Pursuing a Legal Career in Social Justice

Transcript

Thank you, Crystal. Firstly, good evening and welcome everyone to our seventh and final event in the Brennan Justice Talk series. Tonight, we're focusing on pursuing a legal career in social justice.

My name is Dr Elise Methven and I am Zooming in this evening from Wangal Country. I'm one of the co-directors of the Brennan Justice and Leadership Program. I'm joined here by a few members of our Brennan team. Of course, you'll know one of my fellow co-directors from the UTS Law Students' Society, Georgina Hedge, and also Crystal McLoughlin, our Brennan administrator. I'm also joined this evening by our Dean, Professor Lesley Hitchens, and most importantly, our special guests and panellists: Alison Whittaker, Thalia Anthony, and Zaheer Edries. We'll be hearing more about them shortly.

Before we do, I'd also like to say that we're very fortunate this evening to be joined by UTS Elder in Residence, Aunty Glendra Stubbs, who will do the Acknowledgement of Country for us. Thank you so much, Glendra.

Thank you, Elise. Can you see me? We can see and hear you. Oh, okay, thank you. I've only got that funky picture there, so great, thank you.

I'd like to acknowledge that I'm on the land of the Darug and Gundungurra people and say thanks for me living a lifetime here. UTS is part of Gadigal Eora Nation, and so I pay respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and say thanks for allowing UTS to be on their land. The University of Technology is built where it's built. As we share our knowledge, learning and research practices within this university, may we pay respects to the knowledge embedded forever within our culture.

I also pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and say thanks for the way they've looked after us and for the struggles they've had. Also, present Elders and the young ones who are proud to be the emerging Elders. I also want to say thanks to our non-Indigenous brothers and sisters who walk with us on this journey for social justice.

As some of you might know, I did a big stint with the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse, and what became very apparent to me was that Aboriginal people had to learn to trust lawyers, because they'd only been in their lives when they were in trouble with the law or when child protection was involved. But I need to say that the social justice warriors that are lawyers now are earning that trust, and now it's like they're embracing lawyers. You're doing a wonderful job, an absolute wonderful job. I said the other day to the magistrates, when I was doing some training with them, that the lawyers coming through who have learned about our trauma and our past are social justice warriors. So don't any of you forget that you are social justice warriors, and it's the hardest to engage people in Australia. We are engaging with you, and I'd like to say, including in my friend list, Thalia and Alison. So big hugs to you all and keep up the good work. We need you.

Thank you so much, Aunty Glendra. I think they're really inspiring words for students and also clearly remind us of the responsibility we have as lawyers, future lawyers and legal scholars as well. Thank you for that.

Tonight, we have the unique pleasure of being connected with UTS law students across multiple years, all passionate about social justice. I'm going to, as always, lay out a few Zoom housekeeping rules for this evening.

This Zoom event is being recorded for teaching, learning and research purposes. Only key speakers and those asking questions in the discussion will come up in the Zoom. Please put your microphone on mute when not speaking. If you find the event is freezing due to your bandwidth, you might want to turn your camera off to free up bandwidth. Tonight, we expect quite a lot of the Brennan community to tune in and we'd love to see your lovely faces, so if you can turn on your cameras, wonderful; if not, we understand. Especially if you're asking a question, we'd love to see your face, but we also understand if that's not possible.

Lastly, a very important request for current students: make sure you claim your five ROJ points by putting your full name now in the chat box. You can also use the chat box for asking questions this evening.

Now, with all that housekeeping settled, I would love to introduce you to our distinguished guests and panel members, some of whom I'm sure you'll be familiar with. Firstly, we have Gomeroi poet, lawyer and senior researcher at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at UTS, Alison Whittaker, whose work draws attention to the systemic failings and racism of the Australian criminal justice system and contributes to our knowledge around Aboriginal deaths in custody. Welcome, Alison.

Secondly, we have lawyer and General Counsel at GetUp, Zaheer Edries, also a long-term friend of mine who I went through law school with. Zaheer is executive member of, and former president of, the Muslim Legal Network, whose work centres around advocating for social justice and inclusion.

