Collaborative Impact: Working Together to Change the World

Episode Notes

Transcript

Todd Berger:

Changing the world. It’s something we all may aspire to in one way or another, but how do you go about doing that? Maybe you’re going to win a landmark case. Maybe you’ll write a decision that shifts the course of jurisprudence. Maybe you’ll help one person who’s in trouble. There’s lots of ways to change the world, some big and flashy, some small and personal, but despite what big achievements you may hope to accomplish in your career, it’s important to note the change almost never happens because of just one person. It takes the efforts of many working from different perspectives and with different skillsets to move society sometimes in big ways and sometimes in small ways. Today we’ll talk about trying to make the world a better place by working together and by bringing your particular skills to the table in pursuit of a greater goal. This is the ABA Law Student Podcast. So really excited for this interview. Oftentimes, as law professors, one of the things we think about when we worry about is the impact of what we’re doing beyond just teaching in the classroom, which is impactful and important, but can we have an impact outside of that is what we’re doing relevant in the real world and really excited for this week’s interview because I’m going to address some of those topics. So Leah, who did you talk to this week?

Leah Haberman:

I got the opportunity to talk to Professor Dorothy Roberts, who is not only a hero of mine, but someone who really, really helped change and shape my worldview throughout law school with her works. And so it was super exciting to talk to her. She’s a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Law School. She studies medical racism, the family regulation system and has written just so many books, so many articles and just has truly been an icon in the field of how do we talk about reproductive justice and abolition and all these really important topics. And she talks about them outside of the ivory tower, even though she’s at a prestigious law school, she is in the trenches doing this work with activists. A lot of the work I’ve done with my family defense clinic, every attorney in this field knows her, knows her work. And so it was just really exciting to be able to talk to someone because I was like, scholar seems so far away, but here she is so up close to these issues.

Todd Berger:

That’s great. Sounds exciting.

Leah Haberman:

Yes, actually sounds super timely. So I’m excited to jump into it and hear what she had to say. So Professor Roberts, to start us off, can you say how you came to be interested in doing legal scholarship? Did you go to law school being like, I can’t wait to spend a career in legal scholarship? Did it creep up on you? The interest? How did that come to fruition?

Dorothy Roberts:

Well, it’s kind of a circuitous path because growing up I always wanted to be a professor. My father was an anthropology professor and my mother was working on her PhD in anthropology. When I was born, I grew up almost with an expectation that I would be a professor, but also it was my love that was my passion, including during my first years of college. I majored in anthropology with the desire to be an anthropology professor, but then I didn’t have any models of people who were doing activist work and also teaching and writing. So in my last year of college, I decided to go to law school because I felt that I had to be a lawyer in order to be an advocate. And then after law school, when I started to practice law, I clerked for Judge Constance Baker Motley in the southern district of New York for a year.

And then I became an associate in the Litigation department of Paul Weiss, Rivkin, Wharton and Garrison. And my goal for doing that was to learn to be a great litigator. But then as I practiced law, I realized that I was very interested in exploring the legal issues that I was concerned about. I also felt my personality was more suited to investigating more deeply the kinds of injustices that I was concerned about. I just was maybe because of my family background and growing up around a professor because I loved college and research so much, I just felt I wanted to go into academia that that would suit me better and I would be able to explore the topics I was passionate about more freely. As a professor, I realized by then that I could be a professor and still write about and advocate about the social justice issues I was concerned about.

Leah Haberman:

I’m really glad that you brought up the tension of the directions you can go with when you have this singular feeling of I want to be an advocate. I used to work in politics on campaigns before law school and I came to law school. I want to be an advocate. I want to do direct service. And as I’ve been in law school, I’ve really loved thinking through the ideas that when you’re sometimes a litigator and you’re in the trenches, you don’t have time to play with and think what can be so in what is. And so I’m curious for you and other people that you’ve worked with, how have you navigated the, almost like the FOMO of still being a direct advocate doing Litigation and all that work?

