Professor Barbara Babcock is quoted on recently appointed police watchdog LaDoris Cordell. Sean Webby of the San Jose Mercury filed this story:

The knock against San Jose’s newly appointed police watchdog LaDoris Cordell is that she will flat-out not be objective. She’s a former judge, an avowed liberal who publicly disdained the controversial “three strikes” law, and a passionate civil rights activist who says she personally experienced racial profiling as a young woman.

Yet, there she was in the early 1970s, a fiery, Philadelphia-bred, African-American law student at Stanford, taking a stand against many of her white classmates in a legal ethics class. The majority rushed to the defense of a black Oakland attorney disbarred for persuading someone to lie in court. They cited his background as a working-class man who had dealt with racism. Not Cordell.

“LaDoris just let go and said, ‘You don’t have go to a great law school to know that it is wrong to lie,’ ” said Barbara Babcock, a Stanford law professor.