Last but not least, many of you will know legal academic Professor Thalia Anthony, whose research expertise in criminal law and Indigenous peoples and the law has informed policy and debates in relation to systemic change and seeking remedies for wrongs inflicted on Indigenous communities. Welcome also to Thalia.

I will now stop sharing the screen and ask the first question for this evening, which is for both Alison and Zaheer, and perhaps Alison would like to answer this one first.

You are both UTS law graduates. Can you tell us a bit about your career trajectory after you graduated from UTS Law, and how do you use your law degree in your current work? Thanks.

Hi everyone, I'm Alison Whittaker, a Gomeroi woman. I just want to acknowledge before we get any further that I'm here on Gadigal and Wangal Country, and acknowledge their Elders and ancestors and their continued sovereignty over this place. I was very pleased and honoured to graduate from UTS relatively recently, so my trajectory is very short. I graduated in 2016, and it was a momentous occasion. I want to encourage anybody here—I've been in your shoes and at times it does seem insurmountable, and those were in pretty ordinary times. I accept that most of you here are studying during really extraordinary times, and I just want to urge you on as much as I can. You do get to the end eventually.

After I graduated, I went straight to do a Graduate Certificate in Legal Practice and got about halfway through that before I disappeared to the other side of the world, to Turtle Island (North America), where I went on to do some further study on a Fulbright scholarship. That's where most of the research I've done to date on First Nations deaths in custody and how they track through review systems on this continent was cultivated, having got a little bit of space from just reacting in the day-to-day.

In that intervening period, I was working as a researcher. I was really lucky to have the mentorship of Thalia, who I'm sure is going to be very humble about her role in this, but was one of the first people to introduce me to the idea of scholarship as a vehicle for social change, and legal scholarship in particular as having a responsibility to the community it purports to serve. So thank you, Thalia—I'd be remiss not to mention that now I've got you here on the call.

From there I returned, and I'm now working at the Jumbunna Institute. Clearly UTS has had a pull on me, so you can go very far with a law degree from UTS, or you can just hang around as much as you like—it's really up to you. The work I do at the Jumbunna Institute is, like many jobs facing our generation of law graduates, really quite diffuse: a mixed campaigning role, a mixed advisory role, essentially about making sure First Nations communities are heard, as well as bringing their legal interests onto a political agenda, a campaign agenda, and to formal courts, especially in the Coroner's Court, which is where my specialty currently lies.

So the career trajectory has been short, diffuse, and has landed me right back in the tower. I'm sure Zaheer has maybe a more wide-ranging experience than I have.

Thanks, Alison. Zaheer, would you like to share a bit about your career trajectory after graduating from UTS Law?

Yeah, sure, thanks. I just want to, like the speaker before me, acknowledge that I'm dialling in from Stolen Land. I'm on the land of the Gadigal people here in Sydney. For me, a lot of my social justice context comes from growing up in Perth—I was born in South Africa as well, so I grew up on Noongar land and made friends with Elders there very early, because that was a connection that I, as an African migrant, found myself making really early on. I'm humbled to be here with you Gadigal people, so thanks for having me.

Very quickly, in terms of my career trajectory, it's probably important to know that I came to UTS as a postgrad. I came because it was important to me that the university—this is not just because the Dean is here—was a really accommodating place for me. I moved to Sydney by myself, so being able to study law in the evenings, do what was then called the Masters of Law and Legal Practice (now the JD), was really important for me and set my path to doing this social justice work. The subjects I was able to do helped me fine-tune what I wanted to do in the future.

That being said, my career trajectory is bizarre and strange, probably out of necessity. I've been an investigator since graduating, I've worked in the police department for a number of years, I've worked on Royal Commissions, I've worked in private practice at top-tier law firms, I've worked in specialist law firms, and I now find myself at GetUp as its General Counsel. That's a very short version, and I might tell you a couple of interesting bits which you as students might find entertaining or think I'm mad, but either way, I'm going to tell you anyway.

