You know, I took a class on the history of African American racism,
which probably has a different title now, but
I love that class because we're taught in high school
there's only a few kind of civil rights leaders that are —
kind of leave an imprint on our minds
and there was a whole ecosystem of people,
names of folks that were students in different movements
that were never really part of the story
and I learned about their stories in that class,
and I think that really helped me
to kind of go behind the cloak and see who else might be there.
To make change like that
it's way beyond just one or two kind of influential figures.
My law career has been — is like in sections
that appear way more linear than they are.
I started practicing in private practice
and I did cases in the appellate courts here in the United States.
Then I went to the ACLU
which was like my dream job
and I loved it, but I felt like
I was not as connected to the ground.
I then went to India in a very kind of spontaneous way
and I joined a national human rights organization there
working in reproductive rights.
The first case I worked on involved a woman who was very much
the same age as I was and
if you put us side to side, we could've been —
like I could've been in her place.
Our lives took very different paths and she found herself delivering
while having a seizure, under a tree, in public view,
twenty steps from the hospital who refused to admit her.
And I thought, "Okay, this is just so fundamentally wrong."
And we started working on that case and we argued that
that type of violation is a human rights violation
and we actually won.
And it wasn't so much the winning but it was the fact that we were able to go
and raise these kind of arguments in court, we as women lawyers
going in and saying to a judge who's never really heard the word "reproductive rights,"
that this is actually not a fatalistic outcome, that women should just die
but that there is something here that we need to fight about.
Really what we wanted to do was get the community that's affected
involved in the fight. It's their fight, and let's help them understand their rights
and work with them and train them to become their own advocates.
And so we set up Nazdeek, which is premised on this idea of empowering people
to use the legal system in the way in which they want to use it.
At the end of the day, the women that I started this organization with —
we didn't know what we were really doing.
You try to be really, you know —
work with integrity, and do the research and do the work
but just know that you will not have all the answers.
And I think the greatest success I would say is that I trusted
uncertainty, and I trusted the fact that I wouldn't know all the answers
and I still went with something that I believed in and
we created an organization that is now thriving.
After being away for almost nine, ten years
I decided I wanted to bring this idea of legal empowerment
and community-driven justice to a law school
and have students start thinking about how your clients can become
more empowered and eventually leading their own struggle.
Around the world, human rights defenders and activists are under attack
by governments, here in the United States as well now.
And so how do we as a law school support those efforts?
And so we put together symposiums, we bring grassroots activists from
all over the world to think through their strategies of resistance.
And we also manage a fellowship program to really help propel the next generation
of human rights lawyers to get involved in the field.
If you don't really believe in your mission you could really quickly hate a job,
you know, especially if you're an entrepreneur because
again, the tides are against you so it's —
you have to really love what you do or believe in what you do.
I mean, it's not easy but it's totally worth it
if you just keep on.