Arthur Bryant - Public Justice

Louis Goodman / Arthur Bryant - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Arthur Bryant to the podcast. Mr. Bryant is the former chairman and executive Director of Public Justice, a national public interest law firm with over 2,700 attorneys working on high impact litigation.

He has twice been named as one of the 100 most influential attorneys in America by the National Law Journal. He's done substantial work in Title IX litigation, and in the last few weeks, a federal district judge granted Mr. Bryant's motion for preliminary injunction preserving women's sports at Stephen F. Austin University in Texas. Arthur Bryant, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:00:57] Arthur Bryant: Thank you so much. I appreciate you inviting me. 

[00:01:00] Louis Goodman: It's a pleasure to have you. Can you tell us where you're speaking to us from right now? 

[00:01:05] Arthur Bryant: Sure. I'm working in Oakland, California. That's where my office is. 

[00:01:09] Louis Goodman: I love having local attorneys on the podcast.

Can you explain to us what type of practice that you have? How do you explain your practice? 

[00:01:22] Arthur Bryant: I'm a public interest lawyer. I take on cases that make a difference. While of course, now that I'm in private practice after 35 years in public interest nonprofit practice, I need to make money off of the cases, but that's not how I select my cases.

Obviously, I wanna survive and do well economically, but I really focus on taking cases that will make a difference in the world, that will advance consumer's rights, civil rights, workers' rights, public safety, access to the courts, access to justice, things like that. I basically sue big corporations and the government and major institutions on behalf of people, the poor, the powerless, women, minorities who the big institutions are taking advantage of, or cheating or discriminating against, or even harming or killing.

[00:02:18] Louis Goodman: How long have you had this type of practice? 

[00:02:21] Arthur Bryant: Basically, since I started practicing, so I became a lawyer in 19 79, and so I've been doing a long time and I've been doing it in a variety of different firms, but I wanted to be a public interest lawyer since I was 14 years old, and I became one. 

[00:02:40] Louis Goodman: So how does a public interest lawyer get paid?

[00:02:44] Arthur Bryant: Well, it depends on the circumstances. For 35 years, I worked for a national public interest law firm called Public Justice. They're always paid a salary, and that's how I got paid. But the way the organization was financed was through fundraising for the most part, going out to members of the public, lawyers around the country, others, foundations, et cetera, who were supporting our work because of the good that we did.

Some of those cases would also pay money, but that wasn't why we were taking the cases. We were taking the cases to make a difference. And then when I went into private practice, then those cases had to make money and you had to make the money that way, but you took on cases that, in my case at least, would both make a difference and make money if you want.

[00:03:28] Louis Goodman: Where are you from originally? 

[00:03:30] Arthur Bryant: Originally from Pennsylvania. Moved back and forth between Harrisburg and Philadelphia. 

[00:03:35] Louis Goodman: And where did you go to college? 

[00:03:37] Arthur Bryant: Swarthmore College, a liberal arts school outside Philadelphia. 

[00:03:42] Louis Goodman: So you stayed in Pennsylvania after you got outta high school, and then when you graduated from college, you went to law school.

Did you take some time off or did you go straight through? 

[00:03:50] Arthur Bryant: No, I went right through. I, I knew I wanted to be a public interest lawyer, like I said, so it was just how fast can I get there? I went from Swarthmore College to Harvard Law School. I even when I applied to Swarthmore, I even told them that I wanted to be a public interest lawyer, and I was really only applying to Swarthmore because I had recently learned you really can't go to law school unless you go to college first.

[00:04:10] Louis Goodman: That's really interesting. Like when was it that you first knew that you wanted to be a lawyer, and when was it that you first knew that you wanted to be a public interest lawyer? 

[00:04:20] Arthur Bryant: I had some inkling I wanted to be a lawyer probably before I was 14. But I really thought I was gonna go into politics then.

