Pursuing a Legal Career in Social Justice

Thank you Crystal uh so firstly good evening and welcome everyone to our seventh and final event in the Brennan Justice Talk Series and tonight we're focusing on pursuing a legal career in social justice my name is Dr Elise Methvan and i am zooming in this evening from wengel country and i am one of the co-directors of the Brennan Program uh so the Brennan and Justice and Leadership Program and i am joined here by a few members of our Brennan team so of course uh you will know one of my fellow co-directors from the UTSLSS Georgina Hedge and also Crystal McLaughlin our Brennan administrator and also i'm joined this evening by our Dean Lesley Hitchens and most importantly for this evening our special guests and panelists this evening who are Alison Whitaker, Thalia Anthony and Zaahir Edries and we'll be hearing a bit more about them shortly but before we do i would also like to say that we're very fortunate this evening to be joined by uts elder in residence Auntie Glendra Stubbs who will do the acknowledgement of country for us so thank you so much Glendra oh thank you Elise um can you see me we can see and hear you oh okay thank you i'm thinking i've only got that funky picture there so great thank you um yala mandu marang galindara um i i'd like to acknowledge that i'm on the land of the Darug and Gandangara people and say thanks for for me living a lifetime here uts is part of um Gadigal and Eora Nation and so i pay respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and say thanks for allowing uts to be on on their land the university of technology is built where it's built as we share our knowledge learning and research practice within this university may we pay respects to the knowledge embedded forever within our culture um i also like to pay respects to elders past present and our emerging elders and say um thanks for for um the way they've looked after us and their struggles that they've had also present elders and and ones who are in 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 do the big stint with the royal commission into um um institutional child abuse and what became very apparent to me was that um that aboriginal people have to have to learn to trust lawyers because the they'd only been in their lives for when they're in trouble with the law or when child protection was involved but i need to say that you know this social justice warriors that are lawyers now are are earning that trust and and now it's like you know they're they're um they're embracing embracing lawyers you know there and you know he's doing a wonderful job an absolute wonderful job and and you know i said the other day to the magistrates when i was doing some training with him the lawyers that are coming through that 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 guys and you know i'd like to say you know and including in my friend list Thalia and Allison so big hugs to yourself and keep up the good work we need yous guys thank you so much auntie glendra and i think they're really inspiring words for students and also clearly remind us of the responsibility we have as lawyers and future lawyers and legal scholars as well so thank you for that so tonight we have the unique pleasure of being connected uh with uts law students across multiple years all passionate about the topic of social justice so i'm going to as always lay out a few zoom housekeeping rules for this evening so this zoom event is being recorded for teaching and learning and research purposes only key speakers and those that asking questions in the discussion will come up in the zoom you should have the ability to hide and show your camera as well as mute and unmute your microphone when you are not speaking please make sure you put your microphone on mute if you find the event is freezing uh due to your bandwidth you might want to turn your camera off just to make sure that it works and free up that bandwidth and also tonight we expect quite a lot of the bremen 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 that as well uh so especially if you're asking a question we'd love to see your face but we also understand if we can't for whatever reason uh and lastly a very important request for current students make sure that you claim your five roj points uh by putting your full name now in the chat box uh so just note that you can use that chat box also for asking questions this evening now with all that house keeping 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 so firstly we have gumroad poet lawyer and senior researcher at jambana indigenous house of learning at uts alison whitaker 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 so welcome allison secondly we have lawyer and general counsel at get up zahir idris uh and as i he said also a long term friend of mine who i went through law school with and zahir is executive member of and former president of the muslim legal network whose work centers around advocating for social justice and inclusion and last but not least many of you will know legal academic professor dalia 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 systemic change and remedies for wrongs inflicted on indigenous communities so welcome also to balia all right so i will now stop sharing the screen and i will ask the first question for this evening which is for both alison enza here and perhaps alison would like to answer this one first so 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 um so yeah yeah everybody i'm alison whitaker i'm a gomroy woman i just want to acknowledge before we get any further that i'm here on gargoyle mongol country i want to take the chance to acknowledge their elders and ancestors and their continued sovereignty over this place um i was very pleased and honoured to graduate from uts um relatively recently so my trajectory is very short um so i graduated in in 2016 um and it was this kind of yeah momentous occasion at times have been i want to encourage anybody who's here i've been in your shoes and at times it does seem insurmountable um 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 um as much as i can um you do get to the end eventually um after i graduated i went straight to 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 some further study um on a fulbright scholarship which is where most of the research that i've done to date on first nations deaths in custody and how they track um through uh review systems on this continent that's um effectively where that research was cultivated um having got a little bit of space from just reacting in the day-to-day um but in that inter-intervening period i was working as a researcher i was really really lucky to have the 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 in particular as a vehicle for social change and legal scholarship in particular is having a responsibility to the community that it purports to serve um so i want to thank you you'll be very remiss of me to not actually mention that valiant i've got you here on the call um yeah and from there i returned i'm now working at the jumbara institute clearly uts has had a pull on me so you can go very far with a law degree from uts or you can of course just hang around as much as you like uh it's really up to you um but the the work that i do at the jumblana institute um is like many jobs estimates that are facing our generation or graduates from law school really quite diffuse um having kind of a mixed campaigning role a mixed advisory role um that's essentially just about making sure first nations communities are heard um