Lara Bazelon often tells her young law students, “If you step into the arena, you should expect to get hit.” As a former public defender, she speaks from experience.
I first came across Bazelon’s work in 2018, at a book festival where she spoke about alternatives to imprisonment. When I discovered she was a law professor at my alma mater, the University of San Francisco (USF), I immediately purchased her book Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice after Wrongful Conviction. “It was the poor and the resourceless who stood to lose the most because the deck was stacked against them and always had been,” she writes in the introduction. “No matter how heinous the accusation, they needed a fighter.”