Dorothy Roberts:

Yeah, there were certain aspects of Litigation that I didn’t like and part of that was all the time you have to spend not really thinking, but they’re just pressures to get that brief out or get the complaint filed or negotiating with the other parties. And I wanted to be able to spend more time exploring the issues. But yes, sometimes I have felt that I wish I could directly represent people who are suffering from the injustices that I write about because some of my books have been read by the broader public, my book Torn Apart for example, or Shattered bonds before that Killing the black body. I get requests frequently from people who have been harmed by the family policing system whose children have been taken from them, who’ve had bad experiences in hospitals where they feel justly that they were discriminated against. Mostly it’s people calling me or writing to say that their children were taken from them and I just don’t have the time nor the skills at this point to represent them. I try to refer them to other sources. Unfortunately, there’s not enough availability of lawyers to help all the people who contact me for help. And of course I wish I could do more, but I still in the end feel very sure that my contribution has been greater writing the books that I’ve written, the articles I’ve written, this public speaking, I’ve done the engagement with organizers from my vantage point. I think that has overall been more helpful than if I stayed in Litigation.

Leah Haberman:

I think that’s such a critical piece of the professional puzzle is playing to your own strengths of you’ll always make the biggest impact when you both enjoy the work and then you are usually good at the things you enjoy. And so that makes total sense to me. And I guess I would love to hear more about the kind work you do to engage with practitioners and what does the ecosystem look like? I think as law students, we see our professors in class and we see them in office hours, but there’s a lot of other hours in the day, so what does that interplay look like?

Dorothy Roberts:

From the very beginning of my career in academia, literally from the very beginning, the first year I found that I needed to engage with people who were initially, well, it’s lawyers and activists. So I began to work on my very first law review article arguing that the prosecutions of black women for being pregnant and using drugs was punishing them for being pregnant. Now, to write that article, the first thing I needed to find out is whether or not most of the prosecutions were being brought against black women. That was the basis for my claim that this was a form of racism and it was the beginning of my work on my book Killing the Black Body about the need to see the intersection of racism and sexism in reproductive injustices. So in order to find out the race of the women who are being prosecuted, I got in touch with the A CLU and asked about the race of their clients and the clients of other criminal defense attorneys who were representing women who were being prosecuted.

And they helped me to contact the lawyers representing these women, and I was able to calculate that close to 80% of the women who were being prosecuted were black. I also was able to get a lot of legal documents briefs, and when the case went up to the US Supreme Court involving the Medical University of South Carolina and its policy of drug testing its patients and turning them over to the police and having police officers come into the hospital and arrest patients there, all of whom were black except for one of the people arrested, they gave me mountains of court papers related to the case. Just some examples of the help that I got from these attorneys. I needed that in order to write my article. And then you see my article is helpful to them because it’s a Harvard Law Review article that makes this strong constitutional argument about why the prosecutions were unconstitutional.

So that was just the beginning. I mean that was related to my very first article. And then in addition to that, I happened to be writing that article and also my book during the time that the reproductive justice framework was being developed, it was coined by a group of black feminists in 1994, I believe I have the date right, and my article was published in 1991 and I began work on killing the black body after that. It was published in 1997. So you see how there’s this coincidence of my writing and the organizing around a new framework for reproductive freedom. So I began to engage with these new organizations that were being formed around the country, mainly led by women of color to develop and advocate around reproductive justice. It’s been a very mutually beneficial relationship with organizers and lawyers telling me that my work is helpful, they can cite it, they can point to it to support their arguments and my gratitude, my debt to them for helping me develop my arguments and giving me resources that were helpful to document the kinds of claims that I was making.

Todd Berger:

We’ll be back after the break. So Leah, what really stood out to you about your interview with the professor that maybe surprised you or things that you weren’t thinking about before you got a chance to speak?

