Written by Robin McDuff. The opinions herein are not necessarily shared in full by other board members. (But probably are!)
Kenneth L. Karst was my father-in-law and, much more to the point, a legendary UCLA law professor. If you watched the RBG video about Ken, you know he was considered to be quite special in the legal community. To quote UCLA Dean Jennifer Mnookin about his work: “Ken was deeply dedicated to addressing systemic inequities and pursuing societal change through his exceptional body of legal scholarship focused on First, Fifth, and Fourteenth amendments; women's rights; affirmative action; civil rights and discrimination; gay and lesbian rights; lawyers and social change; and land-use reform in Latin America.” Not only that, but Ken's scholarship was both totally readable (unlike many a law review article), and also full of compassion, humor and humility. He was not merely right; he was also passionate, articulate and persuasive.
My wife Leslie and I feel particularly impacted by his ground-breaking work on gay rights. In the 1980 Yale Law Review article, The Freedom of Intimate Association, Ken first articulated the ideas and arguments that ultimately were restated in Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (the 2015 gay marriage decision). (The PDF takes a while to load, but if you want to take the time, it's a great read!) Kennedy's majority opinion fully embraced the logic and compassion articulated by Ken 35 years earlier. We believe that, but for that article, gay marriage acceptance itself would have been pushed some years into the future. Through convincing Kennedy, we won – much faster than anyone (including Ken!) would ever have guessed. The ruling, by the way, was very appropriately handed down on Ken’s birthday, to his great joy in the twilight of his career.
Check out this short clip which opens the 1993 movie The Pelican Brief, with both Julia Roberts and Cynthia Nixon arguing Ken's positions re sodomy laws. When the Cynthia Nixon character says the word “intimate” – bingo – that came directly from Ken. He created the constitutional concept that Justice Brennan lifted and used four years later in the Supreme Court opinion Roberts vs. U.S. Jaycees, thus becoming part of Supreme Court doctrine. And yes, the Julia Roberts line at the end of the clip is correct: The Supreme Court was wrong in Bowers v Hardwick, and they later overturned all sodomy laws in 2003, which was certainly the most important precondition to gay marriage becoming law in 2015.
I could go on and on about Ken's great work, but how does it relate to the origin of this foundation?
When he got this appointment at UCLA, Ken and his wife Smiley, naturally, looked for a nice neighborhood near the university with good schools for their four children. They paid $69,000 in 1965 for their home, which was a stretch for their budget but, given his tenured position, they figured they would be ok. This was the sort of neighborhood that was segregated by design. There were no blacks allowed to live in their neighborhood (North of Montana) in Santa Monica. (For the history of blacks in Santa Monica, read this.)
Ken and Smiley both passed away in the last few years, and the house sold for a bundle, of which Leslie and I received a quarter in an inheritance. It's not at all fair, as I wrote about earlier in this series. I already addressed that these housing price excesses exist mainly due to the forced segregation of the 20th century, and the zoning laws that came with the white enclaves. Leslie (and I) already received financial and other sorts of other help from Ken and Smiley before their deaths.
This is what is meant by accumulated white privilege. Therefore, we believe it's not really legitimately ours, and that we need to do something toward racial equity with this money. More on this here.
We, therefore, started our this family foundation for racial equity to honor and extend Ken Karst's legacy.
What Ken focused on academically was how to ensure opportunity and full citizenship for all, given our country's failure to do so for most of the United States history. This failure left many people behind, and it is those communities who will be the focus of the Foundation. And our vision of racial equity absolutely does include all who were left behind. Many whites have also been the victim of our tax and other economic policies that have hurt all poor people, while giving billions to a small segment of society. The Foundation will support causes that help everyone who has been the victim of these policies, and we are working with other like-minded groups towards broad-base community solutions.
The first initiative of the Foundation has been to endow a scholarship in Ken’s name at the UCLA School of Law, which will exist in perpetuity. It is important both to us and to the law school that the students selected to receive this scholarship (who must be in need of financial aid) demonstrate those traits possessed by Ken—not only academic excellence and a commitment to racial equity, but also a belief in community, tolerance, civility, openness, listening, generosity, and kindness. As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler said of Ken at his memorial, Ken’s intent as a teacher “was not to mold people to his view, but to open them up to the views of others.”
Good thinkers and writers do matter, particularly if they have the characteristics that Ken possessed. For more about the scholarship, read this.