
Curtis
Staff
Writer
When Sid
Wolinsky took a job as an entertainment industry lawyer in Beverly Hills after
earning his law degree at Yale, it was “solely as a second choice.”
“I
went to law school because I wanted to make a contribution,” Wolinsky
recalls. But no do-good-and-change-the-world offers presented themselves at the
time. “There was very little opportunity to do what we now call public
interest law,” says the 75-year-old Wolinsky. He worked at the
Beverly Hills firm for six years ― until he was made partner ―
and then he quit. And his career ever since has been finding ― or, more
accurately, creating ― those public interest law opportunities.
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Wolinsky |
In the past
43 years, Wolinsky has founded or co-founded the San Francisco Neighborhood
Legal Assistance Foundation, Public Advocates, the Disability Rights Clinical
Legal Education Program and Disability Rights Advocates in Oakland, Hungary and
New York. He has been involved, most often as chief litigator, in major class action
cases gaining access and service for Kaiser patients with disabilities,
creating low-income housing in San Francisco, eliminating the high school exit
exam for learning-disabled students, achieving equal funding in California
education through the landmark Serrano v. Priest decision that also won
attorneys’ fees for public interest lawyers and, most recently, winning a
requirement for closed-captioning at all Cinemark first-run theaters.
Litigation,
he says, “is a very intense experience, and when done on behalf of a good
cause, it’s one of the most satisfying professional things a lawyer can
do.”
For those
and other such efforts and successes over five decades, Wolinsky has been named
the recipient of the 2011 Loren Miller Legal Services Award, given annually to a lawyer
who has demonstrated long-term commitment to legal services and who has
personally done significant work in extending legal services to the poor. The
award, which will be presented at the State Bar Annual Meeting in Long Beach
this month, is named after the late Loren Miller, an African American lawyer
and judge who was a leader in the civil rights movement.
“I’m
greatly humbled and honored,” Wolinsky said of receiving the award.
“I feel that there are probably several hundred people laboring in the
public interest law area who deserve this more than I do. But I can say that
none of them is having a more satisfying time with their law practice than I
am.”
Wolinsky’s
friends and colleagues say he more than deserves the award.
“His
dedication to the cause of expanding the availability of legal services to the
underrepresented is a lifetime commitment that has borne wonderful
fruit,” wrote Gerald Uelmen, Santa Clara University School of Law
professor, in a nominating letter.
Shawna
Parks, legal director of the Disability Rights Center, says in her years of
working with Wolinsky, she has witnessed his legendary skills as a litigator ― “having
seen Sid take a complex deposition in two hours flat, draft an introduction so
that it convinces the judge by page two of the brief and craft an oral argument
that responds to every question a judge could have.”
Colleagues
also praised his commitment to encouraging and training new generations of
public interest lawyers. “Sid has inspired and mentored literally
hundreds of law students throughout his four and a half decades as a public
interest attorney,” wrote Lois Salisbury, director of the Children,
Families and Communities Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in
a nomination letter. Salisbury was an extern at Public Advocates and then
worked there as an attorney. “No one, absolutely no one, can match
Sid’s ability to seize every available hour of volunteer time, underpaid
intern time, work-study time, summer fellows’ time and put it to work on
behalf of the underserved,” she said. “And if you were fortunate
enough to be the one seized, you were drawn into an exciting vortex of ideas,
deadlines and deliverables. You were privileged to participate in the best
clinical experience ever designed that focused on complex class action
litigation.”
Wolinsky
says grooming new public service lawyers is very important to him, especially
as he gets older. “In a lot of areas of law, we’ve made terrific
progress, but there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done. The more
people I can entice into this area and help them be better lawyers, the happier
I am.”
The
veteran attorney also rarely misses an opportunity to debunk what he calls the
“nonsense” taught at law schools about how only a corporate legal
career is worthwhile and challenging. He also likes to make clear that there
are no shortcuts in litigation.
“There’s
a reason they call it the practice of law,” he says. “You just have
to keep doing it. I don’t think you can dabble in litigation. I also
don’t think you can do litigation by the committee system as it’s
done in many firms. I think you’ve got to be able to make decisions
quickly and definitively and I think that requires lean, mean litigation
teams.”
Wolinsky’s
legal handiwork can be felt in health care, education, entertainment, housing,
nursing homes, insurance, transportation, disaster planning, prisons,
employment, access to public services and accommodations.
One
suit succeeded in getting Los Angeles to consider the disabled in disaster
plans. Another resulted in removing architectural barriers at public housing.
Another made it easier for parents with learning-disabled children to place
them in mainstream classrooms.
Currently,
Wolinsky is working on a suit on behalf of veterans who suffer Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder and are not getting appropriate medical treatment and
disability benefits. He is also aiming his litigation talents at New York,
where Disability Rights Advocates has opened an office. One suit there
challenges the lack of access of disabled people to 75 percent of subway stops.
Another challenges what Wolinsky says is 98 percent wheelchair inaccessibility
to New York City cabs.
While he aims at large-scale violation of disability rights,
Wolinsky is no fan of vexatious litigants who target small mom-and-pop
businesses in the name of the Americans with Disabilities Act. “I think
they’re terrible,” he says. “They do a disservice in many
ways to people with disabilities.”
“Today,
Sid continues into his sixth decade of legal practice as passionate, energetic
and successful as ever, bringing landmark cases on behalf of veterans,
wheelchair users, people with vision or hearing impairments, the homeless and
people with learning disabilities,” said William Alderman of Orrick,
Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, who has worked with Wolinsky in a pro bono
capacity.
“He
is a sparkplug, a leader and visionary who has used the law to bring social
reform to the poor and disabled for over half a century,” said Laurence
Paradis, executive director of Disability Rights Advocates. “He is still
doing it.”
Wolinsky
himself says he’s going to continue doing what he’s been doing.
Retire? “Why would I want to do that?” he says.