Leah Haberman:

I thought it was interesting that she went into law school being interested in being a professor. I think that’s a perspective. You don’t really hear that often. I feel like with law school, you either have people who were just really outspoken in class and they were told go to law school, or you have people who are like, I want to be a lawyer I’ve seen on tv. So I found that kind of interesting because like I mentioned in the interview, I had such a reverse experience of I came in wanting to do direct service and that’s what I’ll be doing straight out of graduation, but I do have this background interest in becoming a law professor, and I really appreciated that her trajectory followed her skillsets because she was a litigator at a really big law firm, and I thought it was interesting that she was in private practice and she just had all these passions and questions still lingering and the way to answer those questions.

She wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to go work at the ACL U, it’s I want to be a professor, whether I then talk to the A CLU and I appreciated that there’s not a one sort of way to make a difference and that it’s comforting to be like, oh, just because I have this desire to make change, I don’t have to be the person at the defense table defending my client. I can be thinking through issues critically, like she said, professors have more time. And so just thinking about what are the different resources that you as a person have and that you and your profession can have?

Todd Berger:

Yeah, absolutely. The two things that really stood out to me was when she talked about her circuitous path to being an academic. And I think you’re totally right. Most people who come to law school are not thinking, I’m going to be a law professor. Some people’s paths nevertheless are a little bit more directed in some sense. So for people who are out there listening, if somewhere in the back of your mind you’re thinking, well, maybe I will be a law professor, know that you might get there, there might be some twists and turns along the way, but if you have that interest, it’s definitely the kind of thing that can happen.

Chay Rodriguez:

I think something that really stood out to me was how she said that her family, her parents actually inspired her to take a different route to get to the same, not end point I guess current point that she’s in now. And it made me think about our last episode, Todd, when you talked about your dad being an attorney and how you got to see that coming up. So I think it’s just very interesting what you see growing up can impact you, especially when you talk to those in the legal profession, how you can come from all different walks of life. And we all still end up here a part of this exclusive little club of legal minds. And I love that.

Leah Haberman:

I think to that point, Chay what we see, not even just as kids, but when you’re impressionable and who’s more impressionable than a one L is, you then want to mirror that.

And so I think one of the things that was really exciting to hear her process, I’ve never been in her classrooms, but I imagine they’re amazing that she talks about these issues, that her perspective on the law is so unique and I dunno about you and I’d love to hear of, I don’t have a lot of professors who relate this client that I was directly serving, and here’s how it relates to torts. Usually it’s like, here’s the theory of negligence. And I think it would be so much more impactful as a law student to be able to hear people hear the human interaction about it the way she seems to focus on it.

Chay Rodriguez:

I think this could be a difference with Knight students because we are untraditional, a lot of us are a little older. It makes me think of the episode when Todd said that his student AI something that he said to double check him, but my classes we’re always asking for some sort of real life example, give us your proof.

When did this happen to you or what did you, we’re always asking that, and it’s not because we’re trying to be difficult or be a pain, but I think having your professor there with you to then give you a real life story outside of theories, doctrines, closets, things like that, it just allows you to connect with it a little bit more. And then sometimes we’re able to bring in through conversation just even more real life aspects to it. So I remember in a REM class we were talking about a case that my professor had actually been a part of, and then one of the students asked her, well, you got a favor of well verdict this time, but what if your client had been black? And it’s very interesting to see how professors are able to just cut the professional part of it and sometimes they dodge it and sometimes they don’t and they kind of get real about even how much of a close call that case was without throwing different hypotheticals at it.

Leah Haberman:

I think that’s one a super good plug for seminars or classes that offer an opportunity where you’re not in a room of 200 plus people and you can’t really engage at that level. And so I think that’s a huge plug for those opportunities, whatever law school you go to carve those out. But I think to your point of students want to push back. That’s something her and I touched on in the second half of the interview of not necessarily student pushback, but professors have maybe a way of viewing the world what happens when that conflicts with a way that a practitioner, that a client that anyone else is viewing it, but you’ve got this perfect theory in your head, and so that’s something I wanted to make sure I talked about with her.

