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Answering Kern’s law crisis by growing our own attorneys

CSUB professor wins top Bar Association award

By California State University, Bakersfield

March 28^th, 2022

It was the first day of her California State University, Bakersfield political science class — Political Inquiry — and Fatima Rodriguez was following the pattern that had gotten this immigrant daughter from Mexico through school and into college:

No chitchat, head down, eyes on the text.

And then, like a thunderclap, she heard a sound that broke through the intensity of her concentration, a sound that would challenge her, motivate her, bring her out of her shell and inspire and sustain her all the way through law school and beyond: the voice of Dr. Jeanine Kraybill.

“I just honestly had never heard a woman like that,” Rodriguez recalled of that fall morning in 2015, the day that persuaded her to take every single class that Kraybill taught — all seven — whether she needed to or not.

“I have encountered strong women in my life — I’m the daughter of farmworkers — but not like that. She’s so confident. I was just so drawn to her. It really made an impact on me.”

So much so that Rodriguez and her CSUB classmate Pedro Naveiras, both practicing attorneys in Bakersfield today, were moved to nominate Kraybill for the 2022 Ivy Person Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Kern County Bar Association on a professional who supports the legal community, though is not a lawyer.

Kraybill, associate professor of political science and director of the Pre-Law Program, is believed to be the first educator to have received the award in its history, said Alekxia Torres Stallings, the outgoing president of the Kern County Bar Association.

“It was unanimous. It was easy,” said Torres Stallings of the vote by the Bar Association members. “And you’d be surprised. It’s not always that easy.”

On April 2, Kraybill will receive the Ivy Person Award at a ceremony that also will welcome incoming Bar Association President Xochitl Garcia. The event begins with a social hour at 6 p.m. followed by the ceremony at 7 p.m., at the Gardens at Monji, 9401 Shellabarger Road. Tickets are available for purchase to the public.

“This award is for someone who goes above and beyond what they do with their work,” said Torres Stallings, a criminal defense attorney at the law office of Torres / Torres Stallings. “One of the reasons we decided to go with this nomination is that I think that Dr. Kraybill’s work transcends what she does at the university. We can see her work product, aka her students, being used in the system. It is so hard to get lawyers to come back to rural counties and practice. It’s insane. And she’s doing that.”

For Kraybill, the award is an opportunity to take a moment to reflect on what she has built since she arrived in Bakersfield in 2015 and started the Pre-Law Society in 2016. Today, 87 students are in the pre-law track at CSUB, and 20 graduates have gone on to law school, all part of Kraybill’s plan to grow our own lawyers so that they come back and serve Kern County, a “legal desert” for its residents’ poor access to representation in the courtroom.

“I never would have expected in a million years to be honored in this way,” Kraybill said. “When Alekxia called and told me Pedro and Fatima nominated me, I got tears in my eyes. They both represent what we’re trying to do at CSUB, with help from this amazing legal community of mentors and the Bar Association: help the people of Kern County, who need legal representation so desperately.”

‘She’s always been very concerned with the underdog’

The adjectives former students Rodriguez and Naveiras assign to Dr. Kraybill — loyal, energetic, brilliant and fiercely protective — sound familiar to the professor’s mother, Lisa DiCesaris.

“She loves people, loves education,” she said. “She loves being part of the community, and she likes to see everybody get a fair chance. She’s always been very concerned about the underdog. That’s just Jeanine. And she would do anything for them.”

Mike and Lisa DiCesaris raised a son and three daughters in a Roman Catholic household in Chino, a farming community in the Inland Empire that reminds 42-year-old Dr. Kraybill of Bakersfield.

“I come from a small-business, blue-color background,” she said. “I went to a mix of private and public schools for elementary, and for high school went to Pomona Catholic High School in downtown Pomona. It was all girls, and the nuns had a profound impact on me. I come from a good-size Italian Catholic family and it’s not just the religious beliefs, morals and values, but the culture.”

As a child, one of Dr. Kraybill's favorite weekly rituals was waking up on Sunday mornings and watching “Meet the Press” with her dad, as legendary moderator Tim Russert talked politics and grilled Washington’s political leaders of the day.

“My father has always been an opinionated guy. He always had opinions on public policy when it came to economics, foreign policy, a host of issues. My love for political science came from my dad,” she said.

All four of the DiCesaris children attended a California State University campus at the insistence of their parents, who married young and didn’t have the opportunity to go to college themselves.