I know I wanted to make a difference in the world. That's what I really wanted to do, and I was very politically precocious. I marched against the Vietnam War when I was 13 and 14 I leafleted for Bobby Ken, and for Eugene McCarthy when they were running for president and I was sitting on my couch in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania watching the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention where all of these kids protesting against the Vietnam War in Chicago.

I watched them get their heads bashed in by the Chicago police, and I remember sitting there watching the television saying. Maybe politics is not the way. Because if you really get that close to changing things, they might beat the crap out of you. And that more, I thought about it, I thought, if you really wanna make a difference, and I thought politics is about compromise and there are some things you just shouldn't compromise, like racism or sexism or the Vietnam War, and you should fight for what you believe in.

And that in politics, if you ever got close, the deal, often the deal would be made, but it was rarely on the merits. It was about who had more money or who had more influence or who had more power. Whereas in the courts, you could fight for what you believed in and yes, you could reach a settlement agreement and compromise, but if you didn't, at least the decision was supposed to be made on the merits, on the basis of right and wrong.

So it was really then that I decided I wanna become a public interest lawyer 'cause that's how I think I can make the biggest difference in the world. 

[00:06:04] Louis Goodman: Did William Kunstler and the Chicago seven trial influence you at all in your notion of wanting to be a lawyer? 

[00:06:11] Arthur Bryant: Oh, I'm sure it did. I was already interested, but the fact that the Chicago convention was followed up by this trial in which it was the lawyers who could fight for what was right and fight against the oppression being inflicted on the defendants, I think only underscored my desire to want to be that kind of a lawyer.

[00:06:33] Louis Goodman: What did your friends and family say when you said, I wanna be a lawyer, I wanna be a public interest lawyer. This is what I see my life as. 

[00:06:41] Arthur Bryant: At the time, a lot of my friends didn't know what a public interest lawyer was. My, my parents were fully supportive and wanted me to go for it. 

[00:06:50] Louis Goodman: Now, when you first got out of Harvard Law School, what was your first job, when, how did you start out practicing? 

[00:06:59] Arthur Bryant: Well, they encourage you to go to work for a judge, ideally a federal judge as a law clerk, to learn more about how the real world operates. And I became the law clerk to the first black woman federal district court judge in the south. Her name was Gabrielle McDonald.

She was 36 years old in Houston, Texas, and Jimmy Carter had just made her a federal judge. So my first day on the job was her second day on the job. So it was, let's learn to be a federal judge together. I did that for 15 months, and the clerkship was over, and then I couldn't find a public interest job.

So I ended up finding a law firm in Philadelphia called Cone Sette, Marion and Graf, fascinating firm that had 20 lawyers. 15 of those lawyers did plaintiff's antitrust and securities class action litigation. The other five represented basically all the newspapers and magazines in town and did First Amendment work, and that's what I did.

So I spent four years primarily doing First Amendment work, representing newspapers and magazines, defending libel cases, advising reporters and editors on what they could and couldn't or should at least and shouldn't say. Moving to intervene in the courts and unseal records that were of significance to the public, that kind of thing.

[00:08:17] Louis Goodman: When did you first start getting into the public interest world, and how did that start? 

[00:08:23] Arthur Bryant: During my first summer in law school, I worked for the local state representative in Congress. My second summer, I split my summer in New York City between a corporate law firm and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

So I was already doing public interest work, and one of the things that attracted me to work for the federal judge that I clerked for was that she had previously worked with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. 

[00:08:51] Louis Goodman: You are someone who's practiced law his whole life, and you obviously are in a position now where if you didn't wanna practice law, you wouldn't have to practice law.

You and I are both old enough to retire if we wanted to, but yet you stay practicing law. What is it about practicing law that keeps you as an attorney? 

[00:09:15] Arthur Bryant: For me, it's the chance to make a difference. There are innumerable injustices that exist all around the world and of course in this country, but being a lawyer gives you a chance to fight for justice and correct some of these injustices.

And if you learn well enough how to do it and are strategic enough, you can pick areas where you can make a difference. And what could feel better than that? 

[00:09:45] Louis Goodman: If a young person were just coming outta college thinking about a career, would you recommend the law? 

