Editor’s note: The subject of this article, author Collette Hillier, is Glen Starkey’s wife’s brother’s wife’s mother.
Can you name the three branches of government? If you can, you’re one of the two out of every three American adults who can. American adolescents perform even worse. In The Civic Outlook of Young Adults in America survey, only 4 percent of respondents were able to correctly answer four standard civics questions, and on average, respondents only answered 1.6 of the 4 questions correctly: an F-worthy 40 percent average score.
San Luis Obispo author and retired attorney Collette Hillier hopes her new book, Cultivating Justice: Empowering Youth, will inform young adults—or anyone in need of a refresher course—of their rights and the case law that explains the limitations of those rights.
The book was a long time coming, and Hillier took a rather circuitous route to becoming an attorney, proving it’s never too late.
“In my 20s, a girlfriend got me a job at a law firm down in LA. At the time, LA Law [1986-1994] was a big TV show, and I was so excited, but I don’t know why they hired me. I didn’t even know how to type,” Hillier said with a laugh over iced coffee on the back patio of Linnaea’s Café in SLO.
Even so, she dug into the work and quickly developed an interest in the law.
“I remember the first case I ever read. I hadn’t gone to college yet, and I thought laws were just like a rule book, and you either followed it or you didn’t. I didn’t realize that there were stories. So, I read that first case and I thought, ‘This is so cool. These are actual stories of real live people,'” she said.
She’d already had kids when she got around to college, and by the time she started law school, her kids were in high school, but during that entire period, she continued to work at law firms, eventually moving her family to San Luis Obispo. When she graduated from law school and was admitted to the Bar, the law firm she was working for immediately hired her as an associate. After practicing law for years, she decided to pass her knowledge along.
“I got really tired of litigation. It’s hard work and long hours, and I’m not great at the confrontation part of it, so I backed out of that and started teaching at the local law school [Monterey College of Law],” she explained. “There, I realized there were so many adults who didn’t understand constitutional law, our constitutional principles, and what our freedoms are, or even how our government works.”
The book, written after her retirement, became a natural extension of her drive to educate. She spent several days a week watching over one of her young grandchildren who has special needs, and during the child’s naps, she turned her attention to research. Within a year, she’d written her book.
“I already had an outline. I decided I was going to go through the amendments, even the one that’s not there,” she explained, nodding to the unratified Equal Rights Amendment, that was first introduced to Congress in 1923 and still isn’t law.
Many of the cases Hillier outlines are ones involving young adults, for instance Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), a case in which school kids planned to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to school and were suspended for it. The kids sued the state, arguing their freedom of speech had been unfairly restricted, and they won. Though there are limits to free speech in public schools, that case helped define those limits.
There’s currently a gap in civics education in public schools, Hillier argues, and kids are flooded with misinformation thanks to social media, so now, learning about our rights and understanding the cases that shape those rights are more important than ever before.
Her book could certainly work as a textbook. There are discussion questions and lists of additional resources at the end of each chapter, but it’s also just a good read, with clearly explained case law free of the kind of impenetrable legalese non-attorneys despise.
The first eight of 18 chapters are all devoted to the First Amendment.
“There are five different clauses, and it covers so much of our freedom, especially for youth in public school,” Hillier explained. “There’s really a lot in the First Amendment.”
You’ll read her take on the Second Amendment, and right on through to what she calls the “vague liberty amendments,” the Ninth and 10th, as well as the unratified Equal Rights Amendment. It’s fascinating reading and surprisingly accessible.
She also worries about the current political climate and its condemnation of public education.
“There’s a lot of talk about privatizing public education, which I think does a disservice to a lot of minorities and disabled kids because private schools can discriminate against those groups,” Hillier noted. “That’s a huge concern. And now we’re finding out that the right to assemble is being threatened.
“As I was writing [the book], some of these [rights] were being threatened, and I wanted to make sure that people knew, ‘Wait. These are our rights. We need to protect them because the people that came before us did such a good job fighting for them.'” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 17-27, 2025.