Charles Calleros: Enjoying the Rhythm of Life DOWNLOAD PDF

By Michael Rusco

Talking with Professor Charles Calleros about his life and career stirs up many comforting emotions. His warm baritone voice, friendliness, and strong sense of empathy leave you happy to hear how full and rewarding his life and career have been, both for him and for those around him.

 The story starts in California. Although he was born and lived in Sacramento for his first 10 years, Calleros’s strongest childhood memories are from Aptos, a small town on the edge of Monterey Bay. “Our house backed up to a forest and we were five minutes away from the ocean…. It was a fabulous place to grow up, ocean and redwoods with-in a mile of each other.”

Calleros’s father immigrated from Mexico and worked as a factory manager. His mother worked as an administrative assistant at a com-munity college. “Dad was loving and caring, but with high expectations. He had an off-the chart work ethic and gently passed that to [Calleros and his older brother, Jim,] with mandatory chores around the house.”

“Mom was very kind and thoughtful. She would influence us by promoting introspection with questions rather than laying down rules…. She was an English major in college, fond of slipping in an English les-son at the dinner table, such as the difference in pronunciation between ‘wail’ and ‘whale.’”

“Dad would take us to William Land Park in Sacramento every Sunday, to give Mom some down time. The trip usually included the zoo and Vic’s for split hotdog sandwiches.” 

It was in his small local high school that he first discovered what would become one of the great loves of his life—the drums. Starting with the snare, Calleros went on to play in rock, blues, and Latin bands. “As a youth, I was painfully shy…. The thing that brought me out was music and playing in a band. I don’t think I could have gone into education unless I came out of my shell. I think it helped me be a little more creative and take some risks.”

In 1993, Calleros joined a 12-piece rock and soul band that performed regularly at the premiere blues club in Phoenix, the Rhythm Room. Over the last 26 years, Calleros has recorded three studio albums with the band, currently called “The Repeat Offenders.” The band’s latest album—titled “Flight Risk”—is Calleros’s favorite. He retired from the band in January 2020.

Calleros attended college at UC Santa Cruz where he majored in Economics. “It was largely policy oriented, rather than highly quantitative, which allowed for a fair amount of writing on issues that were and are debatable. Good training for law school.”

He attended UC Davis Law School. “I chose UC Davis Law School because it was named after MLK and featured a sculpture of him at its entrance. In my view, King’s nonviolent campaigns embodied great courage in the quest for social justice, and I was inspired by his oratory.”

In 1981, after some notable clerkships, Calleros was approached about teaching at Arizona State University. He applied and was hired to teach Con-tracts and Civil Rights. When he started, ASU’s casebook professors taught legal writing in certain small-section classes. “After I was hired but before I started, I wrote to the dean and requested the small section of Contracts, which came with the assignment of teaching legal writing. I explained that I thought that legal writing was the most important course in the curriculum.”

With the exception of visiting at Stanford for a semester and Santa Clara for a year, Calleros has spent his entire career at ASU. He has straddled the skills-casebook divide most of that time, mainly teaching Contracts and Civil Rights in addition to writing and Academic Success Program courses.

Calleros co-authors Legal Method and Writing with Professor Kimberly Holst. The book will soon be published in its ninth edition. He has also authored two other texts and dozens of articles, including a contracts casebook.

As Calleros reflects on his teaching career, he recalls, “[w]hen I started teaching, Michael Olivas at the University of Texas started an organization called Latino Law Professors. Every year at the AALS meeting, he would organize a dinner at some restaurant. He would joke back then that [the number of Latino law professors [was] so low that it was dangerous to have everybody in the same room, because if there was an accident, the entire population of Latino law professors would disappear. It really was a small group. We could sit around a single table in the early 80s. Then later the numbers became impressive.”

Calleros has loved every minute of his teaching career. He’s also loved how law teaching has allowed him to spend more quality time with his family than law practice would have.

“Debbie was a partner in a law firm when I had a semester-long visit to Stanford to teach contracts. She took some leave from her law firm to come with me and our two very young children.

“She had already seen at the preschool level the influence teachers had on kids…. Once she was away from the law firm and had some time to reflect, she saw that it would not work for the kids and me to be off visiting their grandparents every summer while she was taking depositions in civil litigation. So she retired and switched to teaching 5th grade, which facilitated the family traveling during the summer.”

And travel they have. Early on the family took lots of road trips, always including trips back to Aptos, CA and the grandparents. This last June, Charles and Debbie continued that tradition by joining their oldest son, Alex, and his husband Alek, for a road trip to several national parks.