Dan Siegel, ‘fearless’ civil rights attorney, dies at 79

For many who knew Dan Siegel properly, his dedication to the career of legislation was no shock.

Together with his meticulous consideration to element, pure present for argumentation, and steel-trap thoughts for information, Siegel appeared born to develop into not only a lawyer, however a litigator — somebody desirous to do battle in courtroom for his shoppers.

Over half a century, Siegel took on a whole lot of circumstances, defending his shoppers in opposition to employers, police departments, universities, and authorities businesses, carving out a profitable observe in employment, discrimination, and civil rights legislation. His household and associates described him as the last word advocate. He did a lot of this work professional bono, taking over circumstances just because he felt in his bones the righteousness of a trigger and he couldn’t stand to see an individual go up in opposition to the system on their very own.

He died on July 2 in Oakland at age 79.

A whole bunch of individuals responded to the news of Siegel’s death on social media. “Oakland has misplaced a real champion,” Mayor Barbara Lee wrote in a post. “As an Oakland College Board member and president, Housing Authority chair, and co-author of our group policing legislation, Dan helped form the Oakland we all know at present.” Former Mayor Jean Quan, who Siegel served as a authorized advisor, wrote in a submit that Siegel, his household, and legislation agency “received floor breaking fights right here in Oakland and past.”

Michael Siegel, Siegel’s son, mentioned he was working up till the very finish, making ready briefs and enthusiastic about trial technique. “He was inextricable from his life as a lawyer,” Michael mentioned. “It’s essentially the most foundational factor about him.”

The opposite central factor about Siegel was his political activism. Regardless of the most cancers that had weakened his physique, Siegel confirmed as much as Oakland’s “No Kings” protest on June 14 and addressed the hundreds gathered exterior Metropolis Corridor.

“We represented tons of protesters through the years,” mentioned Anne Weills, Siegel’s spouse and longtime legislation accomplice. “He’s a defender and a protector, and it made him a greater lawyer as a result of he was there with the activists within the streets.”

A lawyer who emerged from social actions

Daniel Mark Siegel was born within the Bronx. His household, together with three brothers, moved to Lengthy Island within the Nineteen Fifties. The Siegel brothers skilled antisemitism and needed to struggle to guard one another within the predominantly Italian suburbs, Weills mentioned. This expertise could have instilled in Siegel an understanding of what it meant to be on the surface, a part of an excluded or oppressed group, in response to members of his household.

When he went off to Hamilton College in upstate New York, Siegel excelled in his research. He double majored in philosophy and faith, performed on the soccer crew, and graduated in 1967. However one summer time away from campus had a profound impression on his life. Siegel joined a pupil chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE, in its struggle in opposition to segregation, and he leapt on the alternative in 1965 to affix different activists on a mission to register Black voters in Mississippi and North Carolina. He was arrested on that journey and likewise skilled firsthand the racist terror that segregationists used to menace Black individuals in addition to outsider allies. 

It was attorneys with the Nationwide Legal professionals Guild who bailed Siegel and others out of jail after which helped defend them.

“The experiences within the South had been formative,” mentioned Christopher Scheer, Siegel’s stepson. “Seeing that there have been already fashions of what had been known as ‘motion legal professionals,’ that was very inspiring to him.”

“The actions themselves produced the legal professionals,” his son Michael mentioned. “He went all the way down to combine lunch counters, obtained beat up and jailed, and noticed how a lawyer may defend the fitting to protest.”

In 1967 Siegel enrolled at UC Berkeley College of Legislation and dove straight into the ferment of Berkeley’s radical politics. He met Weills there, amid the waves of protest and repression. It was a relationship based in a standard understanding of the world, and the necessity for change.

“It was the Civil Rights Motion that triggered the Free Speech Motion,” Weills mentioned. “We had been intricately concerned in that and in opposition to the conflict in Vietnam. This was our faith nearly, to cease that conflict, and that was interconnected to Black liberation and the ladies’s motion,” and extra.

Siegel instantly sought to attach his authorized research to the streetfights he and different college students had been caught up in. Throughout his first week of lessons, he discovered himself marching with hundreds of different college students to attempt to shut down the Army Induction Center in Oakland, the place younger males had been being processed by the army and shipped off to struggle in Vietnam.

“I went on the market in the course of the first day of demonstrations, with my Brooks Brothers jacket that my mom had purchased me after I was in school, and a tie, and a clipboard, and an armband, and promptly I obtained overwhelmed on the top by an Oakland cop,” Siegel recounted in a 2022 historical past of radical authorized motion, Up Against the Law. “Bleeding in every single place, I went again to legislation college, didn’t wash the blood off my head, went again to my felony legislation class, and demanded that the category be refocused on what the cops had been doing in downtown Oakland.”

