Courtesy of Nina Garcia
Nev. Senator Jacky Rosen poses for a photo outside the U.S. Capitol building with UNLV law students (from left) Sebastian Ross, Yadira Santana, Nina Garcia, Gabriela Molina, and Eddie Curry who are in Washington D.C. for the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings Tuesday, March 22, 2022.
Sunday, March 27, 2022 | 2 a.m.
While growing up in Las Vegas, Yadira Santana observed how her Mexican mother’s heavy accent and dark complexion was a point of ridicule and discrimination for those with whom she interacted.
These taunts were Santana’s motivation to go to law school, she said, to help those who “can’t advocate for themselves.”
The third-year UNLV Boyd School of Law student said she was struck by those memories of her mother Tuesday as she sat in the U.S. Capitol watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Santana was one of five UNLV law students of color attending the hearings for Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the high court.
“My parents, they grew up very, very poor,” Santana said. “There’s days where my mom told me that she would go to sleep with an empty stomach because her parents just didn’t have any money to buy food, unfortunately. And so when I look at my parents’ background, and I look at the opportunity I had today, who would have ever thought?”
The trip was a combined effort from the school’s Black Law Students Association; La Voz, the university’s Latin and Hispanic Law Student Association; Demand Justice, a progressive organization that advocates for added seats in the Supreme Court and organized the trip; and the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, from whom third-year UNLV law student Nina Garcia said she secured funding for the students’ flights.
The students — Santana, Garcia, third-years Sebastian Ross and Gabriela Molina, and second-year Eddie Curry — initially only planned to be part of the excitement of the historic nomination, watching the livestream viewings of the hearings, rallying on Capitol Hill and exploring the bustling city, which several had never visited. They would also meet with other law students of diverse backgrounds from other universities.
But the Las Vegas students received an email with news their plans would be enhanced and would instead be in the actual hearing room, made possible by Nevada Democratic U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen.
“Not only am I going to D.C. for the first time, not only am I going to a historical event, but I’m going to go in person,” Santana said. “That is insane.”
The UNLV students were allowed in the hearing chambers for 30 minutes each. Afterward, they met the Nevada senators and their staffs. The confirmation hearing was open to the public.
In a statement to the Sun, Cortez Masto said her office was “open to all Nevadans.”
“It is so important that everyone get the chance to witness our democracy in action,” Cortez Masto said in the statement.
Ross said it was important for him and his peers to have attended the hearings because Jackson’s nomination and confirmation is an imperative move to diversifying the judiciary, he said — and an essential example for students of color who, like himself, will soon leap into the majority-white industry.
In the U.S., lawyers of color are underrepresented compared to their population size, while white male and female layers are, in turn, overrepresented, according to the American Bar Association’s 2021 Profile of the Legal Profession report.
Last year, lawyers of color accounted for 14.6% of the profession, an increase of nearly three percentage points from 10 years previous. Non-Hispanic whites, meanwhile, accounted for 85% of lawyers in the U.S., the report states, even as they made up 76.3% of the U.S. population, according to Census data.
Black lawyers comprised 4.7% of all legal professionals; the U.S. Black population is 13.4%. And 4.8% of lawyers were Hispanic, even with their 18.5% slice of the U.S. population.
“I think having the ability to say that I was in the same room during those hearings is priceless,” Ross said. “It’s something that nobody’s ever going to be able to take away.”
Of UNLV’s 449 law students, 34% are students of color; 78, or approximately 17%, of those students are Hispanic; and 29, or about 6%, are Black students. The law student body is split about evenly between male and female students, according to the university.
Ellen Schulhofer, the managing partner of Brownstein’s Las Vegas office, said in a statement to the Sun that the firm was “grateful” to support the UNLV law students on their trip, as several of its attorneys are UNLV graduates.
“As the legal industry continues to evolve into a more diverse, inclusive and equitable profession, it is critical for us to support and inspire diverse law students in their aspirations to become lawyers,” Schulhofer said in the statement.
Curry said the rally the students held outside the Capitol building after the hearing Tuesday was the most defining moment of the trip for him. He said it was “surreal” to cheer on Judge Jackson while coalescing with other law students of color, who in speeches expressed the impact her nomination had on them, especially the female students.
“Black women have done so many great things for our country,” he said. “It was really, really cool to interact with a lot of these students and to kind of capture that moment, to see how much it meant to them. It kind of makes it a little bit (sweeter) to you.”
In her statement to the Sun, Rosen called Jackson’s nomination “historic.”
“My office stands ready to make sure Nevadans who are visiting the Capitol get an opportunity to attend,” Rosen said in a statement. “I had the pleasure of meeting with these UNLV law school students and welcoming them to the Senate.”
During her time in the hearing, Molina, who was born and raised in Ecuador, said she was struck by some Senate Judiciary Committee members’ questions about international law, which does not apply to the Supreme Court.
But despite the tangential questions, Judge Jackson’s patience was defining and unmistakable, Molina said.
“When I moved here, I moved just for college. I thought I’d be back in my country,” she said. “Nevada is where I feel like I really found a home, you know. My home away from home. So when I mean ‘the senators’ and stuff, they’re my senators, even though I didn’t grow up in Nevada. … It means a lot to me to have met them.”
