Soliciting Justice

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When Renee Garcia ’03 was growing up in Mattituck, Long Island, the North Fork had yet to accommodate swanky spillover from the Hamptons. It was, as she recalls, mostly potato and cauliflower farms.

“It stunk to high heaven,” she says.

There, she came of age with a posse of girlfriends who excelled at their small school, each looking out for the others. Her dad’s last name notwithstanding, she pretty much identified as just another kid from a “small and homogeneous” town. She was certainly aware of the many Latino migrants working the fields, but she didn’t necessarily identify with them.

“I was just breezing through, not thinking anybody would see me any differently,” she says. That was until another kid called her a racial epithet. “I had never heard that word,” she says, adding that she also remembers an older girl swiftly coming to her defense. 

She recalled the scene decades later from her corner office overlooking Philadelphia’s city hall, where she serves as city solicitor — the second Latina in Philly’s history to hold this position. (The first was her predecessor, Diana Cortes.) The office she oversees represents nearly all the city’s interests, including its more than 30,000 employees — among them, the city council and Mayor Cherelle Parker, the first woman to lead Philadelphia in its 341-year history.

“I want her to succeed, more than I’ve ever wanted anybody to succeed, because of what she stands for,” she says, echoing her got-your-back allies from childhood. “The city really must do everything we can to show that you can be a woman, you can be innovative, you can tune out all the noise, and you can make it happen.”

And there’s a lot to make happen. Garcia also represents the city commissioners overseeing the impending election. The 2020 election drew hundreds of demonstrations from both parties outside the ballot-counting venue at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, just a few blocks from Garcia’s current office. This year, a woman’s right to choose, gun control, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — all matters that Garcia’s office has dealt with in some capacity — will be thrown into stark relief no matter who wins the White House.

For example, one state law prohibits municipalities from passing gun laws that restrict ownership, possession, transfer, or transport of guns — “which is basically the whole ballgame,” she says. Good for hunters but bad for a city with 375 gun-related deaths last year. In an attempt to stem the flow of illegal firearms, the city in 2019 began enforcing a decade-old city ordinance that requires gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms. The Gun Owners of America challenged the ordinance, saying it was preempted by the state law and was an attempt to regulate possession. Garcia responds, “This doesn’t regulate ownership; you don’t have that [gun] anymore.” That case is on appeal at the state supreme court alongside a challenge from her office to override the state law altogether.

“We cannot protect our people with such restrictive boundaries around the ability for us to legislate,” she says. 

Similarly, past national policies have stymied local laws affecting a woman’s right to choose. When Garcia served as the city’s chair of litigation, the city allocated $500,000 toward an Abortion Liberation Fund with money drawn from the city’s general fund, which comingles city, state, and federal dollars. The allocation was challenged as being in violation of a state code, a state law, and the state constitution, each regulating the use of state funds for abortion, as well the federal Hyde Amendment regulating the use of federal funds for abortion. The city, joined by the ACLU, balked, and after a series of unsuccessful appeals, the plaintiffs eventually dropped the case.

Gun control and a woman’s right to choose represent just a few of the cases that flow through Garcia’s office. If someone falls on a city sidewalk, that’s the city solicitor’s case. Defending the police and prison workers, negotiating commercial contracts, those are theirs too, as are cases involving employment litigation, commercial real estate, and child welfare. The sheer variety requires a diversity of views, she says, highlighting yet another contentious election issue: DEI. It’s an issue she’s grown increasingly familiar with since the schoolyard incident back in Mattituck. 

After graduating magna cum laude from Barnard, Garcia worked at a law firm with other recent college graduates waiting to hear which law schools had accepted them. After she was accepted at Harvard, a colleague told her it was because of her last name. Blatantly racist comments aside, it was the microaggressions that created a growing awareness of injustices people of color face every day. Garcia recalls observing groupthink in boardrooms where everyone looked the same and provided similar worldviews. By the time she started working at PNC Bank, eventually becoming managing senior counsel, DEI conversations were finally being taken seriously nationwide. 

As chair of the bank’s pro bono committee, Garcia worked with marginalized communities unable to access legal counsel and participated in an in-house working group that didn’t just address Latino staff needs but also focused on breaking down barriers of Latino customers. 

“We were not just talking about hiring, promoting; we were talking about DEI leading to better business outcomes — and I think that’s when things broke open,” she says. 

In 2021, she landed a job heading up litigation at the Office of the City Solicitor, where equity is central to the mission.

“We are representing a majority minority city, a very impoverished city, and […] the way we draft legislation, implement legislation, everything we do [should be viewed] through a lens of equity,” Garcia says. 

For a lawyer who cares about DEI, she insists, there’s no higher calling than municipal law. 

"My proudest days are when [someone] comes to me and says, ‘This doesn’t sound right; they’re trying to do this and it’s legal?’ ” she says of colleagues challenging the status quo. 

Over the next few weeks, much of her energy will be focused on ensuring a safe and fair election. At the time this interview was conducted, there were still two men running for president, but that didn’t deter her from envisioning a future in which more women command the helm, as they do in Philadelphia. It’s something she says she never really thought about at Barnard. 

“I didn’t think about female leadership when I was there,” she says. “It was just leadership.”