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S5E11: (Rebroadcast) Youth Voting Rights, with Professor Yael Bromberg RLAW'11
29 Plays8 months ago
REBROADCAST: Clinic Attorney and Lecturer Yael Bromberg RLAW'11 joins host and Rutgers Law School Dean Johanna Bond to discuss her journey through law school, her work advocating for youth voting rights, and the law school experience as a professor.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Production Manager: Shanida Carter
Series Producer & Editor: Nate Nakao
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rutgerslaw/messageRecommended
Transcript
Voter ID Laws: Student IDs vs. Handgun Permits
00:00:02
Speaker
In other states, for example, students cannot vote using their student identification card. And in Tennessee, a faculty member can vote using their faculty ID issued by the same institution of higher education, but not the student. But by the way, if you have a handgun permit, you can vote using your handgun permit. And the same in Texas, you can vote with a handgun permit, but not a student identification card.
00:00:26
Speaker
And so the list really goes on and on about the ways in which young people are uniquely discriminated and it comes down to sometimes just local electoral administration decisions about whether or not to put a polling location on campus that can be a county-based decision and then also all the way up to state law.
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:51
Speaker
Welcome to the Power of Attorney podcast. My name is Joanna Bond and I'm the Dean of Rutgers Law School. And I'm thrilled that I have here as a guest today, Yael Bromberg, who is a professor with us at Rutgers Law School. Yael, you're a first-generation American. Can you please tell us a little bit about your origin story and what brought you to law school? Sure.
00:01:17
Speaker
Thank you, Dean, for inviting me and having me on the podcast. And I know you've been in the deanship for several months, but a warm welcome to Rutgers Law School. Thank you so much. So I teach at Rutgers Law. And yeah, the way that I, my origin story is,
Yael Bromberg's Background and Heritage
00:01:37
Speaker
I, as you noted, I'm a first gen American. I was actually naturalized as a U.S. citizen after law school during my clerkship. And my parents immigrated from Lithuania and the former Soviet Union to Israel and eventually came to the United States.
00:02:02
Speaker
And, you know, I don't kind of speak about it often, but I think that that really was foundational for my understanding and conceptualization of human rights, of constitutional rights and of democracy. And what happens when hate becomes normalized and codified into law and,
Diversity and Public Interest at Rutgers Law
00:02:29
Speaker
you know,
00:02:31
Speaker
the repression that can result from that. So I was born in Brazil. All of my family is in Israel.
00:02:38
Speaker
And I was raised in New Jersey. And so my viewpoint has been very much influenced from this kind of these global influences. And I think that's ultimately why I decided to go to law school. I'm the first law lawyer in my family. And my sister happily also joined me at Rutgers Law as well. So she's the second lawyer in our family. And I believe that that kind of foundation, our family history with
00:03:09
Speaker
with pogroms, with the Holocaust. My grandfather was sent to the Gulag work camps in Siberia. I think that he was there for about a decade in the prison work camps. And I really believe that that somehow motivated me to pursue law as a means for protection of rights.
00:03:34
Speaker
Well, that makes a lot of sense. That's a powerful family history, and I completely understand how you wound up focused on human rights. And I have to say, you and I have a lot in common. I also grew up in New Jersey. You and I both completed the Georgetown Teaching Fellowship, although I was many, many years before you. And now we're both at Rutgers and working on human rights issues. So I'm just delighted that you're here, and I'm delighted to get the chance to speak with you.
00:04:02
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit about what led you to Rutgers Law specifically? I was very much attracted to Rutgers Law. I was a Rutgers undergrad and actually all my siblings were Rutgers undergrads and Rutgers grads, graduate school. And I really believe in the power of public school. I went to Rutgers and and Rutgers Law because I knew it was
00:04:31
Speaker
a fantastic and well-rounded education. And Rutgers Law specifically, because of its diversity, I really believe that having that diversity of experiences in the classroom makes for stronger classroom dialogue, but it also just makes you
00:04:54
Speaker
more well-grounded as a human being operating in the world and pursuing law.
Yael's New Jersey Upbringing
00:05:01
Speaker
And so I came to Rutgers Law because of its diversity and its commitment to the public interest. And I knew so many attorneys because I was a community organizer before going to law school. So I knew so many attorneys that went to Rutgers Law
00:05:17
Speaker
and found a way to do really incredible public interest work. And I really thought, okay, this makes sense. And so those were all of the kind of information points that motivated me to go to the law school.
