Harvard Native American Program: News and Events

Lawrence Baca is a Pawnee Indian and a Deputy Director of the Office of Tribal Justice, United States Department of Justice. He was formerly a Senior Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division where he was previously assigned to the Educational Opportunities Litigation Section for twelve years, the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section for eight years, the General Litigation Section for two years and the Office of Indian Rights for four years.

A 1976 graduate of Harvard Law School, he was the first American Indian ever hired through the Department of Justice's Honor Law Program and also the first Indian ever promoted up through the ranks to Senior Trial Attorney status at the Department. He is today the senior American Indian attorney in the Department of Justice.

In 1973, Baca received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in "American Indian History and Culture" from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also taught two courses on Indian issues during his senior year. In 1974, while attending law school, he was a Harvard Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and, in 1976, he taught a course entitled "Perspectives On The Historical Development of American Indian Policy and Law" at the Harvard University Extension School. In 1988, Mr. Baca was presented with a Distinguished Alumni Award by the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A member of the American Bar Association Mr. Baca is Chairman of the ABA Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession. Previously he has worked with the Younger Lawyers Division, the Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, the Committee on Minorities in the Profession and the Council on Racial and Ethnic Justice. Baca has been a Program Coordinator of the Committee on Problems of American Indians and has given numerous lectures on the role of American Indian Lawyers as minority members of the majority bar. He also lectures frequently on the role of race in society, civil rights law and federal Indian law.

Mr. Baca is also a member of the Federal Bar Association (FBA) where he is the Chairman of the Indian Law Section. After serving for four years as Chairman of an Indian Law Committee within a Section of the FBA, Baca was asked to create and chair the new Indian Law Section. He has served in that capacity for fifteen consecutive years. The Indian Law Section sponsors the largest annual federal Indian law conference in America. Under Mr. Baca’s leadership the program has tripled in attendance since he assumed the chairmanship of the Indian Law Section. In 1999, in conjunction with the National Native American Bar Association he organized the Inaugural Washington D.C. Conference on Indian Law. The program is now in its sixth year.

Baca is a past President of the National Native American Bar Association (NNABA) and has served on its board of directors, in various capacities, for eleven of the last twenty years. He is the only person to serve as President of NNABA three times.

Mr. Baca is a nationally recognized authority on federal Indian law and race and is a frequent lecturer at colleges and law schools. In 1988, he was invited to write the chapter, titled “The Legal Status of American Indians,” for Volume 4 of the Smithsonian Institution’s 20 Volume Handbook of North American Indians. He was the Consulting Editor for the November 1989, federal Indian law issue of the Federal Bar News & Journal and his introductory essay "The Pinta, The Nina, The Santa Maria...And Now Voyager II: An Introduction To Federal Indian Law", also appears in that issue. Since that date he has been Consulting Editor on four Indian law issues of the News & Journal.

A noted amateur photographer his work has appeared on the cover of the Federal Bar Association magazine seventeen times.

Baca’s legal work has been profiled in the American Bar Association Journal as one of “Twelve Who Made It” and in Indian Country Today, the leading American Indian newspaper in the country, in an article calling Baca “the grandfather of Indian country credit.” In 1999, Minority Lawyer Magazine selected him as the first American Indian attorney ever profiled in that magazine. He has also written articles on the necessity for diversity in the legal community including “Reflections On Diversity In The Public Law Office By The DOJ Civil Rights Division’s First Indian Lawyer” in the Public Lawyer, Winter 2003 and “Diversity and the Federal Bar Association” in The Federal Lawyer, February, 2003.