Todd Berger:

Terrific. Let’s hear the second part.

Leah Haberman:

I would be curious to know whether in your own experience or you kind of seen how maybe other professors operate, do you get kind of pushback from both legal practitioners? And it sounds like you also work a lot with activists, and I imagine that is not always the case for a lot of legal scholars that sometimes there is the ivory tower critique. So I guess do you still see that a lot? And if so, what can emerging young lawyers and law students do to push the academics we interact with to do the work that you’re doing of No, there has to be this ecosystem for legal scholarship to matter.

Dorothy Roberts:

Yeah. Well, fortunately I’ve only experienced a very positive relationship. It’s a blessing, but it is the case that I have heard and seen criticism of researchers and faculty who write about topics that they don’t really understand because they haven’t engaged with either the people who are experiencing the social problems or legal problems that they’re writing about or the activists and organizers and lawyers who work directly with those people. If you have never engaged with the people who actually are experiencing problems that you’re writing about, you’re missing an important insight into what those problems are and you can even write something that’s harmful to them. And unfortunately sometimes and very often scholars who know little about a topic may get more attention than the very people who are experiencing it and know the most about it. This is especially true I think for me, for my work with people who have been impacted by the family policing system, my first book about the family policing system was published in 2001, and I cannot imagine writing that book with, without engaging with black mothers whose children have been taken from them.

That’s how I understood how unjust the system is. That’s what gave me the determination to write a book about it. And now with my next book 20 years later to it apart on the same subject, part of the reason that I felt compelled to write a new book on the same topic of racism in the family policing system was because 20 years later there was a burgeoning of organizations led by black mothers to dismantle the system and replace it with a more caring and supportive way of addressing the struggles that families in this country have. For me, I just can’t imagine how I would have written any of my books or most of my articles without that kind of engagement. So you asked how to convince people to do it.

One selling point is that you learn more about whatever the topic is you’re interested in if you engage with the people who are affected by that topic and the other, just thinking about why it’s so important to me to be connected to advocates and activists and organizers is that it gives me inspiration to continue the work. The topics I write about can be very depressing, and I think that I might be discouraged from continuing to write on these topics and teach on them if I only had depressing news and I could be very discouraged from continuing to engage in this work, but organizers celebrate the victories that they have with parties.

Reproductive justice activists have the best parties, and it might be getting a billboard up that sends a message in support of reproductive justice. There’s so many things that we do that make a difference. Having a meeting that’s well attended or even if it’s not well attended, having somebody there to spread the message, just whatever the victory is, there’s celebration of it. And I feel like we don’t have as much of that at all in academia. We might celebrate the publication of a law review article or a book, but that’s different from celebrating a positive step that makes a difference in people’s lives that you can see and that people are happy about even if you haven’t achieved everything you want.

Leah Haberman:

No, that’s really amazing. I think celebrating victories is not like a skill set that always comports with the type a really rigid diligence that law school instills in you and being an academic requires. And so what I hear you talk about your process and how on the ground you are, it kind of sounds like grassroots academia. And I think that is such a rare phenomenon and especially at schools where the hiring professors that are joint JD PhDs continues to be a trend. And a lot of my professors have never done direct service work. So I think there is a level of academia is losing that skillset. And so to be in an organizing space and be around people who know how to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and know that progress is just good, I think sounds like a really amazing thing.

Dorothy Roberts:

Yes, you put it so well. Yes, thank you.

Leah Haberman:

I’m just here and I’m just like, it’s almost a bummer that this is a podcast. I wish people could see how I’m nodding a lot as you’re saying. I’m like, yes. That’s like if I one day become a professor, that’s exactly what I want. And the reason that I was so excited to talk with you today is I think you are such a phenomenal example of legal scholarship that has led to changes in the systems that you write about. I think most people listening to this podcast have heard the term child welfare system, but now so many of them also have heard family policing system and family regulation system because of the work that you’ve done and the colleagues that are in this space with you. And so I guess I want to move into the conversation into almost tips for law students because our audience here on the podcast are law students and a lot of them are maybe one Ls who are starting to think like, oh, I want to be on a Journal. I want to write a note. Two Ls who wrote a note, maybe some of them got published and some didn’t, and a bunch of three Ls who are going into the world. We’ve already kind of touched on it, but I guess what is your pitch that scholarship matters? If we’re celebrating victories, how is scholarship part of the victory?

