Playing with Fire: California Homeowners Risk High Insurance Costs or Losing Homes to Climate Change Disasters

California should continue to further the policy of protecting generational homeowners’ right to their property. To do this, insurance rates should be set in a way that avoids unfair premium increases that violate Proposition 103 and unfairly burden consumers. Utilizing CAT models will increase the cost of home insurance premiums due to overestimations of risk, enable bias on the part of insurance companies, and promote a lack of public scrutiny for insurance rates. This creates a confiscatory rate, which violates Proposition 103 and the California Constitution. Generational homeowners should not be forced to adopt the FAIR plan just to maintain ownership of their homes. California should create a state-funded fire insurance plan, or the FAIR plan should receive funding from state emergency funding instead of private insurers. California should uphold its commitment to promoting homeownership in the state and supporting generational homeowners by maintaining regulations that ensure the accessibility and attainability of homeownership

Legal Services to Stop Injustice

This summer I worked at the Law Offices of Cliff Gardner, a private law firm assisting mostly death penalty inmates with direct appeals and habeas corpus petitions. As part of my internship, I was able to assist attorneys with legal research, record review, and sit in on meetings to discuss issues with case records and strategies for upcoming cases. I was also able to visit San Francisco’s San Quentin Penitentiary and go to death row to visit with a client. Through this internship I was able to network with interns and attorneys at events with several other organizations such as the California Appellate Project, the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, and the Office of the State Public Defender. The law office I worked in, as well as these other organizations, are dedicated to helping people in prison and on death row to make sure they were tried fairly in California. Many of these people were tried unfairly the first time and have been marginalized and ignored by the state of California. In addition, many of the clients these organizations help have little to no funds to pay their legal fees which means some cases are taken pro bono or are not taken and these clients are left on death row until these organizations have the funds to take their case. While working at this law firm, I had the incredible opportunity of meeting many of the people fighting injustice in the criminal justice system in California and was able to really understand the importance of what it means to have a fair trial in this country. I have always known that I want to go into law in the future but this internship helped me to form a goal of going into criminal justice reform.The law is a vast, complex entity; it is difficult to navigate, and—unfortunately—often easy to abuse. This summer, each panelist worked with an organization that provides access to justice to marginalized groups. These internships allowed us to learn about and fight injustice within the legal system, and provided us with opportunities to work with the law in this capacity first-hand. We gained valuable experience supporting those denied access to the justice system in their fight to safeguard their legal rights, and observed how our colleagues and organizations fought back against legal abuses, navigated challenging legal and office dynamics, and continued tirelessly to work towards improving access to the law for everyone