In our annual Summer Work Series, UC Berkeley Law students share reflections about their on-the-job experiences. These first-person accounts describe various career-advancing work and skill building in different areas of law, through opportunities often obtained in partnership with the school’s Career Development Office.
Rising 3L Jessica Vlacos spent six years as a power validation engineer at Apple before coming to UC Berkeley Law. These days, they work to help validate the power of people with disabilities to gain more independence and more meaningful societal integration. Vlacos has gained important experience in that area during law school, both within student-led initiatives and in summer work after their 1L year. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Colorado, they made the Dean’s List every semester in the school’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Below, Vlacos describes their rewarding work this summer with the California Department of Justice’s Civil Rights and Enforcement Section in San Francisco.
Growing up, I saw how isolating living with a disability can be. Disability is not isolating because disabled people are not fit for public life, but because public life is all too often not fit for us. I hope to spend my legal career advocating for people with disabilities to live in community, not in institutions.
Attending UC Berkeley Law has deepened my understanding of how intersectional disability is. I have come to appreciate how much civil rights and disability rights depend on one another through several endeavors here.
They include examining racial disparities in the restraint and seclusion of students with disabilities with the Disability Rights Project, one of the law school’s Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects; researching the pattern of inadequate involvement of people with disabilities in disaster preparedness and planning during my first summer internship with the nonprofit Disability Law United; and helping people with disabilities get onto public benefits at the East Bay Community Law Center.
One of my comfort TV shows is “Parks and Recreation,” and I have been known to joke that I want to be Leslie Knope (a fiercely dedicated government worker for those unfamiliar with the show) when I grow up. When I learned about the internships offered by the Civil Rights Enforcement Section of the California Department of Justice, I jumped at the opportunity to learn more about how a state government can work to promote and protect the civil rights of its citizens.
This summer, I have had the opportunity to observe incredible legal professionals. I have met attorneys who work on a variety of topics including disability access rights, education rights, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and voting rights. I met an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, as well as a federal judge for the Northern District of California.
I have continued to hone my legal research and writing skills to support a variety of projects. I helped prepare materials for a meeting of the SB 882 Advisory Council, which has been tasked with making recommendations about training related to interactions between police officers and people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. I have also written memoranda related to the state of California’s ongoing federal litigation about recent executive orders.
Perhaps the most invaluable takeaway from this summer has been that even (or perhaps especially) in times of turmoil, you will find government attorneys doing everything they can to close the distance between law and justice. We can’t all be Leslie Knope, but I now have the pleasure of knowing people who are very close.
After graduation in May, I look forward to continuing to work in civil rights by advocating for people with intellectual, developmental, and mental disabilities to retain decision-making autonomy.