CUNY Law Associate Professor and alumna Julia Hernandez ’12 didn’t have a singular moment in which she realized she wanted to practice and teach law.
“The law was all around us growing up and not in helpful ways. For me individually, to counter this—my own personal practice of resistance—the most obvious route was to identify things I didn’t know that I needed to know more about. How can this legal system have this much power? How is it constructed? Education and learning made me feel freer under trying circumstances.”
Julia was especially interested in how the law was used to destabilize families and what work that destabilization did for the state. After law school, Julia practiced in the “grotesque arena of family separation.” She represented non-citizens fighting deportation with Catholic Migration Services and later practiced in Brooklyn Defender Services’ Family Defense Practice, where she represented parents in child neglect and abuse proceedings. Through her work with families ensnared in the immigration and family regulation systems, she saw that there were important gaps in her knowledge.
“I realized I hadn’t made concrete connections between the long history of family separation as a tool of social control across time and space. Native children were separated from their families. Enslaved people’s families were routinely devalued, undermined, and torn apart. What is happening at the border and in courtrooms right here in New York City is nothing new; it’s the same practice, simply masquerading as protecting children.”
Julia reflects that law school itself evoked a dissonance between her first-hand experience with legal systems and actors and the “sanitized” and “disembodied” study of the same systems in law school. In her recent article, “Lawyering Close to Home,” in Clinical Law Review, she argues:
“Conventional legal education and lawyering reifies the ‘us-them’ dichotomy that is incongruent with our lives and radical visions of lawyering. It mistakenly teaches us to choose between identities when the state knocks on our door. Yet these events, and our responses to them, defy such regnant notions of what it means to be a social justice lawyer, and they contain latent opportunities to engage lawyers with their communities and broader struggles for social justice.”
Julia suggests three transformations in legal education to better meet the demands of rebellious law practice for racial and economic justice: studying the political origins of law while de-centering judicial opinions, expanding syllabi, and teaching history.
In addition, she calls for disruption and innovation in law school practices, including the funneling of students to legal services jobs. While these roles and the services they provide are critical to to people facing government intervention, they often do so through the nonprofit industrial complex, which uses nonprofits to manage and control dissent by incorporating them into the state apparatus, disconnected from organizing efforts for systemic change.
“CUNY has more students from politically marginalized backgrounds than other law schools. For them to more fully participate in drawing the blueprints to create a just society, we need more graduates across the spectrum of legal jobs, especially in positions of power. We need more of them clerking and eventually on the bench, as well as in policy, impact litigation, and legislative positions. We need them serving movements from outside the nonprofit industrial complex. But without more exposure to these kinds of practice, students will lack experience to access these positions, and to engage with more experimental or radical approaches to using the law as a tool for social change. I would offer more opportunities for experiential learning and would allow students to take clinic earlier in their law school careers. Students need fewer simulations and more varied practice experience.”
Julia enjoys the technical aspects of working with students. “One of my jobs as professor is as an excavator or a highlighter: To draw out students’ talents and skills which are sometimes latent and not obvious to them but easy to see from the outside. It feels really good watching students grow and develop as advocates and thinkers. I feel very grateful to be a part of that process.”
She also expresses that her students inspire her deeply. “At CUNY, many of our students know the application of the law on the ground, and I love being in a classroom with them. They bring so much to the table. They aren’t as separate from clients as other social justice lawyers. This proximity is an interesting element that we need to explore more.”
Julia notes that this exploration is often flattened into “apolitical explorations” about “cross-cultural lawyering” and “emotional intelligence,” which are offered to help students develop a “professional identity.”
“The problem, as I understood it at the time, was that people like me—whose upbringings were punctuated by crises created and exploited by the state—were not welcome in the kinds of spaces in which law schools are situated, so dissonance and traumatic learning were taxes I paid for entry. The problem, as I see it now, is that law schools are generally not responsive to these students’ realities and needs, beginning with the very notion that one must forge a ‘professional identity,’ a bewildering concept for people for whom social justice lawyering is, first and foremost, about one’s survival, not about a career or profession, although this aspect of the work usually does emerge later.”
In Julia’s piece in the Law and Political Economy Blog, she dreams of intergenerational joy.
“In the world I want to live in, intergenerational joy is a worthy dream, and it is big enough. Lawyers have a place at the messy, frenetic, stunning table where we will build out this dream, but only if they are willing to occupy different and multiple chairs or, sometimes, none at all.”
You can read Julia’s article on how to put LPE into practice in legal services in the Law and Political Economy Journal , check out her article“Lawyering Close to Home” in Clinical Law Review, and follow her on Twitter at @JMHernandez126.