CLIPI's Archives Find Their Home at UCLA

In late October, we gathered at UCLA to celebrate a milestone I've been working toward for years: the donation of Center for Law in the Public Interest (CLIPI) archives to UCLA Library Special Collections.

CLIPI donated 425 boxes, with 365 going to UCLA and additional collections at UC Berkeley, Irvine, and San Diego.

More than 600 cubic feet of legal history—including 118 boxes from the Century Freeway case alone, a case that lasted 45 years.

When CLIPI closed its doors in 2007, my co-founders and I knew these papers had historic value. It took years of work with UCLA, pro bono legal support from David Allen and Barnes & Thornburg, and countless hours in storage units to make this gift possible.

Why does this matter? As Athena N. Jackson, UCLA's University Librarian, reminded us: "An archive is not a grave. It's new life."

These documents will now be available to students, scholars, journalists, and future advocates studying environmental law, civil rights, land use, consumer protection, and government accountability.

I'm grateful to our event co-hosts Michael Drake and Brenda Jackson Drake, to the UCLA Library team (especially Lizeth Ramirez and Athena Jackson), and to the extraordinary panelists who joined us: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dan Selmi, Geoffrey Cowan, Mary Nichols, Ann Carlson, and Felicia Marcus.

And to my co-founders, John Phillips and Brent Rushforth—what an adventure we had, leaving our jobs at O'Melveny & Myers in 1971 to try something nobody had heard of: a public interest law firm.