I graduated in August 2008. I was finishing off an investigator role, which is quite important because the skills you learn were really helpful for me to be a government investigator. I was a workplace conduct investigator at RailCorp. I did work closely with, believe it or not, New South Wales ICAC—quite topical right now—and that was a really interesting start to my career. I then, like many graduates, moved into a graduate-type program. For those of you old enough to know, 2008 was a difficult year for graduates of any degree. We had this little thing called the Global Financial Crisis, which meant graduate positions went from 40 at PwC, for example, to three.

So, interestingly, I had to think about how I would engage in a career that I necessarily may have thought—like many people—you want to do. I did my Masters of Law and Legal Practice in International Law, which was really interesting, but there aren't many jobs for international human rights lawyers in Australia, believe it or not. That being said, it doesn't mean you can't do the work. What I mean by that is, outside of my job, I didn't want to sit on my laurels and think, "How do I get a job during a global recession?" A bunch of my colleagues started what Elise alluded to at the beginning when she introduced me: the Muslim Legal Network of New South Wales.

At the time, we were combating some really difficult counter-terrorism legislation around the country. We formed a supportive network which quickly evolved into an advocacy space. My legal practice helped work in that campaign space, which we'll probably talk about a little bit later on. That quickly progressed and sharpened some of my skills as a graduate lawyer. I moved through private practice for maybe about a decade, moved into in-house work, which I also found really satisfying, and it allowed me to think about different things and apply my legal brain in different ways. All of that NGO-type work is ultimately what got me to GetUp.

If you're a lawyer who works in this space, you're often touted as a troublemaker, or I'd like to think we're more people who like to stir up the status quo, which I think is really important in our profession and in our space, because if we don't, nothing changes. For the last three years, I've found myself living in this little space, admiring the work of Thalia and Alison and seeing them speak at places like Redfern Law and just being really fascinated about what we can do with a law degree in this day and age.

Thanks, Elise. Thanks, Zaheer. Obviously, we'll have a lot of questions on those issues later. I'd also now like to ask Thalia: can you explain why you decided to pursue a career as a legal academic, and what led you to focus your research on criminal justice and First Nations people and the law?

Thanks, Elise. I'd also like to acknowledge that I'm on unceded Wangal land of the Eora Nation, and especially thank the amazing Aunty Glendra for her acknowledgement as well. I also have to put it out there that although Alison claims not to have moved far from the tower, she's constantly on the front line and connected with community, and that's a testament to Alison's work, as well as the work of Jumbunna at UTS.

To answer your question, Elise, and probably the second part first: my journey to becoming a legal academic is not really orthodox. I studied arts/law and then halfway through put my law degree on hold to do my PhD in history, which was on colonial histories in the Northern Territory, especially for cattle station workers. Part of that was looking at the role of legislation and case law in that process of colonisation. So I came to the law being really conscious of historical legacies in oppressing First Nations people.

I also, just to give away my age, grew up in the 1980s when racist policing and deaths in custody were becoming national issues. As a child, I was part of the protests at the time and really saw that injustice. When I studied law, it was about identifying the injustice but also trying to work out how the law can be a weapon for accountability and for change. It's this constant dialectic between law enforcing, as you say Zaheer, the status quo, but also pushing back on it.

In terms of my motivation for being a law academic, it was really to be a lecturer, to teach students. I initially did this in history and then in law, and today a lot of the work I do, as I see it, injustice is really in the classroom. Wiradjuri women like Laura Lyons and Aunty Bronwyn Penrith constantly remind me about knowledge being power. Obviously, we do social justice advocacy in the community, but I never underestimate that day-to-day engagement with students. Having started as a lecturer and continually being grateful for that opportunity, I also got to see the social justice work of my colleagues.

It's why in 2010 I came to UTS, because of the work Jumbunna and Larissa Behrendt were doing against the Northern Territory Intervention, and centres like Anti-Slavery were doing in the law faculty. To see how you could be an activist in your work was astonishing to me—that you could have this as a job, because activism was always just part of my life, and to think that my job could mirror that, I see as a real privilege and responsibility. So I guess my coming to this career, so to speak, kind of found me as much as I found it.

Thank you, Thalia, and I also want to acknowledge that Thalia has had a big influence on my career as well, and I'm sure a lot of students here as well.

