…Siegel and his family were deeply involved in other movements, including the movement that emerged after a young man named Oscar Grant was fatally shot by a transit cop in the Fruitvale BART station 2009, and Occupy Oakland. The Siegel & Yee law offices, then located just across 14th Street from City Hall and the Occupy Oakland camp, became the base of operations for the National Lawyers Guild’s legal defense hotline at a time when OPD was making mass arrests.
–JP Massar
The police crackdown on Occupy convinced Siegel to split with the Quan administration. Michael said his father remained a pragmatist, believing in an “inside-outside” strategy of making social change…
Rocketed to fame for leading Berkeley’s People’s Park demonstrations, Siegel’s 52-year legal career was dedicated to fighting for workers, protesters, inmates, and the underdogs.
by Darwin BondGraham July 9, 2025 (Oaklandside.com)
Dan Siegel addressed protesters at Oakland’s “No Kings” rally on June 14, 2025. Credit: Jerome Parmer for The Oaklandside
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For those who knew Dan Siegel well, his dedication to the profession of law was no surprise.
With his meticulous attention to detail, natural gift for argumentation, and steel-trap mind for facts, Siegel seemed born to become not just a lawyer, but a litigator — someone eager to do battle in court for his clients.
Over half a century, Siegel took on hundreds of cases, defending his clients against employers, police departments, universities, and government agencies, carving out a successful practice in employment, discrimination, and civil rights law. His family and friends described him as the ultimate advocate. He did much of this work pro bono, taking on cases simply because he felt in his bones the righteousness of a cause and he couldn’t stand to see a person go up against the system on their own.
He died on July 2 in Oakland at age 79.
Hundreds of people responded to the news of Siegel’s death on social media. “Oakland has lost a true champion,” Mayor Barbara Lee wrote in a post. “As an Oakland School Board member and president, Housing Authority chair, and co-author of our community policing law, Dan helped shape the Oakland we know today.” Former Mayor Jean Quan, who Siegel served as a legal advisor, wrote in a post that Siegel, his family, and law firm “won ground breaking fights here in Oakland and beyond.”
Michael Siegel, Siegel’s son, said he was working up until the very end, preparing briefs and thinking about trial strategy. “He was inextricable from his life as a lawyer,” Michael said. “It’s the most foundational thing about him.”
The other central thing about Siegel was his political activism. Despite the cancer that had weakened his body, Siegel showed up to Oakland’s “No Kings” protest on June 14 and addressed the thousands gathered outside City Hall.
“We represented tons of protesters over the years,” said Anne Weills, Siegel’s wife and longtime law partner. “He’s a defender and a protector, and it made him a better lawyer because he was there with the activists in the streets.”
A lawyer who emerged from social movements
Daniel Mark Siegel was born in the Bronx. His family, including three brothers, moved to Long Island in the 1950s. The Siegel brothers experienced antisemitism and had to fight to protect each other in the predominantly Italian suburbs, Weills said. This experience may have instilled in Siegel an understanding of what it meant to be on the outside, part of an excluded or oppressed group, according to members of his family.
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When he went off to Hamilton College in upstate New York, Siegel excelled in his studies. He double majored in philosophy and religion, played on the football team, and graduated in 1967. But one summer away from campus had a profound impact on his life. Siegel joined a student chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE, in its fight against segregation, and he leapt at the opportunity in 1965 to join other activists on a mission to register Black voters in Mississippi and North Carolina. He was arrested on that trip and also experienced firsthand the racist terror that segregationists used to menace Black people as well as outsider allies.
It was attorneys with the National Lawyers Guild who bailed Siegel and others out of jail and then helped defend them.
“The experiences in the South were formative,” said Christopher Scheer, Siegel’s stepson. “Seeing that there were already models of what were called ‘movement lawyers,’ that was very inspiring to him.”
“The movements themselves produced the lawyers,” his son Michael said. “He went down to integrate lunch counters, got beat up and jailed, and saw how a lawyer could protect the right to protest.”
In 1967 Siegel enrolled at UC Berkeley School of Law and dove straight into the ferment of Berkeley’s radical politics. He met Weills there, amid the waves of protest and repression. It was a relationship founded in a common understanding of the world, and the need for change.
“It was the Civil Rights Movement that triggered the Free Speech Movement,” Weills said. “We were intricately involved in that and against the war in Vietnam. This was our religion almost, to stop that war, and that was interconnected to Black liberation and the women’s movement,” and more.
Siegel immediately sought to connect his legal studies to the streetfights he and other students were caught up in. During his first week of classes, he found himself marching with thousands of other students to try to shut down the Army Induction Center in Oakland, where young men were being processed by the military and shipped off to fight in Vietnam.
