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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 13, 1977)
j Attorney awaits new wave of radicalism Strike another match. Supposedly, student radicalism has died in its sleep, its followers having broken from the battle lines when they saw money at the end of the tunnel. But at least one former campus radical still serves his politics. “We’re at a period between the waves,” says Mike Goldstein. “We can’t compare now to the crest of the wave of a few years ago. But if people come in and learn what’s going on now, I think we won’t be so naive and self righteous when the next wave comes along.” Goldstein is a a bearded Eugene attorney with slightly long, curly hair, wire-rimmed glasses and is 27 years old. In court, he wears a corduroy jacket, a white shirt and neat pants. His tie is knotted crookedly, so that the shirt shows at the neck, but he adjusts it before walking into the court room. “I guess people would call me a Story and Photo By NICK GALLO Of the Emerald socialist, a Marxist — I don’t know which label fits the best,” says Goldstein. “But you could say I’m not for capitalism.” Goldstein was born May 6, 1949, in Passaic, N.J., an old im migrant town whose population has been slipping since the Mike Goldstein Sex equity conference scheduled Aileen Hernandez, an urban affairs and management consultant in San Francisco and former commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission will speak in Eugene Thursday as part of the Sex Equity in Educational Leadership (SEEL) Conference slated for the weekend. Hernandez’s speech, “Holding Up Half the Sky: Women in Power,” will be free to the public. It is scheduled for 2 p.m. in the EMU. Hernandez will also speak at 7 p.m. Thursday. The topic will be “Double Whammy — Not Double Counting,” a discussion of being black and female, at the Eugene School District Education Center. ATTENTION. . . Prospective Teachers If you need the University of Oregon’s recommendation for an Oregon teaching certificate based on Spring 1977 and/or prior academic work, please pick up the application packets now—Room 102. College of Education. 1920s. He lived in a Jewish-Polish neighborhood and went to schools where teachers were beat up routinely and the vice-prin cipal’s car stolen and driven into a nearby river. A minor protest as early as junior high school sparked the rebel in Goldstein. “I had a friend whose father was a printer,” he says. “We’d sneak over to his house at night and counterfeit hall passes. We were protesting school prayer. It was in teresting — the greasers and hoods and I had an alliance. We all had more detention than there were days of school." After high school, Goldstein attended Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. — the Cornell which made the cover of Time maga zine in the spring of 1969 when a group of blacks strapped with bul let magazines took over the stu dent union. "Cornell was trying to do what other schools hadn’t attempted yet,” says Goldstein. “They wanted to set up black studies programs but they were such pat ronizing programs ... After a few crossburnings in Ithaca, the blacks had had enough.” A lesson in politics emerged during that crisis, says Goldstein. “The first day, all the whites wanted the administration to get the blacks out. But when the crisis was over, a mass education had happened. They (the blacks) had caught people's attention — and people listened. People learned how to organize and stood to gether.” After marginal involvement with the Cornell chapter of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Soci ety), Goldstein graduated with a B.A. in government and entered the University of Oregon Law School in 1973. By that time, the University’s radical political cli mate had cooled, but not long after, the lettuce boycotts began on campus. Goldstein began leafleting and picketi ng. Then he got a chance to get his “legal feet’’ wet. A group of boycotters marched into a cam pus building, the scene of the Oregon Press Conference. Two members of the group, Tony Gregg and Esawey Amasha, were brought to student conduct trial for disrupting a University function. Goldstein defended the pair. “It was more a political experi ence than a legal one,” says Goldstein. “The authorities really showed their true colors in that one. (University Pres.) Bob Clark blew a gut over that, he turned into the father of the boycott, he edu cated more people by being rep ressive than anything else did.” Gregg and Amasha were ac quitted of the charges. After Goldstein got his law de gree in 1975, he left Eugene for a little less than a year before return ing to start practicing law out of his house. In the year since, he has defended political activists, such as the demonstrators at the inau guration of University Pres. Wil liam Boyd, and is now on retainer with Hoedads, a workers’ cooperative in Eugene. He will also help people settle simple di social change, but that it can be a positive force. “The laws are only as good as as the society that produces them,” he notes. The legal system is designed to regulate capitalism, to provide order for its growth, not to replace it. But it’s a front for us to struggle on and I believe in using all the fronts we have. “The law can’t really solve prob lems as long as society uses people's bodies to produce wealth and then throws them away,” he says. “That’s why I don’t think lawyers are bad people, it’s their role within the system. The prob lem goes deeper than individual moral worth.” And this is one reason why the dilemma of a lawyer defending a guilty client is held in perspective by Goldstein. “It’s a matter of first things first,’’ he says. “We’re not identifying any problems the way it is now. We’re not solving them in the court room. The ruling class would like nothing better than to see you and I slug it out with people like the pornographers. And you take “It would be good if you didn’t have to purchase the knowledge from a specialist. ” vorce cases with less than the usual large attorney’s fee. “I decided to go into practice by myself to do the cases I wanted,” he says. “It would be good if you didn’t have to purch ase the knowledge of law from a specialist. I don’t like that the law is wrapped in all its mystical bullshit so that people are kept in ignorance. I try to be reasonable with my rates, not charitable, but fair, flexible,” he says, noting that his rates are a fraction of most attorneys fees which can easily run over $1,000 for felony cases. Goldstein says he doesn’t view the law as any major vehicle of these crimes like pornography — the pornographers aren’t doing anything different than what this society wants us to do. Only they’re doing it well — they’re making a buck.” Goldstein, who is a member of the National Lawyer’s Guild, a group of “progressive lawyers,” as he puts it, says he plans to stay in Eugene and practice law. “There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing,” he smiles. As the inter view draws to a close Goldstein is asked how the legal profession will take to his comments on the law. He shrugs and smiles, “I don’t care, they hate me now as it is.” WHAT TYPE ARE YOU? NO MATTER! ESCAPE FROM THEM ALL ... . INVOLVE YOURSELF IN A VOLUNTEER SETTING, EARN LEGITIMATE UPPER DIVISION CREDIT! TUTOR, TEACH, COUNSEL, COACH, HELP, DEVELOP, GROW. COME BY THE ESCAPE REGISTRATION TABLE IN THE EMU LOBBY OR 327 EMU. (CALL 686-4351) ESCAPE
