The back door to the lecture hall loudly creaks open. The 150 law students in my small section, in one collective movement, shift their intense focus from our Contracts professor to the person standing in the now-open entryway.
"Christine Arguello? Is there a Christine Arguello in here?"
I sheepishly raise my hand.
"I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake. We got your file confused with that of Ms. Aguilera, and you should not have been admitted to law school."
And in one devastating moment, I am found out. I am a fraud. I am not good enough. I will not become a lawyer.
And then I wake up in a sweat from this recurring nightmare.
Why would I have such a fevered dream? Because at that time, I bought into the belief of others—that I, a first-generation high school graduate from a lower economic background, could never make it through college, much less be admitted to Harvard Law School.
I set my sights on attending Harvard Law School and becoming a lawyer when I was only 13 years old, after reading an article about lawyers and law schools. My thought process was fairly simple—lawyers liked to argue; I liked to argue. And I usually won my arguments, so I would be a good lawyer. Harvard was considered one of the best law schools in the country, and that is what I wanted for myself—the best.
Until my junior year in high school, I never doubted my ability to achieve such a lofty dream because I have always had a can-do attitude. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of sharing my dream with my classmates at Buena Vista High School.
When asked what my plans were after high school, I candidly said, "I’m going to be a lawyer, and I am going to attend Harvard Law School." I expected the same support that others received from my classmates when they shared their dreams, but instead I was met with silence—a very awkward silence—followed by the ridiculing laughter of my classmates. "Hahaha, Chris Martinez thinks she can go to Harvard!"
It was a drowning, delegitimizing laughter that cut me to the bone and which still brings tears to my eyes when I recall it today, 48 years later. Both experiences—the real laughter and the fake administrator—are at the core of why I founded Law School…Yes We Can, a law school pipeline program that works with students who come from backgrounds similar to mine and who are underrepresented in the legal profession. Our Fellows, many of whom are also first-generation high school and college graduates, face the same obstacles that I faced in making a law degree a reality.
The first obstacle is rooted in external forces. Our Fellows are locked out of many opportunities to make themselves better candidates for law school admission because they lack the knowledge or social capital necessary to, for example, secure the right internship, emphasize strengths on a résumé, or approach the right college professor about a letter of recommendation. This obstacle can, in part, be a function of poverty. But more often, it is derived from something similar to what happened to me in high school. Our Fellows are turned from the law school path because someone decides that they do not fit the mold of what a lawyer looks like. And so they do not get the right internships, have trouble creating common ground with the professor, or are constantly questioned about the wisdom of pursuing a profession in which there are few people who look like them.
The second obstacle—intertwined with the first—is far more pernicious. It’s internalizing a message to the Fellows that they do not belong in the lawyerly class. It’s the ghost of an administrator dragging you from the law school lecture hall—the one who tells you that, given where you’ve come from, any success is just a fluke, a mistake, or a short-term thing.
These twin obstacles lead to an enduring and disturbing reality of our legal profession: It thwarts many students like the LSYWC Fellows from pursuing law school, which in turn makes the lawyerly class less diverse than the population bound by its laws, which in turn undermines the rule of law. Indeed, it is the perception of the general population that only an elite and moneyed few have the ability to join the ranks of the legal profession, and these are the people who write and enforce our laws. The perception of inequity in our justice system erodes the fundamental principle—etched in stone above the entrance to our highest court—that we can all expect "equal justice under the law."
LSYWC is designed to address the obstacles that students from diverse backgrounds continue to face, with the ultimate goal of changing the face of the legal profession in Colorado. Concretely, we provide our Fellows with three mentors (two lawyers/one law student) who shepherd the Fellows through their undergraduate careers, serve as sounding boards, and position them to be competitive law school applicants. We also provide the Fellows with intensive programming—from résumé-building workshops to a free LSAT prep class—designed to even the playing field in the law school admissions dance.
Equally important, LSYWC is designed to counteract the dangerous message that many students from diverse backgrounds internalize—that they cannot become lawyers. We counteract those negative, internalizing messages with constant, legitimizing, and communal encouragement of our Fellows’ dreams. In stark opposition to the humiliation and belittling our Fellows might otherwise encounter solely because they wish to pursue these countercultural dreams, the LSYWC community offers a communal, "Yes We Can" (or in Spanish, "Sí Se Puede").
The hard work of more than 200 LSYWC mentors who have supported our Fellows over the first six years of our organization’s existence is starting to pay off. Two of the Fellows in our inaugural class are set to graduate from law school this spring—Tomás Manriquez, from Colorado Law, and Viridiana Valdez, from DU Law. And there are now a number of other Fellows behind them in the pipeline, including Larissa Alire and Lexi Clark, both of whom started at Colorado Law this fall. If you are interested in making a concrete and lasting contribution to increasing the diversity of our legal profession, I encourage you to learn more about our program and how you can support it, including by becoming a mentor, at lawschoolyeswecan.org.
Judge Christine M. Arguello sits on the bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. She obtained her undergraduate degree from CU Boulder, served as legal counsel for the CU Boulder campus, and taught bankruptcy law at Colorado Law for several years. In 2017, she received the Richard Schaden Adopted Alumna Award in recognition of her many contributions to Colorado Law.