Now my question is for all panellists, and I'm happy for anyone to jump in for this first question. Are there any particular campaigns or projects that you are working on right now that challenge an area of injustice? If so, can you provide a brief overview of this campaign or project, and why it is particularly significant in a social or political sense at this present time?

Look, I can talk on this question for three hours, but I'll try to keep it succinct. The short version is, I fell into this work around counter-terrorism legislation. In my undergrad, I studied criminology and legal studies, so my work was exposure to the criminal justice system—or as my friends call it, the criminal injustice system, because there's nothing just about it. What I found in my community, as someone who identifies as Muslim, is that around the time I graduated and we formed the Muslim Legal Network, there was significant exposure around pieces of legislation that were contrary to commonly held understandings of civil liberties in Australia and around the world. Australia has enacted dozens of pieces of legislation geared towards national security, and if I'm frank, targeted towards the Muslim or minority communities in Australia. We know this because of the way people have been charged and how it's been reported.

Why that's important and still ongoing is we know those things are intrinsically related to how race and power play into policy making. It's transitioned into what, even though I don't specifically campaign on this work at GetUp at the moment, is so intertwined with our democracy work, because you can't separate what we loosely call the democratic process from racist policy or racist implementation of that policy. When we talk about civil liberties at GetUp and our recent democracy report, it demonstrates in a matter-of-fact way just how poor Australia's observance is to what most people around the world would see as something really simple.

We know in Australia there's no inherent right to free speech; it comes out as a result of some case law. When we go down that rabbit hole, we see there's a lot of work to be done in this area, and it's ongoing. The unfortunate thing is we see these pieces of legislation where sunset clauses keep getting rolled over. Most people don't know there have been half a dozen sunset clauses automatically rolled over in the last 18 months. This is extraordinary—we're talking about the ability to detain a 14-year-old without charge, hold them and not tell their parents. There are extraordinary things occurring, and it would be remiss of me not to mention that as an important campaign, because it's emblematic of how we as a profession, if we want to talk about social justice, need to understand where our power lies: in challenging the power we create and reinforce as part of the system.

There's a whole thinking that needs to go behind it, and we don't do it generally as lawyers. I'm trying to do it more in my work. That's probably one of the more interesting things I'm working on at the moment at GetUp that I think is really important and we should be speaking about. I mentioned earlier that I was an investigator, and I think a lot of lawyers or people who want to do social change or social justice have a real closeness to wanting to see justice. We almost get drawn to policing in some way—we want to serve justice, and then we quickly pull ourselves away because we realise policing is often attached to the injustice that's served on our communities. When we talk about democracy and civil liberties, we can't separate power and injustice and how that influences and stigmatises a lot of communities, selfishly in my community, but I also work closely at GetUp with First Nations communities, and I think we really need to recognise that. But I'll let Alison and Thalia speak about that issue.

I actually don't work on any kind of grand unified campaign. A lot of the work I do is concentrated on serving directly First Nations families who experience the death of a loved one in custody. There was a report released today that finally crunched the official numbers: since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, there have been 471 First Nations deaths in custody up until the end of 2020, and we know in the intervening period there's been another 14. That's really quite diffuse work, in the sense that every death and every family must be honoured in the work you bring them along with. Every time you encounter people in these review systems, you're trying to guide them through, and also help them do things not being served by the legal system—actually trying to build campaigns that put political pressure on the design of the courts and review processes to make them more just.

One example: after a death in custody, there are mandatory inquests, and virtually all First Nations families are met with some kind of hostility in these review systems. One family who has experienced an exceptional version of this cruelty is the family of Wayne Fella Morrison, and Latoya Rule, his sibling, who is a PhD student and scholar here at UTS. The circumstances of Fella's death—he was restrained in a hogtied position with his arms and legs behind him, placed face down in a van with a spit hood placed over his head. In the period with no CCTV coverage, he lost consciousness and passed away a few days later in ICU. The guards who put him in the back of the van refused to speak, and to this day still refuse, claiming a novel penalty privilege—a right to protect themselves against professional consequences, not criminal ones.