00:05:34
Speaker
Well, what you've just said about Rutgers and the emphasis on public interest, work, and social justice is one of the many things that make Rutgers a very special place. So I'm so glad that you wound up here. And so I have to also ask, where in New Jersey are you from?
00:05:51
Speaker
All over, I mean, I grew up in Farallon, New Jersey and North Jersey. And I went to middle school and high school in Ridgewood. And I spent a lot of time in the now officially state recognized central Jersey area in the New Brunswick area and also in Newark. I spent a lot of time in Newark even before coming to law school. So really all over New Jersey.
00:06:20
Speaker
Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I grew up in Ramsey, so very close to Fairlawn and very close to Ridgewood. And when we were in high school, I guess this was more middle school, we would take the train from Ramsey to Ridgewood, and that felt like the big city to us. So that was my early experience with Ridgewood. Well, great. I'm so glad, I'm so glad that you made it to Rutgers and to Rutgers Law School.
Law School Classes and Constitutional Law
00:06:43
Speaker
So I want to do a quick round of softball questions. What was your favorite and least favorite class in law school?
00:06:52
Speaker
Well, I love constitutional law. I was taught by Professor Pope. I really gravitated to the conversation, the dialogue. And it's constitutional law for the non-attorneys that might be listening is one of the required first-year classes. And it can be very intimidating to participate in that classroom because of the differences of interpretation, the questions at issue, et cetera.
00:07:20
Speaker
So I'll admit that I was very intimidated to participate in that class, but I did. And I really loved Professor Pope's teaching. And then my least favorite class was Trusts in Estates, which I squeezed in during my last semester of 3L year.
00:07:41
Speaker
Um, and the professor was excellent. It was more, I was just, you know, I was, I put everything together. I tried to compress. I was commuting to SDNY to do a clerk, uh, an externship with a judge in SDNY. And I was in the clinic and I think my heart just was not in.
00:08:01
Speaker
I was not going to be a trusted estate lawyer, so that was my least favorite. Understood. Well, we all have one of those bar classes that we just took because it felt like it was important to take it, but not necessarily where our passion is or was. Okay, so the constitutional law connection makes a lot of sense given what you're doing now. It strikes me that that would be likely to be the most interesting class for you.
00:08:28
Speaker
Favorite restaurant, favorite place to eat nearby, near the law school? Well, Newark has so many options and there used to be other restaurants. I remember, I think it was called Mix 27 on Halsey Street. I think that that closed maybe, but they had a really great patio.
00:08:50
Speaker
And so now when I just want a quick bite to eat, um, I go to the, um, the falafel place on, on Halsey, the original one. Um, so yeah, there's a, there's a really great kind of fresh salad, a quick place. And, and I have my biases around what, um, you know,
00:09:11
Speaker
like what good hummus should be. And so I really improve their hummus over there. That's great. That's a good recommendation. OK, and favorite place in Newark. Newark has so many beautiful places. It's such a gem of a city. I really believe that. And I love the Newark Museum. I love Branch Brook Park. I used to live alongside Branch Brook Park. It's such an incredible place.
00:09:41
Speaker
to go to, especially during the cherry blossom, but also all year round. And you know, Newark is such a vibrant
00:09:51
Speaker
city. And you can see that also by the artists, the local artists and the work that they produce. And so all of the kind of local studios, the art galleries, I mean, they just give so much life to the city. And so there's just there's a lot of options. Some people don't realize just how rich the New York community is and the incredible institutions that it has to offer.
00:10:18
Speaker
I totally agree. Because I'm new to the Newark community, I'm still exploring. But those are all great recommendations. So I'll put them on my list. So going back to law school for a moment, what do you think was the most important thing that you learned while you were at Rutgers Law School?
Becoming a People's Lawyer at Rutgers
00:10:37
Speaker
I learned how to be a people's lawyer at Rutgers Law School.
00:10:44
Speaker
Because I was an organizer going into law school, I knew that there was something like that available at the law school, but that really manifested and came into reality while being there. You know, Rucker's Law has such a rich history from Professor Mendelson, who was so committed to the international human rights field, to Professor Askin,
00:11:09
Speaker
and Arthur Kanoy, both who co-founded the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Constitutional Rights Clinic, and Professor Venetis. I mean, and really all the professors in the clinic. I mean, Rutgers Law School taught me how to be a people's lawyer, and there was a huge commitment
00:11:28
Speaker
to public interest and public service. And that's not to say that every single graduate ends up pursuing that area of law, but at least they have some exposure to it. And even if they go into corporate law or another area in private practice that might be, you know, kind of to a naked eye divorced from people's lawyering or movement lawyering, I like to believe that
00:11:57
Speaker
they've been trained in public interest law and service, and at least the kind of the theory of it, and that they can continue to do good work through pro bono commitments, for example, through their firms. Great. And for our listeners who may not be familiar with the term, what do you mean by movement lawyering?
