For 20 years, the Trope and Trope fellowship has immersed students in family law and public interest
Sorrell Trope ’49 did not hesitate when Betty Nordwind asked him to fund an annual fellowship for USC Gould students at the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law, where she is executive director.
Now in its 20th year, the Trope and Trope Fellowship, the only family law and public interest fellowship of its kind in the nation, immerses a Gould student each summer in family law and public interest at the Buhai Center, which is named in honor of Harriett Buhai, an attorney who provided pro bono legal services for needy families in South Central Los Angeles.
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| Sorrell Trope ’49 meets 3L Alisa Wecker, the 20th Trope and Trope Fellow. |
Trope, who is one of the highest-profile divorce attorneys in the country, immediately saw the fellowship as a way to honor both his alma mater — to which he says: “I owe everything” — and his friend Harriett Buhai, who passed away in 1983.
Headquartered in Koreatown, the Buhai Center provides an average of 1,000 poverty-level clients a year with a variety of free legal services. The Center’s staff and volunteer attorneys help clients to dissolve marriages, navigate paternity cases, collect child support, determine child custody and combat domestic violence.
Trope and Buhai met in downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, at the bustling master calendar room for family law cases from which courtroom assignments were made. Despite their divergent career paths, they found common ground in the practice of — and understanding the need for — family law.
“I feel obligated to assist the Buhai Center because it’s one of the prime entities in the Los Angeles community that provides pro bono legal services for people who need it,” Trope says. “What goes on in family court is sad and disturbing. Often you see people trying to represent themselves who don’t know what they are doing. They need quality legal representation.”
Nordwind says that Trope never lost his desire to help the “underdog,” having supported the Center’s work since its beginnings. “Family law is an area of very high need, as there are a huge volume of cases in Los Angeles,” she says. “Sorrell understands family law, he understands the needs we have, and he has a sense of what it might be like when you don’t have an attorney.”
She adds that beyond providing the Center with a fellow who can help to assist more clients, the fellowship also promotes to law students the possibility of a career in family law. And the fellowship itself provides excellent
legal training.
For 3L Alisa Wecker, who also interned for the Buhai Center during the spring 2015 semester, practicing family law is essential to her career goal. During her 10-week summer fellowship, Wecker worked on nearly 20 cases, writing declarations and points of authority and interviewing clients to assess their cases.
“I enjoyed working with the clients and finding solutions to their specific issues, which can be complex,” says Wecker, a native Angeleno whose fluency in Spanish assists her interactions with clients. Wecker took the family law survey course at Gould taught in the spring by Trope and Trope attorney Anne Kiley and Harlee Gasmer from the Kolodny Law Group and says her studies bolstered her work at the Center and vice versa.
“It was interesting to intern here and see issues I was learning in school come to life,” she says. In addition, she found the Center’s staff and volunteer attorneys also provided her with formal and comprehensive training, going through paternity cases, dissolution cases and “everything that comes through the Center. That experience gave me a sense of what to do and what to look out for,” she says.
That training helped to propel the career of Gina Zaragoza ’96, the first Trope and Trope fellow. She joined the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles right after completing her J.D. at USC Gould, and eventually served as a panel attorney for the California Parole Advocacy Program.
Now a sole practitioner focused on juvenile dependency and immigration assistance, Zaragoza attributes her summer at the Buhai Center with providing “insight into family law and the issues related to dependency. The interactions with the clients, and targeting what’s important to the clients, were so important,” she recalls.
While some of the Trope and Trope fellows have gone on to practice family law (a few for the Trope and Trope firm), others practice law in a wide range of private and public settings, including city government, estate planning, nonprofits and corporations.
In addition to education and experience, Trope sees the fellowship as offering an even larger benefit to students. “These law school students are in the upper echelon. And we are exposing them to people who can’t afford legal resources,” Trope says. “Even if they go to work for a large law firm, it’s important to me that the lawyers who come out of USC have exposure to the other side of the coin.
— Photo by Mikel Healey
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the USC Law magazine.
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