Artwork hangs in the Center for Indigenous Law and Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Its artist, Judge Victorio L. Shaw, is the longest-tenured member on the board of trustees of California Indian Legal Services and chief judge of the Shingle Springs Tribal Court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shaw, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, joined UC Berkeley law professor Seth Davison Feb. 10 to discuss the tribal court systems and their intersections with state and federal courts. Shingle Springs Tribal Court, which is located in El Dorado County, is one of the only joint-jurisdiction courts in the nation, and the first in California.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great as someone who went through law school, but also as an artist, and I get to be creative in my role as a tribal court judge,\u201d Shaw said. \u201cIt really is about the spirit of the law. \u2018What are we all here for?\u2019 We\u2019re here to help this person, just like we would come together in a village to help a sick person or somebody who\u2019s struggling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking on a wellness approach with teams of counselors, medical professionals and law enforcement, Shaw depicts the nature of the court as a place of helping, describing himself as a \u201chealer\u201d before a lawyer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shaw highlighted the Tribal Court\u2019s work with juvenile cases, particularly with struggling students.The court works to create a positive environment for children and assist families. If a child needs to go to school, the tribe will take them, Shaw said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe haven\u2019t failed to graduate any of our tribal children who\u2019ve gone through that program,\u201d Shaw said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shaw describes the \u201cnon-native attorneys\u201d working for the Shingle Springs Tribal Court as humble and open-minded workers, not coming to the tribe as a \u201csavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his professional career, Shaw describes the offers he had received from firms and realizing many of them wanted him to be their \u201ctoken Indian.\u201dFrom there, Shaw describes how he went out on his own and began taking family law cases.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf your goal is justice, and you\u2019re a very idealistic person, you\u2019re going to have to be creative, and you\u2019re going to have to look for little pockets of justice that you can find \u2026 but you\u2019re going to have a lot of hard days,\u201d Shaw\u00a0said. \u201cBut that\u2019s okay, because we need idealistic people who are lawyers. And you just have to realize you\u2019re going to have to look outside of the box a little bit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Indeed, Shaw claims that the law primarily keeps order in society and that, when justice happens, it\u2019s more of a \u201ccoincidence\u201d than the intention of the law.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shaw said the structure of the law didn\u2019t always work for him, or for Indigenous people, who he said face constant attacks on their sovereignty.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a native person, we are spiritual people, and so when I say the spirit of the law, I really mean the Great Spirit \u2026 \u2018What are the feelings, the unseen, unspoken things that I can draw from to put into this person and this case, to really get them to make better decisions?\u2019\u201d Shaw said. \u201cWhen I have the robe on, I embody the spirit of the chief judge, and I draw upon the spirit of the Creator.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artwork hangs in the Center for Indigenous Law and Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[83503,83501,8921,83506,143,145,144,83507,83504,83502,83505],"class_list":{"0":"post-175073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-california-indian-legal-services","9":"tag-center-for-indigenous-law-and-justice","10":"tag-el-dorado-county","11":"tag-hoopa-valley-tribe","12":"tag-oakland","13":"tag-oakland-headlines","14":"tag-oakland-news","15":"tag-seth-davis","16":"tag-shingle-springs-tribal-court","17":"tag-uc-berkeley-school-of-law","18":"tag-victorio-l-shaw"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}