Civil rights lawyer and former MALDEF president Joaquin Avila dies at 69
Joaquin Avila is seen in this 2009 photo./Courtesy Seattle University School of Law
Civil rights lawyer Joaquin Avila, known for his voting rights litigation, died on March 9 at the age of 69.
The cause of death was colon and liver cancer, the New York Times reports. The Associated Press and the Washington Post also have stories. Obituaries have also been posted by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Seattle University School of Law.
A Harvard law graduate, Avila joined MALDEF in 1975 as a staff attorney. He went on to direct the organization’s voting rights program, and was president and general counsel of the group from 1982 to 1985.
According to AP, during his time at MALDEF, “Avila was involved in multiple groundbreaking court victories that led to more Latinos working as electricians, firefighters and border guards, and allowed parents in the country illegally to enroll their children in public schools without paying tuition.”
He was also one of the driving forces behind the California Voting Rights Act, which allows voters to challenge at-large election systems that dilute the voting strength of minorities.
Avila was involved in more than 70 voting rights cases during his career, while at MALDEF and after he left the organization. He litigated two voting rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Avila was instrumental in the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe, which struck down a Texas law in 1982 that had allowed public school districts to ban or charge tuition to children who are in the country illegally.
Avila won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1996. He told the ABA Journal at that time that the $295,000 award would allow him to continue his voting rights work at least through the year 2000. Before the call came, he was operating courtroom graphics business on the side, limiting his practice to a single case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court—Lopez v. Monterey County.
The court’s 1996 decision in Lopez blocked a federal court plan for judicial elections in a consolidated district in the central California county that had not received federal preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The case returned to the Supreme Court in 1999, when it upheld the constitutionality of Section 5.
Avila joined the Seattle University School of Law as an assistant professor in 2005 and founded the school’s National Voting Rights Advocacy Initiative in 2009. He was unable to teach full-time after suffering a stroke in 2011.
Avila is survived by his wife, Sally, and three children.