Defining Movement Lawyering
00:12:18
Speaker
So movement lawyering, this is a political question because people have different kind of ideas of what that looks like. But to me, movement lawyering is a method of litigation and advocacy and using broad legal tools to empower
00:12:45
Speaker
the people that you represent, your clients, and the organizations and the issues around whatever the case or project is. And so as a practice of law, it's fairly unique.
00:13:02
Speaker
because I think traditionally we think of litigators as members of an elite class that are divorced from the clients and the issues and are simply technicians or practitioners on some
00:13:22
Speaker
some area of law that people don't necessarily understand or have a relationship to. And the idea of movement lawyering is kind of a leveling an equalization. And what I learned as a movement lawyer is that I learned just as much about my approach to litigation and my legal arguments from my clients as I do from
00:13:48
Speaker
the law library or the research tools, right? And it's true because they actually make me a better litigator and I'm better able
00:13:58
Speaker
to represent their issues once I've kind of broken down that hidden wall between us. Once I can be on a level playing field with them, there is an increased access of trust and accessibility. And once they tell me more about their case or their issue or whatever,
00:14:19
Speaker
I can therefore represent them in a much more proficient way as a practitioner. And we can support each other actually in getting the resolution that they need. And resolution for movement lawyering purposes, it can be winning in the courtroom.
00:14:36
Speaker
Sometimes it's a legal project like legislative advocacy or exploration of how to be more strategic in an organizing campaign, but still using kind of legal tools and a framework for that.
00:14:54
Speaker
All of these kind of concepts really wrap around essentially to be a lawyer that is working alongside and with the people and not divorced in a more traditionally conceived elitist sensibility. I love that client centered approach. And it doesn't surprise me at all that you learned that and embraced that at Rutgers Law School.
00:15:17
Speaker
So, did your experiences at Rutgers Law School lead you directly to the work that you're doing now in youth organizing and youth civic engagement and voting rights? Yes. I mean, before coming to law school, I was already working in the area of rights, but I didn't understand what that would look like fully as an attorney.
Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment
00:15:47
Speaker
And I think that there's a direct line from what I was doing before, but also what I learned at Rutgers Law School. At Rutgers Law School, I gravitated toward the Constitutional Rights Clinic and also just the other areas of rights-based jurisprudence.
00:16:03
Speaker
And now I have my own solo practice and I practice across the country around voting rights issues, including a specialty in youth voting rights in the 26th amendment, which was the most recent voting rights amendment to be ratified into the constitution. And it lowered the voting age to 18 and outlaws age discrimination with regard to access to the ballot. So one of the areas of voting rights that I do
00:16:32
Speaker
nationally is focusing on working with young people whose rights are expressly being denied, or being denied by less express ways.
00:16:47
Speaker
and working with them, sometimes with litigation. And in the best of circumstances, when we're successful, we altogether avoid litigation. And we've actually had some really great success stories. And it's really great to work with young people because you're also empowering them. And maybe they'll be public interest attorneys or just democracy practitioners, not necessarily as an attorney. And they'll carry that through with them as well. So it's a very rewarding area. And at home in New Jersey,
00:17:16
Speaker
I also do a lot of voting rights and election law as well. And there are other areas of constitutional rights where I practice such as free speech and civil rights, anti-discrimination, labor issues. But I learned all of that and it was exposed to all of it at Rutgers Law. And I think that had I gone to another law school,
00:17:41
Speaker
I probably would have eventually gravitated potentially towards likely, I think, given my interest towards public interest, but at Rutgers Law, there was such a area of reception and platform for the work that I found it very accessible and not some hidden office somewhere that I had to go and find one or two people. It was just, it was kind of front and center and it was really owned and celebrated.
00:18:11
Speaker
It is absolutely part of the institutional culture. That is right. And so you mentioned limitations on the voting rights of our youth that you're actively working against. Can you elaborate on that? What kind of limitations are we talking about?