For Siegel, the tumult of Berkeley culminated at People’s Park. On Could 15, 1969, Siegel gave a fiery speech in regards to the battle between the college and people who needed to protect a metropolis block south of the campus as an open group house. The gang marched to the fenced-off plot of land, the place they confronted squadrons of police who used tear gasoline and batons to beat them again. As protesters fled up Telegraph Avenue, sheriff’s deputies unleashed shotgun blasts, killing a younger man named James Rector and blinding one other bystander.

After graduating the following 12 months, Siegel handed the bar. Nevertheless, the state’s committee of bar examiners was decided to cease him from training legislation. Siegel believed it was an extension of then-Governor Ronald Reagan’s hostile fixation on Berkeley’s pupil protesters. Reagan ran in 1966 on the promise that he would “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” after which personally accepted sending the National Guard to dump tear gasoline on the campus. The bar committee argued Siegel was not “of excellent ethical character” and “not ready to help the legal guidelines of the US or the State of California” due to his function main the Individuals’s Park protests.

Whereas combating these claims, Siegel sought to make himself helpful to the motion that had drawn him to Berkeley within the first place. In 1971, he traveled to the Philippines the place he labored in one of many National Lawyers Guild’s military law offices, serving to sailors and GIs at U.S. army bases there defend themselves in opposition to courts martial and file for conscientious objector standing as America’s army aggression in opposition to Vietnam intensified.

Constructing a legislation observe and a life in Oakland

By 1973, Siegel had returned to the Bay Space, the place he took a job as the primary administrator of Berkeley’s new hire management program. Decided to make use of his authorized coaching, and having already overwhelmed two circumstances through which he had been charged with inciting a riot, Siegel insisted that he be granted a license to observe legislation, finally arguing his way up to the California Supreme Court.

The case, Siegel v. Committee of Bar Examiners, would reveal the difficult duality of Dan Siegel: sure, he was a firebrand activist who continuously challenged authority, however he was additionally an Eagle Scout, a member of the Nationwide Honor Society, the recipient of a number of tutorial scholarships, and his highschool’s class vice chairman. He graduated magna cum laude from Hamilton Faculty and, in the course of the park protests, was president-elect of pupil authorities at UC Berkeley. The document recast Siegel’s activism not as deviant conduct however as half and parcel of a younger man’s dedication to creating a greater world.

His son Michael mentioned this was a second that solid his identification as a radical legal professional.

“His complete technique to earn a residing was put in jeopardy as a result of Reagan didn’t like him,” mentioned Michael. “He needed to win a case to develop into a lawyer and he set precedent — your political opinions can’t be used in opposition to you to stop you from training legislation.”

From then on, Michael mentioned of his father, “He left all of it on the sphere.”

The household moved to East Oakland within the early Seventies. Siegel opened a storefront legislation workplace in Fruitvale, the place he and his companions took walk-in circumstances from the neighborhood’s predominantly Black and Latino working-class residents. In the meantime, Weills obtained a job as a machinist on the Caterpillar tractor manufacturing unit in San Leandro, the place she helped set up a union and even a wildcat strike.

By the Nineteen Eighties, Siegel grew to become serious about political workplace. He ran, unsuccessfully, on the Peace and Freedom Celebration ticket within the 1982 election for California legal professional basic, then took a job dealing with complicated litigation for the San Francisco Metropolis Lawyer’s Workplace. There, he helped settle a significant discrimination case in opposition to the San Francisco Hearth Division, which for many years had excluded most girls and folks of colour from getting jobs.

His subsequent large transfer was to the Oakland Unified College District, the place he served as authorized counsel to the board and superintendent. Weills mentioned that Oakland’s public faculties grew to become Siegel’s ardour for the following decade. He finally ran for college board and have become the board president, the place he undertook efforts to spice up pupil achievement. He led the recruitment of Dennis Chaconas to develop into the colleges superintendent; Chaconas introduced a imaginative and prescient for smaller schools that might give dad and mom extra decisions and cut back crowding in school rooms. Siegel additionally sparred with then-mayor Jerry Brown, opposing Brown’s signature schooling coverage of increasing constitution faculties.

“He was studying all these analysis research on faculties, how greatest to arrange them in a metropolis like Oakland,” Weills mentioned. “He needed to usher in the state-of-the-art stuff and get all this cash for these children.”

Many of those college reform efforts had been thwarted by the district’s rocky funds. In 2003, the state took over OUSD, a receivership that may lastly finish this month. 