“I went out there during the first day of demonstrations, with my Brooks Brothers jacket that my mother had bought me when I was in college, and a tie, and a clipboard, and an armband, and promptly I got beaten on the head by an Oakland cop,” Siegel recounted in a 2022 history of radical legal action, Up Against the Law. “Bleeding all over the place, I went back to law school, did not wash the blood off my head, went back to my criminal law class, and demanded that the class be refocused on what the cops were doing in downtown Oakland.”
For Siegel, the tumult of Berkeley culminated at People’s Park. On May 15, 1969, Siegel gave a fiery speech about the conflict between the university and those who wanted to preserve a city block south of the campus as an open community space. The crowd marched to the fenced-off plot of land, where they confronted squadrons of police who used tear gas and batons to beat them back. As protesters fled up Telegraph Avenue, sheriff’s deputies unleashed shotgun blasts, killing a young man named James Rector and blinding another bystander.
After graduating the next year, Siegel passed the bar. However, the state’s committee of bar examiners was determined to stop him from practicing law. Siegel believed it was an extension of then-Governor Ronald Reagan’s hostile fixation on Berkeley’s student protesters. Reagan ran in 1966 on the promise that he would “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” and then personally approved sending the National Guard to dump tear gas on the campus. The bar committee argued Siegel was not “of good moral character” and “not prepared to support the laws of the United States or the State of California” because of his role leading the People’s Park protests.
While fighting these claims, Siegel sought to make himself useful to the movement that had drawn him to Berkeley in the first place. In 1971, he traveled to the Philippines where he worked in one of the National Lawyers Guild’s military law offices, helping sailors and GIs at U.S. military bases there defend themselves against courts martial and file for conscientious objector status as America’s military aggression against Vietnam intensified.
Building a law practice and a life in Oakland
By 1973, Siegel had returned to the Bay Area, where he took a job as the first administrator of Berkeley’s new rent control program. Determined to use his legal training, and having already beaten two cases in which he had been charged with inciting a riot, Siegel insisted that he be granted a license to practice law, ultimately arguing his way up to the California Supreme Court.
The case, Siegel v. Committee of Bar Examiners, would reveal the complicated duality of Dan Siegel: yes, he was a firebrand activist who constantly challenged authority, but he was also an Eagle Scout, a member of the National Honor Society, the recipient of several academic scholarships, and his high school’s class vice president. He graduated magna cum laude from Hamilton College and, during the park protests, was president-elect of student government at UC Berkeley. The record recast Siegel’s activism not as deviant behavior but as part and parcel of a young man’s dedication to making a better world.
His son Michael said this was a moment that forged his identity as a radical attorney.
“His whole strategy to earn a living was put in jeopardy because Reagan didn’t like him,” said Michael. “He had to win a case to become a lawyer and he set precedent — your political beliefs can’t be used against you to prevent you from practicing law.”
From then on, Michael said of his father, “He left it all on the field.”
The family moved to East Oakland in the early 1970s. Siegel opened a storefront law office in Fruitvale, where he and his partners took walk-in cases from the neighborhood’s predominantly Black and Latino working-class residents. Meanwhile, Weills got a job as a machinist at the Caterpillar tractor factory in San Leandro, where she helped strengthen the workers’ union and even participated in a wildcat strike.
By the 1980s, Siegel became interested in political office. He ran, unsuccessfully, on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in the 1982 election for California attorney general, then took a job handling complex litigation for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. There, he helped settle a major discrimination case against the San Francisco Fire Department, which for decades had excluded most women and people of color from getting jobs.
His next big move was to the Oakland Unified School District, where he served as legal counsel to the board and superintendent. Weills said that Oakland’s public schools became Siegel’s passion for the next decade. He eventually ran for school board and became the board president, where he undertook efforts to boost student achievement. He led the recruitment of Dennis Chaconas to become the schools superintendent; Chaconas brought a vision for smaller schools that would give parents more choices and reduce crowding in classrooms. Siegel also sparred with then-mayor Jerry Brown, opposing Brown’s signature education policy of expanding charter schools.
“He was reading all these research studies on schools, how best to organize them in a city like Oakland,” Weills said. “He wanted to bring in the state-of-the-art stuff and get all this money for these kids.”
Many of these school reform efforts were thwarted by the district’s rocky finances. In 2003, the state took over OUSD, a receivership that will finally end this month.
By the mid-2000s, Siegel & Yee, the law firm Siegel founded with his friend Alan Yee, was representing clients up and down California. Known for litigating discrimination and other employment law cases, as well as suing police departments and universities, the firm’s attorneys were deeply involved in politics. Partner Jane Brunner was on the Oakland City Council. Yee had served on the Peralta Community College District board. Weills got her law license and brought in her own cases, including one involving a professor who claimed she’d been denied tenure at UC Berkeley’s department of mathematics because she was a woman.