00:18:31
Speaker
Well, there's a range. So the 26th Amendment forbids special burdens that are imposed on young people. That's a part of the congressional history, this idea of special burdens. And in Florida, for example, the state forbade these
00:18:49
Speaker
the placement of polling locations on college campuses during the early voting period. And so we fought that on 26th Amendment grounds, establishing wonderful recent precedent around this amendment, which if your listeners have not heard of it, there's a reason for that. It's been kind of forgotten as an amendment, but there's so much great power in it. And we went back and quantified the impact of that
00:19:20
Speaker
successful litigation and found that the judge basically implemented a preliminary injunction in August and by the 2018 election
00:19:33
Speaker
which was two to three months after the August preliminary injunction, there were 12 campuses that brought polling locations on campuses. 60,000 voters availed themselves of that mechanism in just three months, which is a huge electoral margin, a significantly impact electoral margin.
00:19:53
Speaker
And that was, of course, in Florida. And if you can just imagine a world in which there were on-campus polling locations across, just as this example, the state of Florida, you would not see higher education under attack the way that it currently is. And this is also in place in other states as well, not necessarily an outright ban on on-campus polling locations, although that was a measure that was
00:20:21
Speaker
introduced in Texas and thankfully failed this legislative session. But in other states, for example, students cannot vote using their student identification card. And in Tennessee, a faculty member can vote using their faculty ID issued by the same institution of higher education, but not the student. But by the way, if you have a handgun permit, you can vote using your handgun permit. And the same in Texas, you can vote with a handgun permit, but not a student identification card.
00:20:49
Speaker
And so the list really goes on and on about the ways in which young people are uniquely discriminated, and it comes down to sometimes just local electoral administration decisions about whether or not to put a polling location on campus that can be a county-based decision, and then also all the way up to state law.
00:21:12
Speaker
And so when it is a local decision, a county-based decision, for example, what's the advocacy strategy? Is it public education within those counties? Yeah, this needs a wraparound approach. And actually, this could not have been accomplished without my clinical students last semester, but we did a survey of the availability or lack thereof.
00:21:40
Speaker
of on-campus polling locations across three states. No one has ever done any type of approach to this methodology in the country. And what we found was just a drastic, it has yet to be published, what we found is a drastic lack of a securement of this mechanism.
00:21:59
Speaker
And when it's secured, it's actually widely celebrated and used and appreciated. But on the local level, yes, it's equipping undergraduate students with advocacy tools to go to their county board of elections in different states. It's called the different.
00:22:17
Speaker
agency is called differently, but to go and to do public presentations around the issue, to raise awareness around the issue, debunk myths that the local county election administrators might have around it, such as, for example, there might be some
00:22:35
Speaker
assumptions about not being able to secure a drop box on campus for the collection of vote by mail ballots. But there's also other really great examples of county administrators that do that and find that it's used with great success and great election integrity. And so, yes, there's the basic public education,
00:22:57
Speaker
for both the voters and the election administrators, the support for local-based advocacy, and when necessary, litigation. So I represented in multiple lawsuits Bard College
00:23:17
Speaker
which is in the Blue Empire State of New York State, not too, in the gorgeous Hudson River Valley, not too far from New York City. And you would think that this is something in place only in the red states, but actually the blue states have a lot to learn from this as well. For example, even New Jersey does not have Election Day registration, which is a
00:23:39
Speaker
key tool for youth voting rights. And neither does New York State. And anyway, in New York, I represented Bard College and the university president and the students in litigation in successful, successful, successive litigation to secure an on-campus polling location. It only makes sense. It's ADA accessible. The disability rights community came out in favor of this, right?
00:24:07
Speaker
it's available in that particular location, 70% of the voters came from that particular college. And our case was kind of so celebrated that it motivated a change in New York state law to mandate on-campus polling locations across the state of New York. And so we have looked at that
00:24:32
Speaker
as a model to promote in other states as a potential tool. And we've also incorporated that into a federal proposal for youth voting rights. Well, congratulations on that victory. That's such important work. And I love that it has this spillover effect and resulted in state level changes. That's fantastic.
00:24:57
Speaker
As you know, voting rights is an incredibly polarized issue in this country. And so where do you find common ground on this issue? Is that even possible?
Bipartisan Support for Youth Voting
00:25:12
Speaker
We have to fight for the common ground. We don't really have a choice. I mean, this is the social contract. It's the basic premise of the social contract is that we all participate and that we honor our laws and the democratic process.
00:25:28
Speaker
And I really, one of the things that gives me a lot of hope is this is the 26th Amendment, actually, is the Youth Voting Rights Amendment. It was passed unanimously in the Senate.
