A law student’s poetry collection makes the case for immigrant children’s rights

Barbara Chung J.D. ’26 has spent her life in pursuit of the right words.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she studied Renaissance-era English poetry, wrote her thesis on John Donne, and fell in love with language as a way of understanding the human condition. Then, after a 15-year career in strategy and finance, two published poetry collections, and a certified wildlife habitat crammed into 140 square feet of her Santa Monica patio—she arrived at Santa Clara University School of Law as a Flex J.D. student carrying a conviction she’d spent a lifetime building: “In the law, as in poetry, every word matters.”

That belief is at the center of Merit and Grace, a poetry chapbook Chung wrote for Dean Michael Kaufman’s Law and Education seminar. She originally planned to write a legal analysis of Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 Supreme Court ruling that guarantees all children, regardless of immigration status, the constitutional right to access free public education. Chung read more than 900 pages of research. And then she set the law reviews aside.

“I reached a point where I just thought, one more article isn’t going to make a difference,” she says. “None of this makes a difference unless people’s hearts change. What changes hearts? Poetry.”

Dean Kaufman agreed. Four hours after she turned in the manuscript, he called her with his verdict: “This needs to be published.”

The chapbook is rigorous in every sense. Legally, it is grounded in legislative history, constitutional analysis, and the original district court opinion. Emotionally, it is deeply personal: Chung’s parents are immigrants, and in the stories of the Doe families, she recognized something universal. One father worked a weekend job at a Catholic school so his children could attend while they were barred from public ones.

“He loved his children so much and wanted that better life for them,” Chung reflects. “I see my father’s story. I think of all these immigrant dads I know.”

But the book doesn’t just humanize the law. Since its publication last August, all of Chung’s proceeds from Merit and Grace have gone to MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund—the civil rights organization that represented the families in Plyler v. Doe and continues that work today.

“I have no right to say something about how the law affects people unless I have the integrity to make sure I am living up to whatever standard I’m calling others to,” she explains.

Kaufman’s response to the manuscript was no surprise to those who have followed his tenure of leadership at the School of Law. For example, his Democracy Series, launched in 2023, is dedicated to helping students become not only skilled lawyers but civic leaders committed to democratic accountability. In Merit and Grace, he found that mission embodied in verse that could not be more timely or timeless.

“Lodged in the context of serious contemporary challenges to birthright citizenship,” Kaufman writes, “Chung miraculously intertwines expert legal analysis with a beautiful poetic vision of what makes us human. If hope is ‘the thing with feathers,’ then this book is a nest for all of humanity.”

Read on for an excerpt from Chung’s book.

How to Be Good at English

“Hey, here’s a bunch of kids, they don’t even speak English.” ⁴¹ 

I am the girl who read the dictionary 
every day on the school bus for fun. 
I should have known I’d become a poet 
and a lawyer. Yet my first memories 
of school resound with classmates’ singsong 
taunts of “you don’t even speak English.” 

When I tell people this, I always add, 
“I was born here, so I’m a citizen, 
but Korean was my first language.” 
Why do I say this? Isn’t it enough 
for me, that I am a person? 

“No State shall . . . deprive any person 
of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; 
nor deny to any person 
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”⁴² 

The congressmen who wrote these words lived 
in an era of dictionaries that defined 
“person” as “an individual human 
being, consisting of body and soul.”⁴³ 
They meant what they said. 

I lose patience all the time with people 
and politicians (who are people too) 
who see other persons as food to fill 
the maws of their own ambitions, 
not as “an individual human 
being, consisting of body and soul,” 
and I wonder if they remember that 
they themselves are also body and soul. 

But then I find myself on an ordinary 
Saturday afternoon shopping at Costco, 
searching for a parking spot, pushing 
a cart larger than me, shivering 
in the refrigerated room with the eggs, 

and I consider what it would mean 
to see every person in the parking lot, 
in the aisles, in the refrigerated room 

reaching for the eggs, and to recognize 
the presence of a soul. And I realize two things— 

First, perhaps the holy men and women 
are holy because they think, “There goes a soul,” 
every time they see a person. 

And second, I am not a holy woman. 
I would like to be a holy woman, 
but how can any person bear to see 
every person as a soul? 
The cost of holiness—dear God. 
Lord, grant me abundance enough to pay it.

–

⁴¹ Stern, supra note 13. 

⁴² U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1. 

⁴³ Webster defines the word ‘person’ in the following manner: ‘1. An individual human being, consisting of body and soul. . . .’ Aliens resident in the United States are not citizens, but they are without question persons under Webster’s definition of the word person . . . Since aliens, legal or illegal, qualify as people under Webster's 1848 definition [as well as the 1828 and 1867 definitions], the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly apply to aliens and applied to them in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Steven G. Calabresi & Lena M. Barsky, An Originalist Defense of Plyler v. Doe, 2017 B.Y.U. L. REV. 225, 234, 239–40 (2017).