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Jayashri Srikantiah; Director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic and Associate Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
by Regan Morris
Srikantiah says starting the Immigrants Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School was like starting her own little law firm. The former ACLU attorney canvassed the San Francisco Bay Area for ideas and organizations to work with.
"I had to be entrepreneurial about setting up projects and setting up cases and getting clients and setting up relationships with groups in the Bay Area, who would then send us cases and projects," she said.
"But I also had to be entrepreneurial within the laws school—promoting the clinic, telling the students that this is something fun that they should try, and creating a buzz around the clinic. That entrepreneurial feeling was there in the beginning, and it's still there to an extent, because this is only the third semester," she said.
Srikantiah, an engineer with computer chip maker Intel before becoming an attorney, said she spoke with immigrants' rights attorneys in the area before deciding on the focus of the clinic: the direct representation of immigrants in deportation proceedings and cases involving immigrant survivors of domestic violence. The clinic works on individual cases and bigger advocacy issues and policy on behalf of groups of immigrants.
"It's a time when immigration always seems to be in the newspapers, with Congress taking up the idea of comprehensive immigration reform and President Bush mentioning it in his State of the Union address," she said. "This is something on people's minds. So it is also a time when students really want to interact with those issues as part of their law school experience as well."
Srikantiah immigrated to the United States from India when she was four and grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in San Jose. She said her personal experiences influenced her decision to pursue a career in immigrants' rights, as well as the fact she viewed the group as especially marginalized and in need of legal help.
"In our legal system, immigrants have very few rights; and they're not entitled to lawyers, to free attorneys, the way that criminal defendants are," she said. "And as a consequence, many, many people are unrepresented; and as a community, because they don't vote, they don't have as much of a voice."
The clinic also provides outreach educational programs for immigrants. Students involved in the clinic work on all aspects of a case: interviewing clients and witnesses, investigating facts, writing pleadings, developing case strategy, conducting legal research, and presenting cases.
Srikantiah said it was incredibly gratifying to see the students argue in court for the first time and said that most students find it very exciting. She said they spend months preparing for a courtroom appearance so the student attorneys are prepared to handle the case.
As an engineer, Srikantiah worked on Intel's first Pentium team from 1991-1993. She says she enjoyed engineering but wanted more.
"After being an engineer for a couple of years, I realized that I wasn't doing as much writing and wasn't interacting as much in public policy as I would like in my career. So I went to law school, and it ended up being a good choice for me," she said. "Engineering wasn't a perfect fit for me. Although I obviously was intellectually and analytically very much challenged as an engineer, they don't do that much writing, and you definitely don't interact that much with overall public policy in terms of what you read in the news, what is going on in the world, how do you want to influence social change. It doesn't happen as easily as part of your career."
Srikantiah initially thought she would practice intellectual property law to work with her engineering background, and she did briefly work in the field. But the pull to work in public interest and have a voice in social change was strong. She started working in immigrants' rights as a staff attorney with the ACLU, where she worked from 1998 to 2004. Srikantiah graduated from New York University Law School, magna cum laude, in 1996 and clerked for The Honorable David Thompson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Diego. She then spent a year as a litigation associate with Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin in San Francisco.
As a teacher, Srikantiah says there are often priceless moments when she sees her students understanding a concept for the first time. She said there was a rapid learning curve involved in teaching and she urges her students to try new things and experiment while they are in law school.
"The advice I give most frequently is that students should experiment in law school to see what kind of things they like and not focus on classes that they think they should take or internships that they think they should take or things they think they should do," she said. "But also look into classes in new fields in new areas that they might be interested in, because you never really know where your career might take you and being exposed to different options and opportunities in law school is one way to open a lot of doors for yourself later on."
Srikantiah says she takes her own advice while running the clinic, because each semester is different and she has to quickly adapt to new challenges. She was approached by Stanford over lunch one day to help create the clinic, which proves that dream jobs can come knocking on your door—if you've built up an expertise in the area.
"In doing all of this, one of the things I've learned is that you have to constantly change your approach and way of doing things because different students are different and different semesters are different and different cases are different, so things are constantly changing," she said. "And it's that ability to be flexible that really makes you have a chance of succeeding."
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