Dorothy Roberts:

Victory Scholarship matters to these victories because if the scholars are engaged with the advocates and lawyers and activists, they can make use of the scholarly work that you’re doing. I see this all the time. They can cite your work, they can use the ideas to help with organizing. They can use the ideas to help with the way that they articulate the principles and the vision. Now, that’s not to say that they will adopt wholesale what is in an article, but again, as we were saying, it’s a symbiotic relationship. So the scholarship has the benefit of the insights of organizing and then the organizers can get the benefit of all the time and deep thinking and care you put into the scholarship that in turn has benefited from your engagement with the organizers. So in the end, it’s just a richer, more effective way I think, of moving toward change because you have the advantages of both the advantages of the insights of people who are experiencing the injustice that you’re writing about and have worked with people on the ground in ways that scholars don’t.

But combined with the kind of macro level thinking where you can take those details that people who are doing grassroots work and piece it together, I think that’s what I think my best skill and contribution is to the various movements I’ve been involved with is that because of particular skills I have, because of the time I have as a professor where I’m given time to write, I can look at the broad view, connect the dots, connect the different arguments and experiences that people on the ground are having, connect them to each other, connect them to different policies, connect movements together in ways that are helpful. And so the combination of that is really powerful in so many ways. It’s powerful in developing the arguments, the vision of where we’re going. It helps also in movement building because as a scholar, if you can show how different forms of injustice are connected to each other, I think it also helps to bring together movements that may have been disconnected working on separate kinds of campaigns. To me, I think my best work is where I can show that the family policing system is connected to the criminal legal system. So there’s a powerful effect of bringing together these different ways of addressing social injustice.

Leah Haberman:

I know you started your professional life wanting to be an anthropologist and being someone outside looking in, but it sounds like you’ve made it more as a law professor, someone who’s in the movement, but it’s like you are a part of what you are doing. And I think that is often for students, the frustration when you’re lectured by people who’ve never experienced it, who aren’t in the work. And then you go out into your summer internships and you do the work and you’re like, what is this disconnect between the law I’m learning in law school and the law my professors keep telling me is the way to do it? And then the realities. And it’s so heartening to hear you talk about it of like this is an ecosystem that makes everything better. The practitioners are better when they can cite to the Harvard Law Review article that gives them credibility, but the scholars are better because talked to the people who’ve impacted and been impacted by the systems and that our clients, and then if the scholars are talking to the clients, maybe lawyers will do a better job humanizing their clients and it’s all so there.

And so I’m just so grateful that there’s a model for how this work can be done instead of just being like, okay, well professors live in their silo and they don’t have the kind of incentive to connect the dots between the different systems that you’re talking about.

Dorothy Roberts:

Yes, I think all of that is true. And I think also you mentioned students who are engaged during the summer, also during the academic year where they’re engaged in various organizations on campus, they may be helping to represent clients. I know in my reproductive rights and justice class, students always every week talk about their experiences in various kinds of representational or organizing efforts they’re doing during the school year or in internships that they have, but that enhances the class as well when the students provide that practical knowledge. I think it helps to have a professor who believes that that’s relevant to what’s being taught in class, which I certainly do. I really love it when students are able to help further the discussion by talking about the learning experiences they’ve had working with clients or organizations that are engaged in social change.

Todd Berger:

We’ll be right back.