00:25:43
Speaker
nearly unanimously in the House, just shy of 19 votes. And it's the quickest amendment to be ratified in US history. It rounded the states, the requisite 38 states for ratification, in less than 100 days, which is almost unfathomable to even conceive of now. And the reason for that is the cross-partisan and bipartisan
00:26:07
Speaker
support and endorsement of the value that young people need to serve for the integrity and protection of our democracy. And it's a lowercase D. It's not a Democratic Party effort. It was really something that was embraced across the aisle. And so it's really interesting, right? From a constitutional rights perspective, we have all of these suspect classes that are protected and that have various degrees of protection.
00:26:33
Speaker
And age is one of the only ones, if not the only recognized one, that is a uniform concept. We've all been young. We all know what it's like to be young and all of the kind of
00:26:53
Speaker
stressors of being young, and God willing, we all age. And so when I, you know, even when I talk to Republican parents, for example, they don't want their kids, their college age students to not be able to have access to the ballot. So I see a lot of hope in this, the universalization that an age based
00:27:12
Speaker
anti-discrimination approach offers. But I also take a lot of hope from the 2020 election. The 2020 election had unprecedented voter rates by all Americans. We saw record voter turnout, the highest voter turnout in the 21st century, 67% of all citizens voted. That's 17 more, 17 million more people voting in 2020 compared to the prior
00:27:41
Speaker
presidential cycle. And that included and was a result of election modernization, right? Access to expanded vote by mail, access to smart election modernization tools that don't compromise voter integrity. The 2020 election was considered the most secure in US history. That's by two federal agencies. And of course, the election integrity has been upheld.
00:28:07
Speaker
by over 60 courts, and we're currently seeing prosecutions related to what happens when people kind of monkey around with the electoral system and try to do unnecessary power grabs. And just recently,
00:28:29
Speaker
A lawsuit, a novel lawsuit was filed based on 14th Amendment section three grounds to invalidate the candidacy of our 45th president based on his efforts to engage in insurrection and to support and aid and abet the insurrection. And so I see a lot of hope in the increased conversation
00:28:55
Speaker
of election integrity, the election modernization of our systems at large, which have since had some rollback, so we have to continue to defend them and to remind people of how we secured that unprecedented voter turnout rate. And I see a lot of hope specifically around the questions of age.
00:29:19
Speaker
And in New Jersey, I see a lot of hope because there are a lot of ways in which our electoral system in New Jersey has yet to fulfill the promise of what democracy and true democratic engagement looks like. And when we see these bad actors across the country, even by the other party, by the Republican party, it forces a conversation locally to increase new types of candidates to run for office.
00:29:46
Speaker
and to push for a more democratic expansion, including when it comes to what our primary ballot design looks like. And that's one of the lawsuits that I'm currently involved in as well, is a way to expand access on the New Jersey primary ballot.
00:30:06
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for sharing that hopeful note with us. I will say that I was at the Rutgers University Newark campus convocation a couple of days ago and the student body there, the student government was passing out voter registration cards, which I thought was fantastic. So it's nice to see that that conversation is happening on our own campus as well.
00:30:33
Speaker
So I agree. I agree. And Yael, you teach election law and you also teach in our international human rights clinic.
Teaching Election Law and Student Success
00:30:42
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about how it feels to be on the other side of the law school table, so to speak, as a professor rather than a student?
00:30:52
Speaker
Well, so I was in the clinic for one semester last semester working with Professor Venetas and I've now inherited the course of my, you know, my mentor Frank Askin who passed away fairly recently and election law in the political process. I taught it a few times now.
00:31:16
Speaker
And it's really interesting, right? Like I went to the law school graduation for the first time this past spring and it was just, you know, you can just feel a lot of love, right? A lot of celebration for the law students who are getting hooded and getting their diplomas and
00:31:42
Speaker
It's just, it is a really profound feeling to be proud of all that they've accomplished. And I actually, I also joined a really wonderful spring trip program that Professor Lopez organizes to go through the South and to stop at the Freedom History sites along the way, such as the famed
00:32:07
Speaker
Birmingham Jail where Martin Luther King penned his letter and the Montgomery Improvement Associations, the Brick Layers Union in Montgomery that housed the MIA that Dr. King and the Montgomery Movement organized out of. And so I really had these wonderful connections with the law students. And so being able to watch them and celebrate them as they graduated was
00:32:36
Speaker
such an accomplishment and such a kind of joy. And I think a part of that was that that was the first class that when they entered law school was right in the beginning of COVID also. And so being able to celebrate their success is so wonderful.