In this space, because of the huge power dynamic, a lot of what you do in social justice lawyering is lining up to lose, and lose with dignity and in a principled way. There was a victory in this case: the family organised so specifically and in their power, understanding the limitations of the system and in honour of someone they loved, to get a legislative ban on spit hoods through the South Australian Parliament. To my understanding, that's the first time there's been an all-settings ban on the use of spit hoods, enshrined in legislation across all custodial and medical settings in the state. It's not complete justice, but it's an incredible way that concerted organising—including where there's a role for lawyers—can achieve tangible outcomes in unexpected places, certainly not in a court that has been resisting them every move.

That's an example of a campaign that's been very topical because it's happened so recently, but also demonstrates a model of possibility for how we can do this kind of lawyering going forward. It has me really excited for what's possible, acknowledging, of course, that with every First Nations death in custody, new wounds are being opened in our community. While these are crucial points for us to carry people through as lawyers or campaigners doing direct service work, they're not just opportunities for change but opportunities to hold close the dignity and the sorrow of those families as well.

My campaign at the moment is on COVID in prisons—trying to stop deaths in custody as a result of COVID. We know that prisons are inherently unsafe places, especially for First Nations people due to systemic racism in the quality and level of care. The gravity of the situation with COVID has brought together families, justice organisations, prisoner advocates and First Nations organisations like Deadly Connections in NSW. We've been working on trying to release people from prison because they're overcrowded environments which give rise to the rapid transmission of diseases like COVID.

Last month, we saw an outbreak of Delta, and it's continuing every day—there are new cases. Last month, there were over 400 COVID cases in prisons in Sydney, and at one point, the rate was ten times the transmission in prison compared to the general community. The risk is much greater, and yet these people have no choice to be there. Their loved ones are in absolute fear for their lives. In addition, the way it's been managed is through lockdowns—keeping people in their cell for 24 hours a day for several days, not even having the opportunity to shower. There's lots of demands around the conditions in prison and also the risk of dying from COVID. From personal experience with my auntie, I know that even a hospital in the community, an ICU ward and a ventilator might not save your life—and they don't have any of those things in prison.

It's a really critical situation. Some of the things we've been doing include bringing families together for support, advocating to corrections management and the government to have conditions improved—such as ensuring a tablet to every person in prison for digital visits. We're also running a legal case in the Supreme Court in two weeks, have appeared at parliamentary hearings, held press conferences, and continue to share information on a Facebook site we moderate. We're trying to use legal avenues, but also other social and political organisational avenues. We've had some success in the sense that prison numbers have rapidly decreased in the last couple of months, and judicial officers and parole boards are awakened to these issues that we're trying to keep in the public's attention. It's been a struggle, and Alison's research speaks to this—prisons are generally filled with silence in the media, and in the overwhelming COVID news cycle, prisons rarely feature. But it's gaining momentum, and I think the legal case will be another tool in our toolbox to ensure that the rights of people in prisons are not forgotten and that they have a voice as much as possible.

Thank you, Thalia, and thank you everyone for sharing those really personal and important stories. I'm just going to ask one more question because I also want to ensure there's time for student questions. This is to any panel member: in your experience, what are some of the ways in which the law or the justice system can either reproduce injustice or alternatively be used to challenge injustice?

I'll ask Alison first.

It's a fantastic question. The answer is: in all ways, it can be either. What's required is a really principled vigilance as social justice practitioners, whether we're engaged in the formal practice of law, campaigning, community organising, or in-house work. It requires vigilance not just about the impact we think we can make in the world, but also the forums we choose to ventilate issues and the methods we use to get things through. The moment you stop wrestling with these questions is when you have the capacity to do real harm on a grand scale. It's critical to continue to wrestle with the way you engage with the law and whether you are creating injustice or using the small bit of capacity that settler law has to push back and minimise harm in our communities.

Zaheer, would you like to add any observations there?

