How was the adjustment of going from Vietnam to law school?
As you can imagine, going from Saigon immediately to the Bay Area of California was quite a switch. There s a certain decompression period that you go through, but I had a month or two before law school started. As I was on a leave of absence without pay from the Army, we also needed some income. So my wife, who was attending graduate school at California State University, and I found this big apartment complex that we agreed to manage in exchange for free rent. We did that for three years, during which time our first daughter was born. Did you enjoy law school? Yes, absolutely. It was everything I had hoped it would be. Again, it was because of excellent professors, people like Dean George Alexander, a great constitutional scholar; Professor Jerry Kasner, who recently died; and Father Paul Goda, whom I served as a teaching assistant. They gave you a sense of the higher calling of the legal profession. They instilled in us responsibility to the disadvantaged and the poor, to do more fo