[00:09:51] Arthur Bryant: I think it depends on the person. Certainly when I did it, I would say yes, but when I became a lawyer, the Supreme Court was very different and far more progressive.

You could make a difference fighting for people against power. Now, this is the single most conservative, pro business, anti-consumer, anti civil rights, US Supreme Court, we have had certainly in my lifetime, and strategically, it makes you wonder if you really did wanna make a difference in the world, whether you'd be better off going into politics.

Because politics determines who's in most of the courts, and I'm sure the pendulum swings back and forth. There's also changes to the law that you of course still could make, injustices, you could effectively fight, but we have a Supreme court now that is rolling back the rights of so many people and eliminating access to justice for so many people and advancing corporate and money people's interests way beyond regular people's interests.

That it's truly disturbing, and I couldn't blame somebody who said, why would I want to spend my life trying to change the law when the people who are gonna make the decisions are gonna rule against me time after time, and change the law in the worst direction possible. 

[00:11:20] Louis Goodman: Is there anything that you know now that you really wish you'd known before you started practicing law?

[00:11:27] Arthur Bryant: I don't know. What I actually have recently come to realize is by focusing on public interest law. And my whole career doing public interest law. I never really had to pay much attention to the law as a business. I never really had to much look at lawsuits as things to make money with. And I realized that most lawyers have to look at them way that way, that for a whole lot of lawyers cases are part of a business.

You take on cases and you handle cases based on how much money they're gonna make and how much they're gonna cost. I never had to do that until the last five years when I left public interest practice. My mind still doesn't really work that way, and part of me feels blessed that I had that entire career without having to focus on that.

But now that I'm having to focus on a little, a part of me is feeling like, Hey, I might have been better to learn more about that earlier. 

[00:12:34] Louis Goodman: Since you've brought it up, how has the business of practicing law gone for you in the fairly short period of time that you've been doing it compared to your whole career experience?

[00:12:45] Arthur Bryant: It's gone very well, but it's what convinced me ultimately to open my own law firm because if I was going to make decisions about what cases to take on and how to balance the public interest aspect of the cases with the financial aspect of the cases. I wanted to make up with my values and not be guided by owners of the law firms I was working with and how they prioritized money over other things.

[00:13:13] Louis Goodman: Do you have anybody that works with you, any other attorneys support staff? 

[00:13:17] Arthur Bryant: I don't have them in my law firm, but I've just set up the firm two months ago, and so my cases, now I'm all handling with co-counsel who in each case I have several different co-counsel who are really handling the cases with me being the lead strategist and bringing in and putting together the cases, but also working with others who handle the details.

[00:13:38] Louis Goodman: Do you think the legal system's fair? 

[00:13:40] Arthur Bryant: Oh, not close. Not close to fair. I'm, 

[00:13:43] Louis Goodman: Why not? 

[00:13:43] Arthur Bryant: I mean, there are parts of it that are fair. There are cases in which it's incredibly fair. There are cases in which justice can be done, and it's important to bring cases that will do that and fight for it. But there is no way to look at our current legal system with our current Supreme Court and even the most even balanced, fair-minded, just judges having to deal every day with the president threatening judges for actually enforcing the law, that it's possible to sit there and say the system as a whole is fair. 

[00:14:21] Louis Goodman: I have a two part question for you. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received and or what advice would you give to a young attorney just starting out in practice?

[00:14:34] Arthur Bryant: I think the best advice I ever see received, and it's also what I would give to is do what you think is right. Fight for what you believe in. Nobody really sat me down in law school and said, you're gonna devote your entire career arguing for somebody. You get to decide who that's gonna be, and you can either fight for people and things that you believe in where even if you fail you'll feel great about what you spent your time doing. If you actually spent your career fighting for what you believed in and arguing for what you believed in, I believe the system of justice would be much stronger and you would feel much better about yourself. 

[00:15:18] Louis Goodman: Is there somebody either living or out of the historical past who you'd like to meet?

