ON AND OFF CAMPUS PROFILE: ELISABETH SEMEL ’72

Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley School of Law

ELISABETH SEMEL ’72 THE ZEALOUS ADVOCATE

Elisabeth Semel ’72 was just 16 when she graduated from high school in San Francisco. “In my generation, the idea of a gap year wasn’t normal,” she says. “So I applied to a lot of the predictable schools. None were what I was looking for. I declined all my college acceptances. I wasn’t ready to go to college yet.” In the course of being profiled for a CBS documentary called The Old College Try, Semel had a conversation with the producers, who asked if she’d ever heard of Bard College. “This was during the ’60s; people on the West Coast didn’t know about Bard,” she continues. “When I discovered it, I went straight to my parents, who are native New Yorkers, and asked, ‘How could you not have told me about this school?’” The College’s liberal environment, strong foreign language programs, and politically engaged campus resonated with Semel: “I could be the very left-wing radical lover of languages that I was.” Semel majored in French, took political studies courses, and became very politically active at Bard. Professors Justus Rosenberg in literature and Bernard Tieger in sociology were her mentors. She remembers College President Reamer Kline shutting down the school so students and faculty could board a bus to Washington, DC, for a Vietnam War protest. By junior year, she realized that languages were not going to be a career for her: “My political leanings were too dominant for me not to do something with greater public impact.”

Semel earned her degree in French studies, but early field experiences while at Bard, such as working in a legal aid office in Kingston, New York, influenced her to enroll in law school at University of California, Davis, where she was on track to become a public defender. She vividly remembers her legal aid experience. “We had to interview women who were trying to get a divorce in a system that required fault,” recalls Semel. “Either they had to say their husbands beat them or cheated on them. It made me feel just how disempowered these women—who were marginalized, trying to support and feed their families—were in maneuvering within the legal system.”

Her career began as a deputy public defender in Solano County and later at Defenders Inc., the nonprofit defender office in San Diego County. In 1980, Semel and a group of her colleagues went into private practice together. She and one partner, Steven Feldman, eventually opened their own law firm, Semel & Feldman, in 1983. “I never planned to go into private practice,” she says. “I had a concrete view of what I wanted to do: be the most aggressive, zealous, loyal defender for my clients that I could be. There was no change in the nature of work I was doing—I was still representing clients, mostly court appointed, in highstakes criminal cases.” In 1997, Semel accepted a position in Washington, DC, as director of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Representation Project, which recruited large law firms to represent, pro bono, capital-crime clients in the South, where such resources are most needed. She also took her first academic position, combining litigation with teaching in the capital-punishment seminar at Georgetown University Law Center. “It’s immersing students, engaging their heads, hearts, and hands,” she says. “There’s nothing theoretical about it.” Since 2001, Semel has been clinical professor of law at University of Califonia Berkeley School of Law, where she launched and is director of the Death Penalty Clinic. Her time in DC influenced the direction of the clinic. “I was going back to California, but I knew we needed to continue our work with those who are in most need of quality counsel.”

The clinic was founded on the principle that the right to a fair trial and equal protection under the law are core societal values. “I was very clear when I started this clinic, I didn’t want to run an innocence clinic,” she says. “It’s important to teach students that you don’t cherrypick clients. As a public defender, you do not have that luxury. Everyone has the right to representation, and I want our students to absorb that premise. Making judgments about the nature of the crime is not what defense lawyers do. I’m comfortable with talking about those issues with sensitivity, but not with refusing those cases. You have to figure out how to work your way through those questions, because you have a responsibility to your client. You will be a zealous advocate for that client, whoever he or she is.”

Issues of race have been a focus of Semel’s legal career. “It doesn’t take long as a public defender to have in your face the reality of how racist the criminal legal system is from beginning to end,” she says. “I confronted it in the late ’70s to early ’80s. It is as evident now as it was then.” Semel coauthored, with five of her students, an investigative report, “Whitewashing the Jury Box: How California Perpetuates the Discriminatory Exclusion of Black and Latinx Jurors,” and helped to draft major legislation in California addressing racial discrimination in jury selection. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3070 into law on September 30, 2020. “It is tremendously satisfying that the bill became law,” she says. “The topic is so fraught. There is deep opposition to changing the status quo. The statute has the potential for significantly increasing the representation on juries of Black and Latinx Californians.”

Shortly after Semel graduated from Bard, the Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional. “What I hoped would never be a feature of my career became part of it in the late ’70s, when the so-called ‘war on crime’ was used to promote regressive criminal law procedures and moved support for capital punishment to an all-time high,” she says. Over the course of more than 40 years, she has watched popular support for the death penalty shift, and sees an opportunity in this historical moment to end capital punishment, including the federal death penalty. “For the last decade, decline in popular support for the death penalty has been very steady and in the same direction,” she says. “It’s highly significant that Virginia became the first of the Southern states that made up the Confederacy to abolish capital punishment. We’ve elected a president who has made vocal arguments against the death penalty, and could help move congressional legislation during his term. The biggest hurdle we face at the state level is the current Supreme Court. But if we take this very clear trend of abolition into the states, both at the legislative level and state supreme court level, then we will reach a tipping point. It will take courage. We need to continue to do what we are doing, which is to peel states off and to draw down the legality of the death penalty. Racism and poverty are the most salient features of the death penalty.”

Semel advises aspiring lawyers to find an area of the legal system that inspires them. “What inspires and sustains me is feeling as though I’m making a difference in the life of every client,” she says. “I’ve always regarded law as a public service. Students need to take that responsibility seriously. In the legacy of [civil rights icon and Bard 2017 Commencement speaker] John Lewis, be a troublemaker, a changemaker, a catalyst to reimagine justice. In the course of one’s practice, there will be opportunities to engage in a way that does service to the greater good.”

Elisabeth Semel ’72 was awarded an alumni/ae honorary doctor of laws degree from Bard College in 2016.