Jeremy Aliason, ’01, has been named the new Executive Director of Legal
Aid Services of Oregon (LASO). He is the first Native American director of any
Oregon legal aid program.
In his new position, Aliason will oversee the work of eight field offices
that provide direct legal service to low-income people in 22 of Oregon’s 36
counties, a farmworker program, and a Native American program. He will
supervise 104 staff. He also will be working closely with LASO’s sister program,
the Oregon Law Center, on broader poverty law issues.
Aliason’s path to the law was a long one. Although his father was Filipino,
Aliason grew up in Oklahoma City with his Seminole/Muscogee mother,
surrounded by his tribal community. “I saw poverty and a justice system that
ignored Native people,” he recalls, and what he saw led him to law school.
Before he began his legal studies at Lewis & Clark, he found
opportunities in the places his wife, a medical student, did her studies, her
internship, and her residency. Among those opportunities was a stint at the
Center for Indigenous Justice, at the University of California, Berkeley. He also
did administrative work at Central California Legal Services. He arrived in
Oregon when his wife joined the faculty at Oregon Health and Sciences
University in Portland.
He remembers his first day at the law school. Was he going to fit here?
he wondered. Within minutes, he was talking with Professors Ronald Lansing
and Janet Steverson, he says, and was reassured. In his third year, he signed up
at the Northwest Legal Clinic, at that time the law school’s poverty law clinic.
This was the work Aliason wanted to do, he realized. “This program is what
made me focus on my future career path.” He also credits the late Hon. Robert
Wollheim (’83) of the Oregon Court of Appeals for guidance and support when
Aliason externed for him.
Understanding how critical guidance and support can be for marginalized
people, Aliason has made central to his career the goal of offering
opportunities to others. He has directed the National Native American Law
Student Association and the Native American Bar Association. He helped
develop the Lewis & Clark Native American Law Students Association, part of
Opportunities for Law in Oregon (OLIO), the state bar’s diversity and inclusion
effort to attract minority law students at Oregon’s three law schools.