Professor Richard Zitrin: A trial lawyer for all seasons on ethics, racism, and injustice
By Karen Ocamb, Director, Media Relations for Public Justice
For a moment, a beat, an uncharacteristically cavernous pause, Richard Zitrin seemed at a loss for the precise words to sum up his reaction to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and striking down a New York gun conceal law.
“I’m appalled and my wife was so upset that she was crying all morning The court is extraordinarily out of touch with the American people and represents only a minority of not only thinking, but of legal thinking in the United States,” Zitrin told Public Justice. “I don’t see any honest morality coming from the court. You know, the Supreme Court is the only court in the country that doesn’t have any ethical guidelines. And they have consistently refused to make ethical guidelines for themselves. And yet, as far back as when I was in college doing my government honors thesis, the subject was that the court makes decisions based on their political and personal ideologies and not based on law.”
The decision “denying women the right to control their own bodies — which may result in also denying the right of LGBTQ people to marry and the right of trans people to be who they want to be — is very much a political decision based on the political views of right-wing people who represent only a small minority of the country,” said Zitrin, author of the recently released memoir Trial Lawyer: A Life Representing People Against Power. He is “very concerned” that America is heading towards an autocracy.
The Constitution’s promise of equality under law radiates from Zitrin’s core. Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York to parents who were both physicians, Zitrin “fell” into law after teaching school, driving a New York City cab part-time and working on political campaigns during the tumultuous countercultural movement of the 1960s. After studying government at liberal Oberlin College, graduating in 1968, he enrolled in New York University School of Law.
I have, for a long time, worked to develop equal opportunities for people of all kinds, whether they are Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ. Why? Because I hate injustice, I just hate it.
In 1973, his last year of law school, 26-year-old Richard Zitrin’s life changed forever as he moved to San Francisco and worked with his mentor David Mayer on his first murder case, representing Johnny Spain of the San Quentin Six.
“When I walked into the visitor’s room of San Quentin, the visiting room that was reserved for the most highly secure prisoners, which included my client, Johnny Spain, my boss’s client, I was immediately struck by the horror of what was going on,” Zitrin told Public Justice. “I’m sure I left that room in shock. The book details that experience: Johnny came in wearing chains that looked like he was literally being taken to the auction block and when the six defendants of color sat in the courtroom with 25 pounds of chains on them, unable to move their hands away from their bodies enough to be able to write, it was a pretty horrifying experience.
“It was a huge wake-up call,” Zitrin continued, “and frankly, a radicalization of my thoughts about race. Johnny was the only one convicted of murder and that conviction was later thrown out because he continually complained about the chains to the point where he said he couldn’t communicate with his lawyer or sometimes even sit in the courtroom.” The ugliness of the racism was compounded by the elitism from the other side, which was “just beyond abhorrent.”
Four years later, Zitrin’s life changed again. “I got into ethics entirely fortuitously — because legal ethics was the poor stepchild of the law school curriculum,” he said. Despite the horrendous pay, he agreed to become an adjunct professor of legal ethics at the University of San Francisco. “I decided we were going to have to teach it to each other,” developing “a kind of collaborative view of what’s right and what’s wrong.”
That was the beginning of a 40-year career teaching legal ethics, including at UC Hastings Law from 1994 until recently. Trial Lawyer begins with a quote from ethicist Michael Josephson: “We may not know what the truth is, but we know what’s a lie. We don’t always know what’s fair, but we know what’s unfair.”
“That’s what got me really interested,” Zitrin said. “It wasn’t what the rules said” — it was appropriate professional and personal behavior and being honorable. “And that has been my operating principle.”
“Why do law schools teach law students to become big firm lawyers who work for gigantic corporations that are going to help us destroy the world?” he continued. “So that’s where this ethics stuff really resonated with me and over the years got me extremely interested in why courthouse secrecy has prevented the public from knowing extremely important things that would help them be safer and would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, if only they were known and not kept shrouded by agreements among lawyers and judges. I considered that from the very beginning to be extremely unethical.”
Zitrin had an epiphany about courthouse secrecy in 1986 when his client, a poor Latina, couldn’t steer her Dodge van going around a turn on Mission Street and crashed into a building. He found out that Dodge knew that the power steering in two million vans was defective and the fix ordered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “was absolutely 100 percent useless.”
Chrysler Corporation attorneys offered him nothing to settle the case so Zitrin went to trial, won a huge settlement, and garnered lots of publicity.
“That got me thinking: why is it that if we don’t go to trial, this stuff remains secret?” he recalled. At the time, most secrecy deals were between the lawyers on each side — a settlement in exchange for keeping information secret.
Since the mid-1990s, “it’s been kind of a mission of mine to try to undo that,” Zitrin said. “It’s extraordinarily unethical for anybody to keep that information secret from the public when lives are being lost and people are crashing cars and people are taking OxyContin without knowing that Purdue is lying about it and so on. None of this stuff is confidential information between a lawyer and a client. This is stuff that comes out in discovery, in the litigation of a case, and all of that should be public.”
Zitrin has extended his mission, endowing Public Justice, which has a 40-year history fighting courthouse secrecy, with a significant gift to fund the Richard Zitrin Anti-Secrecy Attorney. Additionally, Zitrin is leading the fight to pass California State Senator Connie M. Leyva’s Public Right to Know Act (SB 1149), which will hit the Assembly floor in August. Public Justice is a co-sponsor of SB 1149 with Consumer Reports.
But fighting systemic racism is still a core value. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among so many others, prompted him to “really look at myself.”
Bay Area civil rights icon Eva Paterson asked Zitrin to write an essay for her Equal Justice Society newsletter, which turned into Being Anti-Racist is not Enough, published in the ABA Journal. Paterson “impressed upon me that white people need to talk about these things, too.”
At 75, Zitrin has spent much of his life fighting injustice. But “it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve really made a much stronger internal effort to dig down — not about my views on race, but about my own baggage that comes with being a straight white male,” he said.
“I have, for a long time, worked to develop equal opportunities for people of all kinds, whether they are Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ. Why? Because I hate injustice, I just hate it. It makes me angry sometimes. My wife tells me it makes me too angry and has me yelling at some guy who ran a stop sign in front of me. I should be letting those things go and concentrating on the more important things. But I just hate it — injustice.”