So Leah, one of the things I think that was really interesting was in the discussions about celebrating the little things or the little victories. They may not actually be little things. They may be not the big victory that you want, but they’re nevertheless a victory and they’re important. And I think that’s a really important thing to focus on, particularly for law students and young lawyers because you will go out there and you’ll have really tough cases and you won’t always win those cases in the way you think that you’re going to win them. So you get a client and you think you’re going to try this case and you’re going to get a not guilty and you’re going to walk the client out of the Courtroom or something like that. And I would deal with this all the time, but young public defender was How do I find victory when I’m going to lose a lot, no matter how hard I try and talking about legal scholarship and its application and practice.

There’s actually a law review article that I read and I would assigned to my class when I taught a criminal defense clinic. And it was so impactful to me. The professor who had practiced also as a public defender talked about the need to redefine what victory looks like. So victory is not always the straight not guilty. If you’re a public defender walking the person out of the Courtroom, for example, particularly in the public interest world, there aren’t a huge number of those victories no matter who you represent or what size you’re on. But redefining victory was oftentimes things like you work out a beneficial plea agreement or you work out some sort of sentence that avoids significant collateral consequences. And sometimes I like to think that the victory is just in fighting really hard, doing the best job that you possibly can and making sure that the client’s rights are protected.

And in a criminal case, the government had to work as hard as possible to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and that that’s a victory. That’s really important. And if you find victories in those little things, you oftentimes will find the job really fulfilling, and you’ll be able to last a lot longer in those jobs because for many public interest advocates, if you’re trying to define victory as you won this major lawsuit and got everything you wanted in it or you won the case just outright, there’s not that many there. But you can have a lot of successes along the way that are maybe smaller, look a little bit different, but are still really meaningful and they can make the job meaningful and more fulfilling over time. So I think celebrating those smaller things, but recognizing they’re important and impactful is a real way to have a long, hopefully really meaningful career in the practice of law.

Leah Haberman:

Absolutely. I think Litigation is one of those few moments in life where there’s a clear winner and a clear loser, but life is not all Litigation. Not all lawyers are litigators. And so I think it’s also, to your point, reconceptualizing victories in other contexts of lawyers can also be organizers on campus. At Columbia, we had a really tremendous victory, and I was for student organizers and I was talking to one of my friends who was really involved in How are you feeling? And she was like, I’m just happy that organizing seems to be working. And she was like, and so often I think you as someone who’s an organizer, someone who’s trying to create institutional change, you’re told to think about the arc and that eventually it bends towards justice. And that’s kind of hard on a day to stay motivated with. And so I think when you can make those victories clear for yourself, and it’s not just like, oh, to your point, a win is the only way to have a victory.

I think to that point, it’s like it helps sustain the momentum and so that you’re not just thinking in these grandiose visions. You get to see your piece of the puzzle, then it gives you the accountability and agency that like, oh, if victories are tangible, then I’m accountable to being a part of them. And I think that’s for me, something I really took away of, I can feel so daunted by some of these systemic issues that I’m like, sometimes I want to throw my hands up and say, it’s like, it’s not my thing. I’ll focus on this smaller piece of the pie. And so I think I left the conversation with Professor Roberts being, I want to be a little bit more on the ground, a little bit more engaged because I don’t have to win the whole day. I can just win this part of the day.

Todd Berger:

Something that lawyers sometimes struggle with is this question of systemic change coupled with individual client representation. And there are some lawyers who think that they came to law school to change the world, and there are some cases that you get that might change the world. You get a brown versus Board of Ed, for example, and there’s this really broad impact across the country, and there are definitely cases like that, but many, many lawyers don’t have the opportunity for those cases where there’s big systemic change. But that doesn’t mean you’re not having an impactful, meaningful career because each individual client needs to be represented and each individual client needs to have someone who diligently and zealously advocates for their rights. And just doing that is tremendously impactful. So it’s not the victory in terms of the systemic change, but every day you do that and make the law come alive for a client that’s a victory.