Cases like that, which settled for large sums, brought in funds that allowed Siegel and others in the firm to engage in more pro bono work.
Siegel at times took on unions if he believed they were mistreating their members. In 2009, the massive union SEIU put one of its locals representing California healthcare workers under receivership. The local’s staff and members then split away to create their own union, which they argued would be more democratically run. SEIU sued, seeking $25 million in damages.
Sal Rosselli, who led the breakaway union, feared that his new group, with virtually no resources, would be crushed by the legal firepower SEIU could bring to bear against them.
“Dan turned over his whole firm to this David and Goliath fight,” Rosselli told The Oaklandside. “We didn’t pay a dime. It was all pro bono. The picture of Dan standing up in court to these lawyers was extraordinary.”
The new union, National Union of Healthcare Workers, and Rosselli didn’t win the case, but with Siegel’s help they didn’t lose either. Most of the $25 million in damages was dismissed by a jury. Today, the NUHW represents 19,000 healthcare workers across the state.
In 2010, Siegel put his firm’s powers up against the city of Oakland. With his son Michael, he fought Oakland’s gang injunctions, legal actions taken by the city to try to restrict alleged gang members from associating with one another in a designated “safety zone” in Fruitvale.
At the time, Siegel was also serving as a legal advisor to then-Mayor Jean Quan, who was on the fence about the injunctions, which had been spearheaded by John Russo, the city attorney. Russo called Siegel’s role with Quan a conflict and demanded he and his firm back down.
“He didn’t flinch,” Michael said about his father’s decision to take on the case. “We ultimately were going up against the mayor he was volunteering with, and Jane Brunner was in the firm, but he didn’t care about any of that because he was convinced he was on the right side.”
Weills said if there was one trait that defined Siegel, it was his fearlessness.
Siegel and his family were deeply involved in other movements, including the movement that emerged after a young man named Oscar Grant was fatally shot by a transit cop in the Fruitvale BART station 2009, and Occupy Oakland. The Siegel & Yee law offices, then located just across 14th Street from City Hall and the Occupy Oakland camp, became the base of operations for the National Lawyers Guild’s legal defense hotline at a time when OPD was making mass arrests.
The police crackdown on Occupy convinced Siegel to split with the Quan administration. Michael said his father remained a pragmatist, believing in an “inside-outside” strategy of making social change.
“To be a lawyer you have to be an institutionalist,” Michael said. “You have to believe the structures of a democratic society are important and useful. Obviously, there are lots of flaws, and increasingly democracy is in question, but he believed in the constitution.”
True to his beliefs, Siegel ran for mayor in 2014, receiving over 18% of the vote in ranked choice runoff. His platform included opposition to the Domain Awareness Center, a proposed citywide surveillance system; raising the minimum wage; and implementation of community policing.
Over the last decade of his life, Siegel represented police whistleblowers, journalists, Death Row inmates, and victims of police misconduct, including his wife and several other women who were arrested at a 2014 protest and said they were subjected to demeaning conditions in the county jail.
After Oakland police and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies fired less-lethal munitions and gassed protesters during Black Lives Matter protests in Oakland five years ago, Siegel filed class-action lawsuits that led to settlements restricting how law enforcement can use these weapons against protestors.
Recently, Siegel represented University of California staff facing discipline for participating in protests in solidarity with Palestinians, arguing that the university’s crackdown was specific to those opposing Israel’s war in Gaza.
He argued a similar case in 2003, when he represented students at UC Berkeley who faced discipline over a building occupation in solidarity with Palestinians. “I think it is hostility toward these students and toward any opposition to what the government of Israel is doing and the external pressure,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “What they did is not different from many other demonstrations that have taken place on the Berkeley campus.”
Scheer, Siegel’s stepson, said his appearance at the No Kings rally last month was a fitting curtain call to a life of social justice, and a feat for a man in the throes of illness. “If you were around him and knew what it took to make every word come out strong, it was very impressive. It was definitely a closing moment in his life.”
In a public statement, the family said they’re planning a public memorial for later this year.
DARWIN BONDGRAHAM
Before joining The Oaklandside as News Editor, Darwin BondGraham was a freelance investigative reporter covering police and prosecutorial misconduct. He has reported on gun violence for The Guardian and was a staff writer for the East Bay Express. He holds a doctorate in sociology from UC Santa Barbara and was the co-recipient of the George Polk Award for local reporting in 2017. He is also the co-author of The Riders Come Out at Night, a book examining the Oakland Police Department’s history of corruption and reform.More by Darwin BondGraham
(Contributed by JP Massar)
