Show notes
In this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aditi Juneja. Aditi is a lawyer, an immigrant, and a feminist who formerly led/co-created Resistance Manual and OurStates.org. Topics Covered Her background as both a lawyer and an activist, and how she noticed the disconnect between the purposes and the aims of criminal law and how it was being implemented. Aspects of her advocacy job that lead to her founding of the Resistance Manual and her Self Care Sundays podcast. How self-care is about having the tools, resources, and practices that allow you to thrive in this world and how our identities shape how we see self-care. How privilege plays a role in skewing our views of self-care and how to engage a conversation on privilege which is productive. You can learn more about Aditi Juneja at: Her Website: https://aditijuneja.me/ Her Podcast: www.selfcaresundays.com Twitter: @aditijuneja3 Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! hello@jeenacho.com. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho For more information, visit: jeenacho.com Order The Anxious Lawyer book? Available in hardcover, Kindle, and Audible Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers I'm creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus 5-week program. Spend just 6 minutes every day to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/gLlo7b Sponsor: Spotlight Branding provides internet marketing services exclusively for solo & small law firms. Unlike most internet marketing firms, they do NOT focus on SEO. Instead, they specialize in branding their clients as trusted, credible experts, increasing referrals, and ultimately driving growth. For our listeners, Spotlight Branding is offering a complimentary website review. Go to: SpotlightBranding.com/trl Check out this episode! Transcript Intro: Today's show is sponsored by Spotlight Branding. Spotlight Branding works exclusively with solo and small law firms to brand them as trusted, credible experts and help them stand out in a crowded marketplace. Their services include web design, social media, video marketing and more. Aditi: She said, "I try to get rid of the blame and the shame and kind of explain that, being born white is like being born with access to a country club. Like, it's not that you did anything to deserve it; you just kind of have it. But, by having it that means you have access to certain things that other people don't." Intro: Welcome to The Resilient Lawyer podcast. In this podcast we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. And now your host, Jeena Cho. Aditi: I am Aditi Juneja. I am the creator and the host of the Self-Care Sunday’s podcast, and I co-created The Resistance Manual and OurStates.org as well. Jeena: Wow, that's quite a list. Well, tell me about Self-Care Sunday. Where did that idea come from and tell the listeners a little bit about the project? Aditi: So the Self-Care Sunday's podcast came out of the activist work that I was doing and realizing that I was really just tired and exhausted and feeling like I didn't know how to do this work in a sustainable way. And I thought that I should probably figure that out in order to try to avoid burn-out and to make sure that I was being as effective as I could be. So I thought, you know, the way I would learn was to talk to activists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, artists, all kinds of folks about how they did self-care and how they sustain their work. And then it occurred to me that if I was having this problem that others must be too. So if I recorded the conversations I was having in the form of a podcast and I shared them that perhaps that would have some utility. So that was how that podcast was born. Jeena: Tell me about the activist work that you are doing. Aditi: So I had been, I was in my third year of law school. I had been interested in criminal justice reform, I had worked at a DA's office for a couple of years prior to law school. In law school, I had focused mostly on criminal justice reform work. I had written a note on that topic and particularly on prosecutorial reform. But after the election, it seemed like the shift needed, that there needs to be a shift, I needed to broaden my focus a little bit. So I started just kind of collecting, tracking information trying to understand the various policies that were being proposed by the incoming administration and the processes to enact them, so I didn't know how budget reconciliation worked for example, so I was trying to understand that, understand where the opportunities were for activism, and I shared that with Stay Woke, which is an organization that was born out of the movement for Black Lives, and they thought that what I was collecting that information would be really useful and that if we could create a crowd-sourced platform that might serve as a useful resource for other folks who were joining what was the nascent resistance movement. So that rather than everyone researching every individual policy themselves, we could have a collective, you know, a shared space for that information and that we could kind of build on the work of each other instead of duplicating efforts. Jeena: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. What got you interested in criminal justice reform? Aditi: I think I...so I had it, I was always interested in criminal justice generally, but I don't know why. I look back through high school; maybe it was a mock trial, I don't know, it was a lot of different things. But I had always had that interest. But in college, I had the opportunity after my junior year to intern with a superior court judge in New Jersey who was in the criminal court system. And during that time I was sitting in chambers and then talking to prosecutors and defense attorneys. And I got to hear their opinions about how the system was working, and also importantly how it was not working. And so after I left college I spent my first two years as a paralegal in the Manhattan DA's office in the Early Case Assessment Bureau, so I was writing up complaints about the cases that everyone hates. You know, the fair-beating cases, the shoplifting cases, the "feet on the seats" cases and all that. And even when I was there it felt to me like, you know, we were enforcing the law. I didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong. I didn't feel guilty about it. But after I left and started law school, with the perspective of distance and time and then also just the legal education, the opportunity to consider why do we have laws? What is the purpose of the criminal law? Like what is mens rea? What is actus reus? What is the point of all of this? You know, kind of having that framework made me think about it more critically and, particularly, be able to apply it not just, I wasn't just learning about it in a theoretical sense, I was able to then take that framework and that theory I was learning in law school and apply it to what I had seen working in the DA's office and I realized that there was quite a large disconnect between the purposes and the aims of criminal law. And what I had seen actually happen, so I was very quickly interested in reform work and trying to understand what the issues were in the system and how it might be improved. Jeena: Saying more about the disconnect, can you give a concrete example of how the law should work versus how it was actually being implemented? Aditi: So a lot of the cases I was writing up as a paralegal, it was non-victim misdemeanors, so it was what we would consider or what was called broken windows, policing quality of life crimes