“My mom and dad wanted to keep us in the state if they could," Dr. Kraybill said. "I think they really saw the value of a CSU education. They felt it was a good system, a system they could afford to pay for. I think they felt they could trust the CSU.”

Dr. Kraybill decided on Cal Poly Pomona the minute she set foot on the campus and saw the beautiful, natural surroundings, plus the “gardens, goats, pigs, sheep and just the peaceful vibe.”

Her time at Pomona, which emphasizes hands-on, experiential learning, informed her approach to teaching.

“Education is a dynamic process, and something you do together with your students,” she said.

Yet teaching wasn’t her first choice. Dr. Kraybill intended to become a lawyer and took the LSAT while serving as an intern on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., through the institute begun by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, an “over-the-moon” experience for the college student and political junkie.

But then tragedy struck. Her lifelong best friend died in a car accident, and she knew that she didn’t have the strength to begin law school. She accepted a job teaching at the Catholic high school she attended as a teen, and even considered becoming a nun.

Enter Jesse Kraybill.

Though she had known her future husband since they dated as teenagers, it was a chance encounter at a bar — and the persistence of her former boyfriend — that persuaded the young teacher that a religious vocation was not to be.

“Jeanine was just feisty, man,” Jesse Kraybill said. “She kept me on my toes, kept me honest. We always got along and challenged each other, but in a good way. I can’t imagine life without her. We’ve been together a long time; we’re almost at the point we’ve known each other longer than we haven’t known each other.”

The two were married in 2005 when both were 25.

“I’m fortunate to have a friend in Jesse because he just never says no,” Dr. Kraybill said. “I want to get a masters. ‘OK.’ I want to get a second masters. ‘OK.’ I want to get my Ph.D. ‘OK.’ I want to go to law school. ‘OK.’”

With her Ph.D. in hand, Dr. Kraybill applied to 102 schools across the country and has the color-coded spreadsheets to prove it.

“I just basically told her, I want to go north,” her husband said. “We went a little north.”

Even during the interview process, Dr. Kraybill said she felt right at home in Bakersfield because the demographics and feel of the community are so similar to Chino.

“I come from a blue-collar background and my parents had a lot of pride in that. I could sense that same pride in Kern County. I felt I could contribute something to the students and related to the students in that capacity.”

Mark Martinez, chair of the political science department at CSUB, said that it was clear in the interview that Dr. Kraybill had the passion and energy to achieve the goals she set for herself.

“And she’s exceeded every expectation we had for her,” he said. “What’s incredible is how her academic and professional accomplishments match what she does with our students and in our community. Our students and region are better off because of her decision to come to CSUB.”

With their new life in Bakersfield beckoning, the Kraybills found a “fixer-upper” on three acres near the Kern River, which they share with three dogs, two goats, two pigs, a mule and a bunny.

“We get to try to eat dinner together every single night,” said Jesse Kraybill, a landscape and pipeline contractor, who owns his own business. “She’s willing to work in the middle of the night to not give up seeing each other every single day.”

‘I realized this was a community gig’

When Pedro Naveiras began his studies at CSUB in 2011, there were just seven students in the Pre-Law Program, he said. During his final year, 2015, a new faculty member arrived, and everything changed. Today, there are 87 pre-law students.

“Under Dr. Kraybill, there’s a Pre-Law Society and the sheer amount of growth in the program is amazing,” said Naveiras, who works as a Kern County deputy district attorney. “It was a no b.s. department. There was a very high expectation, and I appreciated that kind of teaching. Dr. Kraybill had high expectations for all her students and expected her students to meet that.”

When she arrived on campus in the fall of 2015, Dr. Kraybill relied on the mentorship of her predecessor, Dr. Stanley Clark, a CSUB Faculty Hall of Fame member, who died in 2018.

“I’ll never forget when he picked me up at the hotel,” she said. “He was early by a half hour. I got ready as fast as I could. We got in the car and he was blasting ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ soundtrack and wearing a beanie. He said we’d be spending a lot of time together over the next two days. I ran errands with him, went to eat with him. It made me realize the gravity of the position I would accept. He could walk into the Blue Elephant, Little Italy, the corner drugstore, and someone would stop him and say hi and let him know what an impression he’d made on their lives. And I thought, holy moly, this man was in the community. I realized this was a community gig.”

And so Dr. Kraybill began building bridges without delay, expanding the network already built by Clark in the legal community and persuading judges and attorneys to share their knowledge with CSUB’s students like Fatima Rodriguez, who runs her own law firm and serves on the Indigent Defense Panel. Rodriguez had never seen the inside of a courtroom before Dr. Kraybill sent her to Kern County Superior Court in Delano to watch Judge Robert Tafoya in action.