00:32:56
Speaker
And it was really funny for me to be joining also the faculty in that for the first time as well. And, you know, there's a lot of new faculty and a lot of kind of old faculty members, not old, but faculty members that I had as professors who are all wonderful professors and they continue to teach and to invest in the school.
00:33:18
Speaker
I agree with you. There's something that's so gratifying about watching your students, particularly students that you've gotten to know well, cross that stage at graduation. It is a very joyous moment. And so let me ask you, what advice would you have for some of our listeners who may be thinking about law school?
00:33:38
Speaker
Um, I think that
Advice for Prospective Law Students
00:33:40
Speaker
headache. So I, it's a funny question for me because I never knew that I was going to go to law school. Um, I thought that I was on the science track. Um,
00:33:50
Speaker
I thought I would do something around environmental work. It was not something that was very obvious to me, probably because I was the first lawyer in my family. There was no real modeling of what that was other than the attorneys that I worked with on my organizing campaigns.
00:34:10
Speaker
And so what I would recommend to folks who are thinking about going to law school is to have an open mind about what the process might look like, right? If you're interested in science, you can still go on and pursue law and do really wonderful things around medical and legal partnerships, for example.
00:34:32
Speaker
If you're interested in business, you can go to law school and learn about corporate law, and you might even get an MBA while you pursue law school, right? So the law really offers an open track for people to, even if you don't want to litigate, going to law school can really kind of give you such a powerful tool in your tool belt. And I've seen a lot of my
00:34:55
Speaker
former classmates go into litigation and be wonderful litigators and attorneys and go into other fields, but using the legal tool that they now have available to them. And so I would suggest for potentially incoming students to really have an open mind about the process and continue to engage with their curiosity as they go through law school.
00:35:23
Speaker
And also, really importantly, before they kind of enter that next phase, if they choose to do it, is to get really centered about their why. Because law school is really tough. And the first year and the first semester is really tough. And you want to know why you're going and what your intentions are on the other side. And I find when I teach 3L students, for example,
00:35:50
Speaker
that, and I start to introduce like certain reading materials that they say to me, for example, I have, there's a chapter in Arthur Kanoy's book on people's lawyering that I, that I assign at the top of the class. And they say to me, and there's also a really great article by a professor, Bill Quigley, called a letter to a law student. So I also assign that. And
00:36:17
Speaker
The three I'll say to me, I'm so grateful that you've assigned this because it reminds me of why I went to law school and I forgot about that. And there's so many pressures along the way to kind of conform, right? To go on one certain kind of predetermined track to do the necessary steps, which are all good and important to take.
00:36:36
Speaker
But you have to have kind of a balanced and open-minded approach. And I think that if you're considering going into law school, just really centering and even writing yourself your own letter or whatever it is to keep as a focal point your why. Why are you going? Because you can continue to refer to that when you break down crying from stress.
00:36:59
Speaker
or you have any in and you're studying hard and whatever the issue, or you've been rejected, because there's countless rejections that you'll have along the way. And so everyone has their own path, but focusing on your why will kind of be your steady state to your journey.
00:37:18
Speaker
That is such great advice, Yael. Thank you very much for sharing that. And so I have one last question for you. And that is, what's next for you? What's your next career move? What's your ultimate goal?
Commitment to Public Interest Law
00:37:31
Speaker
I'm not sure what's next for me. I have my solo law practice, which I'm really thrilled about, where I primarily practice democracy law with some work around civil rights, kind of broadly construed democracy law. But for me, my goal is really to see how I can work to have the biggest change in impact.
00:37:54
Speaker
I think there's so many injustices, broadly speaking, around constitutional rights and public interest work, that that's really my goal. And if I can work on a team, just because I have a solo doesn't mean I don't work on legal teams, right? There's innovative ways to do that. But if I can work and build teams and support campaigns and movements,
00:38:17
Speaker
and young people, then I think that that'll be what I always do. But the way in which I do it may look different over time, but I found that that's been my consistency, is the focus on that journey. So I don't know what's next, but those are kind of my own posts, really, for my professional track.
00:38:46
Speaker
That's great. Your work is such an inspiration, and I really appreciate you taking time out from it to talk to us today. Thanks so much, Yael. Take care.
00:38:57
Speaker
Thank you for having me.
Conclusion and Rutgers Law School Invitation
00:38:59
Speaker
The Power of Attorney is a production of Rutgers Law School. With two locations just minutes from New York City and Philadelphia, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large nationally known university with a personal small campus experience. Learn more today by visiting us at law.rutgers.edu.