and the idea, at least in my understanding, was that by lowering the rates of quality of life, crimes in New York City were just, where I was working, that it would then reduce violent crime overall. But there was no nexus between those two things, there is no provable nexus between those two things. And so, for me it felt like a lot of times I would see cases right, where for example, in New York State there's a law about gravity knives, which are the kinds of knives that if you flip out the blade, the blade just flips out, like you don't have to push a button or anything it just flips out. And there's a law against possession of them, but half of the people who possess them said, "I was like coming home from work. I work as a construction worker. I have this job." And of course, one could think that people are lying about it, but it often felt like you're arresting people who have these as tools for their jobs. Thinking that you're thinking that, you know that this law was written at a time or with the idea and understanding that you're going to prevent violence, but most of these people are literally just possessing them for the purpose of their job. And the way that you're stopping them and noticing that people have them is because you're seeing the clip in their pant pocket. And so it's not that someone is like, holding it out or doing something with it. You're stopping them and so, you know, I would hear police officers talk about pressure to have a certain number of arrests per month. An unspoken pressure, it's not a quota but a pressure that they felt to have a certain number of arrests per month. And to me, I was like, wouldn't the goal of the criminal justice system be that we have fewer arrests— isn't that supposed to be a good thing? Because that means that less crime is happening or that you were able to resolve an issue without making an arrest, without it escalating to the point of an arrest, you know. And so the measures of success, the metrics that we use to understand how safe or unsafe a community is, and how issues are being resolved, to me just all felt flawed. And it was never an issue of an, I mean it was most often not the issue of an individual, right? It was, the police officer's following the law as he understands it, the prosecutor, or in my case, the paralegal is writing up a complaint based on their understanding of the policies and procedures of the office and what the law says. But somehow the people who are being arrested are not the people that I'm most concerned about. You know, in our society it's often, it felt like it was often those who, you know, happen to be out in public didn't have the privacy of their own homes, didn't have the money to make bail. And that to me felt like something was just off. Jeena: Yeah. I definitely feel like I saw a lot of that when I was an Assistant State Attorney, where I was like I don't think that's what the law was actually intended to do. Like for example, in Florida, there is a crime. It was a misdemeanor for driving without a valid license which, you know from a majority of us just might get your driver's license expired and you have to go and get it fixed. But often how it was actually used was to punish undocumented workers who, of course, can't legally get driver's licenses. So these people ended up with very, very long jail sentences. Whereas for everybody else, all they had to do was just go and get their driver's license renewed and then come back and just show the proof. But that wasn't the intent of the law, right? The intent of the law was not to prosecute or to criminalize people that are there as an undocumented worker. And in Florida, there are lots of them. So yeah. Aditi: Yeah and there's just this feeling too of you know, I'm a citizen obviously as well of the state that I'm living and working in, and so you know I would you know I would see the kinds of cases that I was writing about, but I was like, "This is how police officers are spending their time?" This is not like, this does not make me feel safer as I walk home at night. You know like, I'm not I'm like you know I would sometimes be a little bit sarcastic with police officers. I'd be like, "Really? Like, I feel so much safer knowing you're on the street arresting people for this. Like what, what are you doing?" And of course, it was often not the individual's fault. It was really the policy and the incentives of the systems. And so I started kind of, you know getting really interested in what are the incentive structures and what are the systems that are at play here that are leading these to these kinds of absurd results. Jeena: Yeah, yeah. So let's go back to self-care. Were there any particular aspects of doing the advocacy job where you kind of felt like you needed to practice self-care? Like what was the impetus for you recognizing that? Like, "Hey I need some additional tools to be able to continue to do the work that I'm doing effectively." Aditi: We've co-founded The Resistance Manual and it launched right around the inauguration, so it was like January 20th. So I was a third-semester law student running an organization of 300 people. And I was just overwhelmed. It was really a time thing that I was like, I just don't have the time to be attending whatever it was, four or five classes, writing papers, and like all of that while supervising, facilitating, coordinating the work of 300 volunteers for this monster of a project that I created. And I was just very, it was really a time crunch and I felt like because I was the person who had created it, it was the vision, it was new. You know, there was no internal infrastructure; there was no like HR to refer people to. Right? Like I was the person with all, you know who had answered all the questions and I was kind of perpetually on call. And especially in the early months of the administration, now we've almost gotten used to it. But like, the fact that there was a crisis every day was like...now we're kind of like, "Well there's a crisis every day." That has somehow become normal but like, when we first started that was definitely not normal. We were like, "What the hell?" Every moment you're just on, and first the Muslim ban, Paris agreement, and it was just always something. And there were lots of leaks early on of proposed executive orders. And so I was, fortunately, kind of, I'm a systems thinker so I was really trying to like figure out like how do I create systems to handle these things. You know, building teams, creating a layer of team leaders, an FAQ document, a principles and guidelines document, like really trying to create a process to kind of absorb some of the questions and confusion that was existing in the organization I was building but it was still just a lot. And it was this feeling of, you think you're doing work that's important and matters. But at the same time, no one had done what I was doing before. Lots of people had done organizing before, but no one had created a policy platform before in the way that The Resistance Manual existed and with the purpose of being targeted to the general public. So, of course, you have think tanks that issue reports and stuff, but no one had created what we were trying to do. So I was just in this constant state of like, I have no idea what I'm doing. And it's not as though, I can ask others who have built new things, but it's not as though I can ask someone who has done this before because no one has done this before. And so, I was like looking for ways to keep myself calm, keep myself focused, not to feel guilty.…
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