An Enduring Tribute to Ralph Abascal, ‘68

Ralph Santiago Abascal was a UC Law SF graduate whose remarkable career in public interest law spanned a thirty-year period that ended with his untimely death in 1997. It was established and funded by a large and diverse group that included UC Law SF students, faculty and alumni as well as Ralph’s family and numerous other friends and admirers.

Ralph was born in 1934, the eldest of four children of Spanish immigrants who had met and married in San Francisco. He grew up in San Leandro, helping with his younger siblings as well as the family’s small business ventures. When a debilitating stroke put his father in a nursing home and led to his early death two years later, Ralph, still in high school, unexpectedly became the man in the family.

After two failed attempts at college, a stint in the U.S. Navy, and a variety of odd jobs, Ralph finally got serious about succeeding in higher education. By the early sixties he had completed a BS degree (one year attending classes at San Jose State and San Francisco State simultaneously), and by 1964 was working toward a PhD in Economics at U.C. Berkeley. Sometime in the 1964-65 academic year he saw the film Inherit the Wind, and claimed from then on that it changed his life. The film depicts the legendary courtroom battle that crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow fought against religious bigotry in the infamous Scopes trial in rural Tennessee. To Ralph, it revealed a legal system that empowered a determined individual, even one working alone, to expose injustice and over time to effect change. Convinced this was what exactly what he wanted to do with his own life, Ralph enrolled at UC Law SF in the fall of 1965.

Unsurprisingly, Ralph’s activism and advocacy began while he was still in law school. He played a prominent role in the student-led effort to establish LEOP (UC Law SF’s highly-regarded Legal Education Opportunity Program), was involved in numerous other public interest activities at the school, and worked summers and in his spare time at nearby legal services programs. Early in 1968 he met Bea Moulton (whom he would marry fifteen years later) when, as chairs of their respective chapters of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council at UC Law SF and Stanford, the two were asked to visit other Bay Area law schools and interview applicants for the following summer’s LSCRRC internships. When Bea mentioned on one of their drives that she was acquainted with the sponsor of new legislative reforms in California’s Juvenile Justice system and could secure him as a speaker, the two put together a conference on that subject, holding it at UC Law SF later that spring.

Ralph graduated from UC Law SF in 1968 at the age of 34. He spent most of his career at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), initially as a staff attorney in its Salinas office (1968-69) where he had interned the previous year, then as Directing Attorney in its Marysville office (1969-70), and lastly, starting in 1975, as its longtime General Counsel. In his early career he was part of CRLA’s successful effort to end the use of the “short-handled hoe” that helped growers make sure farmworkers were stooped over their work, despite the fact that it was literally back-breaking. And he led their successful effort to ban the use of DDT in agriculture, representing lactating mothers whose breast milk carried the toxin to their infants.

From mid-1970 until early 1975, Ralph was the Director of Litigation for San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation (SFNLAF). In that role, he forged close ties with California legislative leaders whom he assisted in their efforts to temper changes in welfare legislation sought by then Governor Ronald Reagan to cut welfare rolls. Afterwards he represented welfare beneficiaries in dozens of law suits, most of them successful, challenging Reagan’s welfare policies and practices.

These successful challenges by Ralph and others were not without cost. Governor Reagan developed an enmity for government-funded legal services that carried over to his presidency, where his concerted efforts to defund legal services at a national level led to a series of hard-fought battles in which Ralph again played a prominent role. Late in his career as General Counsel at CRLA, when new restrictions on the use of government funds for legal services precluded their ability to address important issues of environmental justice that Ralph and his good friend Luke Cole had begun to work on, they left CRLA to establish the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment with foundation funds.

During his career Ralph was involved in more than 200 major cases in both court and administrative proceedings affecting the lives and rights of farmworkers, welfare recipients, persons with disabilities, immigrants, and other vulnerable individuals. Renowned for his procedural knowledge and innovative solutions to issues, he was revered by his peers in the public interest community, many of whom he mentored. He was always available to give advice to other attorneys and served on the boards of numerous nonprofits. He also remained heavily involved in legislative and regulatory advocacy. His unique ability to develop and maintain strong relationships with legislators and other public officials gave him unusual access and influence in representing the interests of the poor.

Ralph was also highly regarded and honored by the broader legal establishment. In 1981, he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to a twelve-year term on the Board of Directors of UC Law SF. In 1983, he received the California Bar Association’s Loren Miller Legal Services Award, given annually to a lawyer admitted to practice in California who has demonstrated a long-term commitment to legal services and who has personally done significant work in extending legal services to the poor. Ten years later he received the National Legal Aid and Defender Association’s Kutak-Dodds Award, which honors an equal justice advocate “who, through the practice of law, has contributed in a significant way to the enhancement of the human dignity and quality of life of those persons unable to afford legal representation.” And in 1995, Ralph received The American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award (recognizing long-term contributions to the advancement of civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights) for his innovative and far-reaching work as a founder and proponent of the environmental justice movement.

At the age of 60, in March of 1995, Ralph was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. He continued as long as he could to work on cases, advise other attorneys, and serve on the boards of public interest organizations, working from home to the extent possible for the six months that he was bedridden. On March 17, 1997, he died peacefully at home, surrounded by his wife and daughter and other members of his extended, loving family.

In the 1995-96 academic year Ralph had taught his popular seminar on environmental justice at UC Law SF one last time. Among his students that year was Scott Kuhn ’97, who as HPILF president the following year conceived the idea of a post-graduate fellowship in Ralph’s name and spearheaded a fundraising effort that led to the student body’s taxing itself $10 a head to get the funding underway. Ralph knew of this effort before he died and was deeply touched. And when his widow Bea Moulton (by then a professor at UC Law SF) designated the fellowship as the charity of choice on Ralph’s death, donations came pouring in.  It took a few years and a continuing effort by dedicated individuals to grow the endowment to a level that would support a fellow on a yearly basis, but that happened some years ago.

In 2022, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ralph’s death, it became possible to fund two recipients in a single year, and fundraising efforts to make that a possibility on an ongoing basis continue. The family wishes especially to thank Emeritus Professor Mark Aaronson, Professor Richard Boswell, and Judge Brad Seligman (UC Law SF ’78) for both their fundraising achievements and their tireless service on the selection committee that oversees the application process and distribution of these fellowship funds.