Maribel S. Medina

Ms. Medina was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States with her family as a young child.  Her parents enjoyed little formal schooling in Mexico, and did not attend school in the United States.  Ms. Medina was raised in a farm worker camp in the agricultural town of Watsonville, California, where her parents worked picking strawberries, apples and lettuce.  Later, they found more secure employment at a local cannery.

It was at this cannery that Ms. Medina’s desire to attend college was born.  During a cannery strike, Ms. Medina, then a high school student, acted as a translator and an advocate for striking workers.  Her activism soon garnered the attention of her high school teachers and high school principal who encouraged her to apply to UC Berkeley.  Upon graduation from high school, Ms. Medina was accepted at UC Berkeley and became the first person in her family to attend a four-year university.

Ms. Medina continued her activism on the UC Berkeley campus.  She became co-chair of MEChA, a student organization dedicated to providing and securing educational opportunities for Latino students.  During her summer breaks in college, Ms. Medina returned to her roots, Watsonville’s migrant labor camps, to teach second and third grade students.

 Upon graduation from college, Ms. Medina was accepted to UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.  After earning a JD and MPA from Boalt and Harvard respectively, Ms. Medina was selected from a pool of applicants from across the nation’s finest law schools as the first recipient of the prestigious Fried Frank/MALDEF Fellowship. 

 As a Fried Frank/MALDEF Fellow, Ms. Medina spent the first two years of her legal career at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Jacobson in New York City representing some of the world’s largest corporations in securities and transactions.  After two years in New York City, she moved back to California to work at MALDEF where she filed a number of civil rights class action lawsuits.  Ms. Medina played a vital role in the fight against Proposition 227 (the English Only Initiative) by preparing information pamphlets for the community, debating Ron Unz, the proposition’s author, and appearing on numerous English and Spanish language programs, including CNN and Life Times, to discuss the merits of bilingual education.  After the Fried Frank/MALDEF Fellowship, Ms. Medina joined the downtown Los Angeles law firm of Richards, Watson and Gershon, where she advised city councils, planning commissions and other public bodies on municipal, land use and environmental matters.

 Ms. Medina also worked as an Assistant City Attorney for Pasadena where she specialized in land use and environmental law.  She was responsible for numerous complex projects, including a proposed residential development, which if approved would have been one of the two largest projects in Los Angeles County.  She was also the legal advisor to the City in its negotiations with the National Football League in an attempt to bring an NFL team to Pasadena. 

 Ms. Medina currently serves as Special Counsel to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education, the second largest school district in the Country.    Ms. Medina serves as lead legal advisor to the LAUSD Board on issues ranging from education, real estate, environmental and construction to labor and budgeting issues.  LAUSD is an educational institution employing more than 80,000, serving more than 700,000 students, and with an operating budget totaling more than $12 billion dollars.

 Ms. Medina is the immediate President of the Mexican-American Bar Association, one of the largest Latino bar associations in the country.  She is the President of the Statewide La Raza Lawyers Association, and serves as General Counsel to the Hispanic National Bar Association.  Also, Ms. Medina was appointed by the Honorable Herb Wesson Jr., Speaker of the California Assembly, along with other noteworthy people such as USC Professor Erwin Chemerinsky and State Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh, to serve on the Speaker’s Commission on Police Conduct, a statewide commission established to recommend policies and legislation that would safeguard against police abuse.   Ms. Medina was also recently selected as one of Southern California’s Super Lawyer, one of the top 20 California attorneys under the age of 40 by the California Daily Journal and was selected as the recipient of the Latina Lawyer of the Year Award by the Hispanic National Bar Association in 2004.

 What is most impressive about Ms. Medina is the unselfish manner in which she gives back to the community despite all of her professional obligations.  After negotiating the terms of multi-million dollar development deals for the City of Pasadena, after meeting with elected officials in Sacramento regarding policy issues and legislation that affect the Latino community,  Ms. Medina still makes time to reach out to young students to help motivate them to attend college.  She regularly shares her experience with students at our local colleges, high schools and continuation schools.  She believes that she has a duty to give back to the community that gave so much to her.