[00:15:24] Arthur Bryant: Oh, sure. I would love to get a chance to meet and talk with Thurgood Marshall. 

[00:15:29] Louis Goodman: What is it about Thurgood Marshall that attracts you? 

[00:15:32] Arthur Bryant: I think he really fought for what he believed in. I think he used the law to do so and the political arena. He became a Supreme Court justice and continued to do that. He lived a full and rewarding life, and there are a few people I can think of who both spent their life doing the kinds he did and had the kind of success that he had.

[00:15:55] Louis Goodman: Let's say you came into some real money, several billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life? 

[00:16:05] Arthur Bryant: Oh, I think I would give a whole lot more money to others for a whole lot of things. I would not be worrying at all about paying any bills or how I'm gonna finance any case if I wanna pursue it. And I would probably take way more vacations and enjoy my social life a little more. 

[00:16:26] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a Super Bowl ad, someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl and you could put out a message to an enormous audience. What message would you wanna put out to this very large audience? 

[00:16:42] Arthur Bryant: I think the problem now in America is that we've become so polarized on so many issues that there's no effort to find common ground or at least very little and massive demonization of the other side. If I could come up with a message that would make a difference there, I would love to do it. 

[00:17:06] Louis Goodman: If someone wants to get in touch with you, someone has some sort of a public interest matter that they wanted to talk to you about another attorney or perhaps a member of the public who felt that perhaps your services could be of help, what's the best way to get in touch with you, Arthur Bryant? 

[00:17:28] Arthur Bryant: Go to my website, Arthur Bryant law.com, or email me my email address is arthur@arthurbryantlaw.com or just go to the website, Arthur Bryant law.com. 

[00:17:41] Louis Goodman: And I assume that if we Google Arthur Bryant, lawyer Oakland, it'll come up. 

[00:17:50] Arthur Bryant: If you have a little bit of time, we could go back over co cover one area you might be interested in, 

[00:17:54] Louis Goodman: Please.

[00:17:55] Arthur Bryant: Okay. So right now the vast majority of my practice is focusing on Title IX cases on behalf of women or men who were discriminated against on the basis of their sex. How I got into it. It was way back in 1980 when I was first a lawyer in Philadelphia and wanting to become a public interest lawyer. I started going to the ACLU of Philadelphia board meetings, and to my utter astonishment, I learned in 1982 that the single most prestigious high school in Philadelphia, the premier college prep academic high school, its name literally was the Central High School of Philadelphia, was close to girls.

And I said, how could that be? This is a public high school. And they said, oh, they have a legal justification. I said, and what is the legal justification? They said, they have a separate but equal high school for girls. And I heard this phrase and my jaw just dropped, and I'm just like, well, this phrase rings a bell.

Separate but equal. Really? I thought the Constitution ruled that out, the Supreme Court ruled that out in 1954, and they said, that's what we thought too. That's why we sued five years ago and we lost. I said, how could you, the ACLU have lost this case? They said, well, the district court judge says there's no such thing as separate but equal and he ordered the girls admitted, but they appealed and the court of appeals said, there's no such thing as separate but equal for race, but for gender. They're separate bathrooms. They're separate athletic teams. We're not gonna be saying that they can't be separate high schools if they're really equal.

So it reversed and kept the girls out and the Supreme Court of the United States took the case. Chief Justice Rehnquist had a conflict, so he didn't vote. The other eight, split four to four, which left in place the appeals court decision and kept the girls out. So I come along five years later and I say to them, I hear this story.

I say, look, I've only been a lawyer two years, but you get me a young woman who wants to go to that high school and my law firm lets me take that case. I'll take that case. Because I guarantee you, if you look at the facts, the boys school's gonna be better in a hundred different ways. It's not separate but equal.

It's separate and better. And on top of that, Pennsylvania state Constitution has an equal rights amendment. So we can also rely on that. They got me a client, we sued. We tried the case. We won the case. We proved that the boys school was far superior. We got girls into Central High School. We made such a big public stink that the school board members who opposed letting girls in were voted out of office and replaced by supporters. So there was no appeal. The case was over. And then I went on and said, this is clearly what I was meant to do was public interest law. And I joined this brand new public interest organization.