By the mid-2000s, Siegel & Yee, the legislation agency Siegel founded with his friend Alan Yee, was representing shoppers up and down California. Recognized for litigating discrimination and different employment legislation circumstances, in addition to suing police departments and universities, the agency’s attorneys had been deeply concerned in politics. Companion Jane Brunner was on the Oakland Metropolis Council. Yee had served on the Peralta Group Faculty District board. Weills obtained her legislation license and introduced in her personal circumstances, together with one involving a professor who claimed she’d been denied tenure at UC Berkeley’s division of arithmetic as a result of she was a lady.

Circumstances like that, which settled for big sums, introduced in funds that allowed Siegel and others within the agency to have interaction in additional professional bono work.

Siegel at instances took on unions if he believed they had been mistreating their members. In 2009, the large union SEIU put one in every of its locals representing California healthcare employees below receivership. The native’s workers and members then break up away to create their very own union, which they argued could be extra democratically run. SEIU sued, looking for $25 million in damages.

Sal Rosselli, who led the breakaway union, feared that his new group, with just about no assets, could be crushed by the authorized firepower SEIU may deliver to bear in opposition to them. 

“Dan turned over his complete agency to this David and Goliath struggle,” Rosselli informed The Oaklandside. “We didn’t pay a dime. It was all professional bono. The image of Dan standing up in courtroom to those legal professionals was extraordinary.”

The brand new union, Nationwide Union of Healthcare Staff, and Rosselli didn’t win the case, however with Siegel’s assist they didn’t lose both. A lot of the $25 million in damages was dismissed by a jury. Right this moment, the NUHW represents 19,000 healthcare employees throughout the state.

In 2010, Siegel put his agency’s powers up in opposition to town of Oakland. Together with his son Michael, he fought Oakland’s gang injunctions, authorized actions taken by town to attempt to limit alleged gang members from associating with each other in a delegated “security zone” in Fruitvale. 

On the time, Siegel was additionally serving as a authorized advisor to then-Mayor Jean Quan, who was on the fence in regards to the injunctions, which had been spearheaded by John Russo, town legal professional. Russo known as Siegel’s function with Quan a battle and demanded he and his agency again down.

“He didn’t flinch,” Michael mentioned about his father’s determination to tackle the case. “We finally had been going up in opposition to the mayor he was volunteering with, and Jane Brunner was within the agency, however he didn’t care about any of that as a result of he was satisfied he was on the fitting facet.”

Weills mentioned if there was one trait that outlined Siegel, it was his fearlessness.

Siegel and his household had been deeply concerned in different actions, together with the motion that emerged after a younger man named Oscar Grant was fatally shot by a transit cop within the Fruitvale BART station 2009, and Occupy Oakland. The Siegel & Yee legislation places of work, then positioned simply throughout 14th Avenue from Metropolis Corridor and the Occupy Oakland camp, grew to become the bottom of operations for the Nationwide Legal professionals Guild’s authorized protection hotline at a time when OPD was making mass arrests.

The police crackdown on Occupy satisfied Siegel to split with the Quan administration. Michael mentioned his father remained a pragmatist, believing in an “inside-outside” technique of constructing social change.

“To be a lawyer it’s a must to be an institutionalist,” Michael mentioned. “It’s a must to imagine the constructions of a democratic society are necessary and helpful. Clearly, there are many flaws, and more and more democracy is in query, however he believed within the structure.”

True to his beliefs, Siegel ran for mayor in 2014, receiving over 18% of the vote in ranked selection runoff. His platform included opposition to the Area Consciousness Heart, a proposed citywide surveillance system; elevating the minimal wage; and implementation of group policing.

During the last decade of his life, Siegel represented police whistleblowers, journalists, Death Row inmates, and victims of police misconduct, including his wife and several other women who had been arrested at a 2014 protest and mentioned they had been subjected to demeaning circumstances within the county jail.

After Oakland police and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies fired less-lethal munitions and gassed protesters throughout Black Lives Matter protests in Oakland 5 years in the past, Siegel filed class-action lawsuits that led to settlements limiting how legislation enforcement can use these weapons in opposition to protestors.

Lately, Siegel represented College of California workers dealing with self-discipline for taking part in protests in solidarity with Palestinians, arguing that the college’s crackdown was particular to these opposing Israel’s conflict in Gaza. 

He argued an identical case in 2003, when he represented college students at UC Berkeley who confronted self-discipline over a constructing occupation in solidarity with Palestinians. “I feel it’s hostility towards these college students and towards any opposition to what the federal government of Israel is doing and the exterior stress,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “What they did isn’t completely different from many different demonstrations which have taken place on the Berkeley campus.”

Scheer, Siegel’s stepson, mentioned his look on the No Kings rally final month was a becoming curtain name to a lifetime of social justice, and a feat for a person within the throes of sickness. “In case you had been round him and knew what it took to make each phrase come out sturdy, it was very spectacular. It was undoubtedly a closing second in his life.”

In a public assertion, the household said they’re planning a public memorial for later this 12 months.