Partner Profiles
Andy Silverman
A Legacy Rich in Coalition Building
Andy Silverman is the Joseph M. Livermore Professor of Law Emeritus at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He also serves as the director of the UArizona Civil Rights Restoration Clinic (CRRC), a Reclaim Your Future coalition partner, which he and former Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild founded in 2006.
Andy has been involved with the Reclaim Your Future campaign from almost the beginning of the project, working on a number of cases through fellow RYF partner Arizona Justice Project (AJP). As someone deeply committed to volunteer service in Tucson, Andy reached out to AJP when the marijuana expungement grant that funds the Reclaim Your Future campaign was announced, suggesting that a coalition primarily of legal service providers in Arizona–including DNA Peoples’ Legal Services in Flagstaff, Southern Arizona Legal Aid in Tucson, and Community Legal Services and AJP in Phoenix–could be beneficial since they already serve every county in the state.
“The community is stronger now that those with marijuana-related matters on their record can get those things expunged and feel they are more part of the community.” -Andy Silverman
Andy works with UArizona law students on facilitating marijuana expungement in accordance with Prop 207, the ballot initiative passed in 2020 that legalized adult recreational marijuana use in Arizona, created a pathway to expungement for those with a marijuana-related arrest or conviction, and led to the creation of the Reclaim Your Future campaign. The students also set up events where RYF holds clinics and help people petition for expungements.
The most complex program the law students lead, Andy says, is a program that Andy oversees in collaboration with the Tucson City Attorney’s Office. During the 2023 fall semester, CRRC students worked on marijuana possession cases that had been prosecuted by the Tucson City Attorney’s Office and completed more than 17,000 petitions, which are now being filed in the Tucson City Court at a rate of about 50 petitions per week. The project continues this spring when CRRC students will focus on marijuana paraphernalia cases.
Expungement is, obviously, an important issue to Andy. As a lawyer serving his community for more than 50 years, he always felt that at least marijuana should be legalized and those who had been convicted of marijuana offenses should be exonerated.
“This became particularly vivid to me when I represented a person on a post-conviction matter who was given a 4- to 6-year prison sentence for possessing a small amount of marijuana,” Andy says. “It was just an extension of the work I was already doing to become involved in the marijuana expungement movement.”
Andy says the expungement campaign is important to the community because, in his work as the director of the CRRC, he has spoken to many people who have been denied jobs and housing because of minor marijuana convictions or charges. Andy feels that it is unfair for a person to be denied a job, housing, or their civil rights because of past convictions, particularly marijuana-related ones.
“The community is stronger now that those with marijuana-related matters on their record can get those things expunged and feel they are more part of the community,” Andy adds.
When asked about plans for the future, Andy says that he hopes “to do more traveling with my wife, which we now restrict to doing during the summers and school breaks because of my work. I also have two grandchildren, whom I enjoy spending time with and would like to spend more time with.”
For more information about upcoming CRRC expungement events, keep an eye on the Reclaim Your Future events calendar.
This quality content was created by Hey Joe Media, an Arizona small business.
