About the Author

Author Discusses Legal Rights with Farm Worker Audience

Author Discusses Legal Rights with Farm Worker Audience

Barbara Rhine is a lawyer, activist and writer. She blogs on books and politics and is the author of the novella, The Lowest Form of Animal Life. Her articles have appeared in The SF Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, The Recorder (Bay Area legal newspaper), and online in Counterpunch. She is a contributor to From The Well of Living Waters poetry anthology, edited by Lenore Weiss (2011).

She graduated from the University of Chicago, Phi Beta Kappa. During her college years she tutored in Woodlawn, got arrested with Marlon Brando in a CORE demonstration against segregated housing in Los Angeles, participated in Martin Luther King’s demonstrations in Skokie, and led a hunger strike to protest the War in Vietnam.

She attended UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. First in her entering class, she published “The Use of Deadly Force in the Riot Situation,” California Law Review. Her other legal writings include “Coming to Terms with the Nuclear Age,” The Reporter—an Antidote to Law Reviews; “Business Closings and their Effects on Employees—Adaptation of the Tort of Wrongful Discharge”, Industrial Relations Law Journal; and “Workers’ Compensation and the Meretricious Spouse: 62 Years of Irreconciliable Differences,” California Western Law Review. She also participated in the Third World Liberation Front Strike, Stop the Draft week, and the People’s Park movement. An activist in the National Lawyers Guild, she was a member of a Guild delegation that attempted to travel to Cuba, but got imprisoned and deported from Mexico, along with Black Panther Party activists David Hilliard and Masai Hewitt.

She served as staff attorney with the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) from 1973-75 and set up law offices in Stockton, Merced, Fresno and Delano during and after the largest agricultural strike in California history.

After a stint at Big Wheels Ranch, a rural commune in Northern California, she was a professor at Golden Gate School of Law in San Francisco, where for ten years she taught labor law and torts. Since 1998 she has had her own law practice in Oakland California, which focuses on legal issues affecting children. She has served on the Boards of the Vanguard Public Foundation, the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and Kehilla Community Synagogue.

Barbara is married to Oakland attorney and activist Walter Riley. She is an avid hiker, tennis player, swimmer, and amateur pianist. She currently divides her time between her husband, her daughters and her grandchildren in Oakland, California.

Email Barbara @ barbrhine@pacbell.net

 

RADIO INTERVIEWS WITH BARBARA RHINE:

Radio interview with Kate Raphael, which was aired on November 24th, 2014 at 1 PM: