Contact Information

Bio

I recently graduated from law school (2003) and am now in the process of charting a new path as a lawyer. Law is a mid-life career change for me. Spirituality and politics have been the focuses of my life from an early age.

I’m a practitioner of Buddhism, originally Jewish, and a student and lover of world religions.

In the late 1970s, as a college student majoring in Spanish, I joined the movement for human rights in Latin America. In the early 1980s, I became a journalist as an adjunct to activism. For 15 years (1983-98) I conducted a full-time research project on social movements of the U.S. Right. I published four books on the subject. The most significant of these is Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (Guilford Press, 1995), a 50-year history and analysis of the Right based on my doctoral dissertation in Sociology at U.C. Berkeley. Also during those years, I taught journalism and sociology at various universities and worked with many groups on the Left.

During my last year of law school, I decided not to look for a full- time job within an existing firm or organization. I want to practice law in a way that is non-hierarchical, non-exploitative and grounded with the continual inquiry: does this course of action, this writing, this speech promote wellness for as many beings as possible? I may fail at always acting with wisdom and compassion, but at least that’s my goal.

I’ve begun sharing office space with a group of solo attorneys in Oakland, doing contract work for other lawyers while I wait for bar exam results and while laying the groundwork for my own law practice. Right now—and this will undoubtedly evolve—my primary interests lie in elder law, housing rights and employment law. In three years of law school, I learned that what there is to know about the law is endless. I am studying substantive areas of law plus procedure, and meeting new allies.

In the future, I’d like to integrate my new legal background with my old skills in writing and teaching. In the back of my mind, I’m collecting ideas for an eventual book and course on the sociology of law.

 

Contact Information

Sara R. Diamond
P.O. Box 6006
Albany, CA 94706
Sararose33@CS.com