“And I’m grateful that was my first experience because it was a Latino on the bench,” Rodriguez said.

Later, the judge took time to have lunch with the college student, and they talked about working in the fields with their parents. She confided that she wasn’t sure she was up for the grueling odyssey of law school.

‘I’ll never forget what he told me. ‘You’ll be studying in a room with AC. Working in the fields is hard. Studying in a room with AC is not hard.”

It is those encouragements, large and small, that set the local legal community apart, Dr. Kraybill said. In 2016, she helped to establish the Pre-Law Advisory Committee, a dedicated group of retired judicial officers, practicing attorneys and others, who help design some of CSUB’s Pre-Law programming.

The local legal community also mentors pre-law students through the CSUB Legal Information & Support Clinic, launched this year, no small undertaking during the unprecedented challenges posed during the pandemic. Legal clinic students work alongside supervising attorneys in the field in the areas of family law, immigration, criminal law, housing and at the Superior Court to help provide people with no-cost legal services and assistance with navigating the system.

Partnering firms and organizations are the Law Firm of H.A. Sala, the Law Office of Torres|Torres-Stallings, the Law Firm of Xochitl Garcia, the Law Firm of Vanessa Sanchez, the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, the Kern County Public Defender’s Office, the Kern County Superior Court, and the Greater Bakersfield Legal Assistance.

“We also have our Court Observer Program that we have been doing for over four years with the Kern County Superior Court,” Dr. Kraybill said. “This all speaks to the hands-on experience our pre-law program provides.”

Next up for CSUB students is the California LAW Pathways Program, an initiative to diversify the legal profession by building a clear pathway from high school, community college, CSUB and, ultimately, law school. Dr. James Rodriguez, dean of the School of Social Sciences and Education, oversees the CSUB team. The team, which includes Dr. Kraybill, are currently at work implementing the pipeline program.

Even with her packed schedule, Dr. Kraybill occasionally finds time to serve as a guest expert on many local, national, and international media outlets, discussing the law and politics. Among her first regular guest spots was on “The Richard Beene Show,” which aired from 2017 to 2021 on KERN Radio in Bakersfield.

“I was lucky enough to be one of the early ones to discover the genius of Professor Kraybill,” Beene recalled. “Here was a relative newcomer to our community who was wicked smart, funny, extremely passionate and a person who was blessed with the gift of taking a very complex subject and boiling it down so the average person could understand it. I thought: ‘My God, this woman is perfect for radio! They will love her!'"

Among Dr. Kraybill’s dedicated listeners — no surprise — is her mom.

“She’s like a walking encyclopedia, just always remembers things," she said. "I’ll say 'no, no, no,' and she’ll say, ‘This is what it is and where it comes from,’ and then she explains, and I never get offended. I always learn from her.”

And now it is Dr. Kraybill who is doing the learning in her role as a student at Monterey College of Law’s Hybrid Program, accredited through the State Bar of California and the parent campus of Kern County College of Law. She started the online program in February 2021 and anticipates finishing in the fall of 2024 and taking the bar exam in 2025.

Why take on the rigors of law school? As her former student Naveiras put it: “Law school is not a fun experience, I promise you! It’s not one of those things you do for fun.”

But Dr. Kraybill is not your average student.

“It’s helping me more and more with my own students and the pre-law courses I teach,” she said. “And I like the process. It’s like that movie ‘A league of Their Own.’ Tom Hanks’ character tells one of the ballplayers who is thinking about quitting, ‘It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.’ That’s when I feel like I’m living life.”

Even when she earns her law degree and passes the bar, nothing will take Dr. Kraybill out of the classroom, she said. She wants to encourage the next generation of students to come home to practice law, just like Rodriguez and Naveiras have done.

“I remember never wanting to disturb professors at their office hours and would keep to myself,” Rodriguez said. “I was at work one day, and Dr. Kraybill texted me and asked if I was interested in attending a women’s law event. I was surprised because I felt like I didn’t have a lot of communication with her.

“I went to that event and when people ask me what made me want to practice law, I honestly think Dr. Kraybill reaching out to me and going to that event. She bought my ticket – I don’t know if she was allowed to, but she did, so that I could go. She introduced me to people in the legal field, and my life changed in that one night, because she saw something in me that made me believe in myself as well.”