Nicholas Goldberg: Karen Bass says she’ll protect Angelenos’ abortion rights. But can the mayor of L.A. really do that?
On this episode of Town Hall, we talk to Karen Bass, the city attorney in Los Angeles and possible mayoral candidate in next year’s election. Bass also heads up the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, of which she’s the president.
Bass, who is also the mother of two children, was a candidate for city attorney in 2016. She defeated another opponent, Steve Zipperman. She is currently serving her two-year term as city attorney. In July, she helped put together a legal brief urging California’s voters to pass Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage, and to support Prop 8 in the courts. Bass is a member of the Los Angeles City Council, where she serves as vice chair of the Committee on Public Safety, the Committee on Governmental Operations, the Committee on Transportation, and the Committee on Community Development and Housing. Bass runs a law firm with her husband, the L.A. Times journalist Jeff Zelikow. She is a member of the ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Group and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project.
Her background is in academia, where she’s worked as a visiting professor at UCLA, as a lecturer at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and as an adjunct professor at UC Hastings. Her research interests focus on legal issues, including discrimination law and public policy. She’s also an author, with a chapter on “The Criminalization of Gay Sex” in the current edition of the Los Angeles Times’s Best Lawyers series.
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