Even in Difficult Times

During the pandemic, a Gulf War veteran with PTSD walked into Jeanne Nishimoto’s office at the UCLA Veterans Legal Clinic needing assistance with disability benefits. While she was helping him, he also mentioned problems with his landlord.

“As I worked with him, I realized that—in part because of his disability—different things would trigger him that we would not think of as particularly triggering,” she remembers. “Unexpected text messages or notes on his door might seem benign, but for him they were very, very challenging. It was really degrading his dynamic with his landlord.”

So Nishimoto reached out to the landlord: phone conversations, a letter, a face-to-face at the apartment building. “I ended up helping him obtain a reasonable accommodation—clear guidance about how communication should happen so it’s not triggering,” she says. “Having worked a lot in evictions, you often get involved after the dynamic has completely broken down. So it was great to get in early.”

Five years later, the veteran is still in that apartment. “He’s doing really, really well,” she says.

Nishimoto’s focus at the Veterans Legal Clinic is administrative and legal work for low-income veterans—often unhoused or formerly unhoused. “Veterans have disproportionately been a larger group of the unhoused community,” she says. “Often related to their times in service and what came out of that.”

The clinic defends quality-of-life citations (e.g., open container), and works to expunge past criminal convictions so they’re not an impediment to housing. With infraction cases filed in traffic court, she says, “You don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney. But our clients can still get significant fines and fees for failure to appear, which can have a cascading effect.”

We have seen a wave of proposed legislation aimed at criminalizing unhoused people for simply existing.

Through UCLA School of Law, Nishimoto also teaches at the Veterans Justice Clinic. “That’s an experiential class with 2Ls and 3Ls,” she says. “We’re teaching them lawyering skills—how to think critically about the law, how to work with clients, all those sorts of things. They also get assigned actual cases. They’re working with individual veterans to understand, ‘How do I develop a case? How do I develop rapport with my client? How do I think critically and put together a case theory?’”

Recently, these students contributed to an amicus brief, written by faculty director Sunita Patel and co-written by Nishimoto, which was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of numerous veterans service providers. City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, et al. (2024) concerned whether laws regulating camping on public property were unconstitutional per the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” statute. Though the court ruled against the clinic’s position, 6-3, its brief was cited in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent. 

Nishimoto feels the case was a significant step backward. “Since the decision came down,” she says, “we have seen a wave of proposed legislation aimed at criminalizing unhoused people for simply existing—when research shows criminalization makes homelessness worse and the best solution to homelessness is housing.”

Born and raised in Carson, California, by two elementary school teachers, Nishimoto went east for college. Amherst in Western Massachusetts, she says “was a completely different type of place and culture. It had winter. That was a bit of its own shock. Short story: When I was accepted to college, I went out and bought what I thought was a winter coat. It lasted me through mid-October.”

A religious studies major, she eventually turned to the law. But her graduation from University of Michigan Law School in 2011 coincided with the after-effects of the global financial meltdown. “I was lucky to get a position at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles,” she says.

There, she did eviction defense and government benefits work, then moved into housing and homelessness issues. That lasted until 2018, when she worked on homelessness issues at Inner City Law for a year. She’s never been in private practice. Public interest, she says, “is what I’ve done and what I’ve enjoyed doing.”

She adds: “I think it’s a puzzle—the law. You have a set of rules, and you have a set of facts, and you need to figure out how you piece all those things together to come to the most compelling case theory, or the most compelling defense, or figure out what puzzle pieces are missing and where you need to go to find more facts. I really enjoy that challenge. I also like that, in the type of law I’m doing, it’s very individual-focused. I get to work with clients who I wouldn’t necessarily meet otherwise.”

This kind of work is also why she doesn’t let our current troubling times get her down. “We don’t really have the option to check out because it’s maybe a tough moment for the law,” she says. “My clients are going to be in court, and it’s a question of whether they have someone with them. Or they need access to their benefits and they’re going to be better off if they have an attorney. I think that helps me see the importance of continuing in this practice even in difficult times.”