Without going over what Alison said, which I agree with completely, I'll give this perspective: there's a lot of students online, and you'll find challenges in your career, particularly early on, with what I call the question of integrity if you're going down this path. The question of integrity revolves around whether or not you're willing, in your heart of hearts—and you won't know the answer, it's a constant learning and educating yourself, and if you ever stop, you're in trouble. We know the law as a system has the potential to do harm, unfortunately, because people aren't balanced in—even though Lady Justice is blind and the scales are supposed to be even, we know we don't all come the same way to the law.

If you're ever in a place where something feels wrong in your gut—and as ridiculous as this sounds, I'm sure my panellists will agree—when it feels wrong, it probably is wrong. You need to think about whether, if you're going to live in this space of social justice, you're willing to stop and think back to what your integrity says about you in the decision you're about to make. Often that will guide you as to whether the law is helping you or hindering you. It's not a real answer, but it's a feeling that took me 15 years of practice to get on top of, and I'm still working on it now. So I thought I'd give everyone here a head start.

Thalia: Those were brilliant answers about the way in which we negotiate our relationship with the law and perceive the law. What I wanted to add is that, while it's really clear to me—and I get a lot of my impressions and deep feelings of outrage about what injustice is from people I work with who are affected by injustice—while it might be clear to me, we shouldn't take for granted these terms "justice" and "injustice". For some people, the rule of law, which can in many ways uphold power and privilege, is a system of justice, and many people who work in the law would say they work with integrity. For me, it's more about what the law does to uphold or challenge structural relationships, especially relationships of oppression, and identifying where you see yourself in that relationship. When we talk about social justice, we're talking about the broader community and how that is affected by laws, and how we work that out is by being engaged in the broader community. It's difficult to make those kinds of judgement calls from the sidelines, and once you get too embedded in a profession, it's hard to do that critical work. The critical work needs to start now.

As students, I wouldn't say you should be thinking about a future career in social justice. What I would say is social justice should just be something that's part of your life. Some of the most amazing social change in the world has happened through student movements, so don't underestimate your own power. That will help you navigate how the law works and what your role in it will be.

Thank you, Thalia. I'll hand over to Georgina now to field questions from the audience.

Thank you so much to our panellists. We've got a few questions coming in on the chat, which I'll read out. If anyone wants to ask a question live, feel free to use the raise hand function and I can call upon you, but if you're not comfortable, I'm happy to read out the questions.

First question from Melanie, and I think this is probably a question a lot of students might have: What are some things university students can do in commencing change when we are not yet in roles such as you all are? If any of the panellists want to contribute to that one.

Alison: It's not always something that's replicable, because I know it's much more difficult now and a lot of people have to work and use their own time to get through university. But a really critical thing you can do—and we don't want to discount direct service work to the community—is go and volunteer for community legal centres, do paralegal work. It has the added benefit of helping you develop that sense of intuition we were just talking about, as well as beginning to understand and make explicit your values and how they relate to the process of law, and developing skills that are going to be really useful in this toolkit. It's all very well to go in with principles blazing, but sometimes there's a practical matter of making sure you're useful to the communities you're serving as well. I personally cut my teeth at the ALS office in Parramatta—immensely valuable work. I would encourage everyone to do the same.

Thalia: We run a subject called Strategic Litigation, run by Craig Longman at Jumbunna. Part of that is getting an understanding of doing community-led work, especially with First Nations communities. I'd really encourage people to look at that subject. Being part of those organisations is a great experience for you, but often it's really valuable for the organisations as well. It's a good way to immerse yourself in something that's part of building the field. Social justice is something you might get paid for, but a lot of those centres continue to rely on pro bono or volunteer work, even as legal graduates. Even if you take a path in a law firm, there's nothing that means you can't continue with these opportunities.

Zaheer: No further comments.

Next question is directed to Zaheer from Rebecca: When you were in private practice for 10 years, was this mainly around commercial law, and if so, did you still know your heart was in social justice? She feels law students are often steered towards a commercial law career, but she knows it's not for her and her heart is in social justice.

Zaheer: Great question. I asked the same question when I was studying. I got a job as a paralegal, worked out of necessity but also began gauging what I was doing. I didn't work in commercial law; I was a litigator. It was a deliberate decision for me not to