March 2006

Joshua Kagan ('02) Advocates Tirelessly on Behalf of the Disadvantaged


Joshua Kagan has logged more hours in volunteer service and advocacy work since graduating from Jepson in 2002 than most people do in a lifetime. He started by taking a year off between college and law school to work for AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC).  

The NCCC assigned Kagan to a 12-member West Coast team composed of 18- to 24-year-olds. After a one-month training period, Kagan’s team undertook the first of four major two-month projects. Kagan and his teammates organized a holiday food drive for the food bank in Sacramento, Calif. In addition to advertising in the newspaper, NCCC members went door-to-door asking businesses to put food collection barrels in their offices, which the NCCC would pick up later and deliver to the food bank.  

Kagan’s second assignment with the NCCC took him to Mesa, Ariz., where he worked in a variety of capacities at a transitional housing community for battered women and their children. One of his duties involved tutoring the children attending the community’s Boys and Girls Club.  

Joshua Kagan conducts a basketball clinic for children
 from the Mesa, Ariz., transitional housing community.

Most of the women living in the community received food stamps, but they couldn’t use food stamps to purchase such basic necessities as diapers for their young children. In response, Kagan helped organize a diaper bank for these women and other qualifying people in Mesa.  

Located in the Arizona desert, the Mesa transitional housing community experienced difficulty complying with the water restrictions required by law. Kagan and other NCCC members devised a plan enabling the community to meet its water restrictions and thereby receive a much-needed tax break.  

Next Kagan and his teammates traveled to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where they built affordable homes for low-income native Hawaiians. Without housing programs such as the one cosponsored by the Hawaiian Homeland Program and Habitat for Humanity, sky-rocketing real estate prices would force native Hawaiians off their ancestral islands, Kagan said.  

Kagan returned to California for his fourth and final NCCC assignment—fighting forest fires in Eldorado National Forest. While professional firefighters battled the blazes, Kagan and other NCCC members spent long, grueling days cutting swaths around burning areas with chainsaws to prevent the spread of the fire.  

After completing his intense, but rewarding ten-month commitment to the NCCC, Kagan entered law school at the University of San Diego in fall 2003. There he has continued his volunteer efforts on behalf of people in need.  

During his first year of law school, for example, Kagan volunteered at the Guardianship Clinic  in downtown San Diego, writing and filing court briefs to help caring people gain legal custody of children who had been abused, neglected or abandoned by their parents.  

Kagan interned in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004 with the World Service Authority, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping refugees of political and religious persecution achieve asylum status. He primarily assisted Kurds who were trying to flee Iraq by doing the legal research necessary to win their release from prison and gain them entry into a safe country.  

His work with the World Service Authority sparked an interest in international human-rights work, Kagan said, and he decided to pursue other advocacy work in this area. During the spring semester of 2005, he volunteered with a workers’ rights organization in Tijuana, Mexico.  

“Due to significantly reduced import taxes resulting from the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),” Kagan said, “large numbers of assembly plants have sprung up in northern Mexico to support international companies seeking to benefit from low-paid workers. We saw a lot of human-rights abuses in these sweatshops where long shifts, unsafe working conditions and mandatory pregnancy testing are the norm.”  

“We tried to inform the workers of their rights,” Kagan said, “and we tried to get them to work together to improve their working conditions. Power is in numbers.”

A paper Kagan wrote on human-rights abuses in the Mexican maquiladora sector will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Transnational Law and Policy, a publication of the Florida State University College of Law.  

This past summer, Kagan took classes in Costa Rica, where he continued his advocacy of international human rights by completing an unofficial internship with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.  

Kagan served as the vice president of the Public Interest Law Foundation (PILF) at the University of San Diego Law School from February 2005 to February 2006. Because public-interest lawyers earn significantly less money than most other lawyers, the Public Interest Law Foundation raises money for the Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) to help University of San Diego graduates who work for qualifying nonprofit public-interest organizations repay their law school loans.  

As vice president of PILF, Kagan promoted public-interest law opportunities to other law students. For example, he spent a week in New Orleans during winter break with a group of law students offering legal assistance to the many immigrant workers from Latin America who have come to the Gulf Coast to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  

“Many of these workers were sleeping in broken-down cars and city parks,” Kagan said. “Working conditions were poor. Employers would contract undocumented migrant workers for two-week periods, but at the end of two weeks, they would call the INS to have the workers deported so they didn’t have to pay the workers the wages they were due.” 

Kagan has organized another contingent of seven students to accompany him to Jackson, Miss., during spring break. The law students will do volunteer legal work for Hurricane Katrina victims at the Mississippi Center for Justice.  

Kagan will graduate from law school this May and plans to spend this summer preparing for and taking the Virginia Bar exam. He would like to embark on a political science doctoral program in the fall, he said, and is currently waiting to hear about acceptance into several graduate school programs.  

“My ultimate goal is to become a college professor specializing in international relations or international human rights,” Kagan said. “If I ever practice law at all, I will practice public-interest law.”  

Kagan knew long before he entered Jepson that he wanted to help the disadvantaged, but his Jepson education helped him focus on how he could best do that, Kagan said. “Classes like Service Learning gave me the insights and drive to act on my interests and beliefs,” he said.