It was then called Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. It's now called Public Justice, www public justice.net. And when I got there in 1985 the National Women's Law Center came to me and said, Arthur, we have the very first Title IX case in the country ready to go to trial against a college for discriminating against its women athletes.

Title IX is a federal law that prohibits all schools that receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. Now it's gotten rid of all these limitations like law schools and business schools being closed to women and nursing schools being closed to men. It's had an enormous impact in athletics.

Its construct is very simple. There are separate programs from men and women, they gotta be equal, but at most schools they're not. So we've just started litigating this. The first case is against Temple University in Philadelphia. It's ready to go to trial. You may not realize this, but you're the only lawyer in America to try a separate but equal case in the last 20 years that we can find.

Will you be our lead trial counsel? I said I'd be happy to. And after three weeks of trial, temple settled and agreed to treat the women and men equally. And since that time, I've done more Title IX cases than anybody in the country. And what's astonishing is we never lose because every school is in vi, almost every school is in a violation.

It's not that I'm the world's greatest lawyer, it's that so many schools are in violation. We sue when they are. And that's how I won my most recent case. And that's how I've run so many. But what people need to understand is the law is very clear and it's very right and just we have to treat our daughters as well as our sons.

And the schools are not doing that. And until they do, they've gotta be held accountable. 

[00:22:43] Louis Goodman: We are coming up against your time deadline, so I'm cognizant of that. Yeah. But I would like you to just very briefly talk about this recent case with the Stephen Austin University in Texas where you were dealing with precisely this kind of issue, and this was very recent. This is not ancient history. This is what's going on now. 

[00:23:05] Arthur Bryant: The latest Title IX case I've been involved in is against Stephen F. Austin University in Nacodoches, Texas. Title IX requires colleges and universities to give women and men equal opportunities to play sports, which basically the easiest way of measuring that is if women are 48% of the undergraduates student body, they should get basically close to 48% of the opportunities to play varsity sports.

That's equality. Proportionality, to be technical, but that's how it's worked. Stephen F. Austin University had a Title IX consultant who gave it a report in January of this year, telling them it was in violation of Title IX because the women had nowhere near enough chances to play sports compared to the men, and that the way it could get in compliance was keep all the women's teams you have reduce a couple of the sizes of a couple men's teams.

Add one or two women's teams, and that was how to get into compliance. And this school, which has never given women close to equal opportunities to play sports, responded to that by doing exactly the opposite. They announced they were cutting three women's teams and one men's team. Increasing the number of athletes on the women's side, they would have to add for women to get equal opportunities to play sports to over 250.

And when I got approached by the women whose teams were being eliminated, and then I threatened the school, I said, don't make me sue you. You're in clear violation. If you do, you're gonna lose. Just put 'em back, get in compliance. Pay my fees, I go away. They said no. So we went to Texas. There was a trial last Wednesday and Thursday just on a preliminary injunction in order to put the teams back right away while we litigate the rest of the case.

The judge ruled a hundred percent in our favor and to show how this is not any matter of big controversy, I was able to cite an executive order from President Donald Trump issued one week ago called Saving College Sports, in which he said. It is critical with all this money changing hands in college athletics in particular, to save and expand women's sports, Olympic sports, and non-revenue sports.

And it was the position of his administration that's what needed to be done. So I got to cite President Trump's executive order to a judge in Texas appointed by President Trump, all in favor of giving women equal rights in the sports arena. And it was a fun and fabulous experience. 

[00:25:49] Louis Goodman: On that note, Arthur Bryant, thank you so much for joining us today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:25:58] Arthur Bryant: Thank you. 

[00:26:00]Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:26:39] Arthur Bryant: I'm sorry. Pardon me. Just again, I'm sorry. Lemme try that again. Let me back up. I don't know. Let me think about it a second.