Chay Rodriguez:

And I think there’s so many ways you can go with this, but it kind of brings me back to the Mike Quinn episode when we talked about that idea of, and this is putting it very simply, the good lawyer versus the evil lawyer and how that works, even though we’re not saying anyone is inherently evil, the lawyer that is on the opposing side of whatever issue you’re fighting for or against, they have that same win-loss mentality too. They have that same notion to want to fight for some sort of victory. So I think also if you kind of put it into the context of this is a system, and yes, it’s an arc and it’s going to bend church justice, but it’s definitely going to bend back, maybe not now, maybe not in the 20 year future, but the 30 40 year future, that arc is going to bend back.

You have to celebrate the victories when you get them, the small wins when you get them, or you’re going to go mad because it might not always track in your favor.

Leah Haberman:

No, that’s a hundred percent true. And I think very true of the moment of there’s fundamental rights that we no longer had, that people in past generations did have. And so I think to your point that the arc is not unidirectional. And so to be in the moment, and also to do what you can to be in community with the people who are impacted, because I think a really good point is you’re not just celebrating the victory as the lawyer. We’re not trying to be like lawyers go out to happy hour. More often it’s be in community, be in these spaces with the people who are impacted with the clients, the policy changers. This is such a larger ecosystem we as lawyers are entering into. And so it’s about how do we take the skillsets. And I think something I said to Professor Roberts was like, lawyers maybe don’t have the best skill sets for celebrating, so how do we take the being in community and having a more kind of cohesive way? It’s like the humility of it all of like we’re going to celebrate that we’re all in it together rather than the lawyers are charging ahead.

Todd Berger:

It’s a good point, Leah, about how do we have the skillset as lawyers to celebrate those victories. So I think part of it is the culture that exists at wherever you practice. It’s really important that people celebrate those victories. I know lawyers who would practice and public defender’s office and the supervisors would send out shout outs in these emails, so-and-so got this done and this done and this done. And oftentimes there were shout outs about these not guilties or these great sentences people got. I thought that was great, but every once in a while I wanted a shout out to say something like, so-and-so represents his client. They got found guilty of everything and they got a bazillion years of jail. But you know what? They deserve a shout out because they went in there, they fought so incredibly hard, they forced the government to meet its burden. You don’t win every case, but they deserve a shout out for great lawyering in the face of really long odds. So whatever those shout outs look like, whether they’re actuals or big victories or small victories or just the victory, the honor that goes into fighting hard for your client, though, you should be in a place where there’s a culture that celebrates that. So I think that’s really important when you think about where you’re going to go and practice, you want to be in that place, or if you can, you try and create it yourself.

Chay Rodriguez:

I think that is the underlying exclamation point of everything you just said, Todd. You have to do that for yourself because sometimes it’s not always going to be provided for you. And we talk a lot about mental health as law students, and I know the trajectory for lawyers in mental health isn’t much better, but when you’re able to create that environment for yourself to celebrate small wins or even within your study group to celebrate small wins for each other, and you practice that now, that’s only a skill that is going to get better when you get out there and start practicing. When finals come around in a few weeks, I’m going to be celebrating dressing for the weather correctly. Sometimes I just throw on Uggs, I have a hat on, and I wonder why I’m so hot in school and everyone is looking at me like I’m insane.

But it’s because I am so deep in the books and so deep into making sure that I get the grade that I want in this class and that I get my win, that I’m not taking care of myself. So it’s a small victory for me to make sure I’m paying attention to that and can move forward in the best way health wise for me. So if you start doing that now with even the small things that may seem silly, that’s a skill that you can build once you pass the Bar and you cross that line and you start working on those other things that don’t define you as a person, but help to define your career as an attorney.

Leah Haberman:

Absolutely. And I can’t wait to text you in a few weeks, Chay and be like, I hope you’re not wearing Uggs today. Speaking of a culture of shoutouts and gratitude, I want to give a really big thank you to Professor Roberts for taking the time. She’s an incredibly busy woman with all the things she’s doing as she talked about on the podcast, and I left our conversation feeling really invigorated and really excited, and I hope our listeners did as well.

Todd Berger:

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