as well as bringing um their legal interests onto a political agenda a campaign agenda um as well as to to formal courts um especially in the coroner's court which is where my specialty currently lies um so the career trajectory has been short diffuse um and has landed me right back in the tower um i'm sure he has maybe a more wide-ranging experience than i have thanks thank you alison so much enzo here would you like to share a bit about your career trajectory after graduating from uts law yeah sure thanks um i i just want to like uh the speaker before me just acknowledged that i'm i'm diving in from stolen land i'm on the land of the ghetto people here in sydney um and for me i often do this because it's really important that i a lot of my social justice context comes from i'm growing up in perth and i was born in south africa as well so i grew up on long island and i made friends with elders there very early because that was a connection that i as an african migrant found myself making really early on and i'm humbled to be here with you deadly people so thanks for having me um very quickly in terms of my career trajectory it's probably important to know that i came to uts as a postgrad and as a postgrad i came because it was important to me that the university and this is not what i'm saying just because the danish on here um it was a really accommodating place for me i came in i moved to sydney by myself so being able to study law in the evenings um do what was then called the masters of law and legal practice it's since been converted to the jd um was really important for me and it sort of set um my path to doing this social justice work because the i guess the subjects that i was able to do really helped me uh fine-tune what i wanted to do in the future uh that being said my career trajectory is bizarre and strange um probably out of necessity um i've been an investigator uh since graduating um i've worked on royal commissions i have worked in private practice um at top tier law firms i've worked in specialist law firms and i found myself now at getup as is general counsel that's a very short version and i might tell you a couple of interesting bits which you students might find entertaining or think i'm mad but either way i'm going to tell you anyway i graduated about in august i think it was um in 2008 i um was finishing off an investigative role um which i think is quite important because the skills you learn um were really quite helpful for me to be a government investigator i was a workplace conduct investigator at railcorp i did work closely with uh believe it or not with 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 um for those of you old enough to know um 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 um you want to do you know my special i did my masters of one league practice in international law which was really interesting but also there aren't many jobs for international human rights lawyers in australia believe it or not um that being said it doesn't mean you can't do the work what i mean by that was outside of my job i didn't want to sit on my laurels and think um how do i get a job during um a global recession um and a bunch of my colleagues started what elise alleged to at the beginning when she introduced me was the muslim legal network of new south wales um at the time we were combating some really difficult counterterrorism legislation around the country we formed this i guess a supportive network which quickly evolved into an advocacy space my legal practice uh helped work in that campaign space which we'll probably talk about a little bit later on um that quickly progressed into and was able to sharpen some of my skills as a graduate lawyer i moved through private practice for maybe about a decade moved into um in-house work which i also found really satisfying um and it allowed me to think about different things and apply my legal brain different ways um also all of that uh ngo type work is ultimately what got me to get up and so if you're a lawyer who works in this space you're often touted as a troublemaker or a um i'd like to think when 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 um and yeah so for the last three years i found myself living in this little space admiring the work of uh phthalia and allison and seeing them speak at places like you know red law and um just really fascinating about what we can do with the law degree um in this day and age thanks lise thanks i hear obviously we'll have a lot of questions on those issues later i'd i'd also um 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 uh first nations people and the law thanks elise um and i'd also like to acknowledge that I'm on unceded Wangal land of the Eora Nation um and especially thank the amazing auntie glendra for her acknowledgement as well um so and i just also have to put it out there that although allison claims not to have moved far from the tower she's constantly on the front line um and connected with community and um that's a testament to allison his work sorry as well as the work of um john banner at uts um so to answer your question elise and and probably the the second part first my journal my my journey to becoming a legal academic sorry um is not really orthodox i am i studied arts law and then halfway through um put my law degree on hold to do my phd in history and that was on colonial histories in the northern territory especially for cattle station workers and part of that was looking at the role of legislation and case law in that process of colonization so i came to the law being really conscious of historical legacies in oppressing first nations people um but i also and just to give away my age um grew up in the 1980s when racist policing and deaths in custody were becoming national issues and i was you know as a child part of the protests at the time and really saw that injustice and when i studied law it was about you know identifying the injustice but also trying to work out how the law can be a weapon for accountability um and for change and it's his constant i guess dialectic between law enforcing as you say they hear the status quo but also pushing back on it um in terms of my motivation for being a law academic it was really to be a lecturer to teach students um so i initially did this in history and then in law and today a lot of the work i do as i see it in justice is really in the classroom um and you know we're jury women like laura lyons and and annie brown and penrith um constantly remind me about knowledge being power um so i don't i mean obviously we do social justice advocacy in the community but i never underestimate um that day-to-day engagement with students um and and i think you know having started as a lecturer and continually being grateful for that opportunity i also got to see the social justice work of my colleagues um and and it's why in 2010 i came to uts because of the work jambana and larissa bera were doing against the northern territory intervention and um centers like anti-slavery were doing in in the law faculty and to see how you could be an activist in your work um was just astonishing to me you know that you could have this as a job because activism was always just part of um you know my life and to think that my job could mirror that um i you know i see as a real real privilege and responsibility so i guess my you know coming to this career so to speak kind of found me as much as as much as i found it thank you thalia and i also want to acknowledge that thalia has a had a big influence on my career as well so uh and i'm sure a lot of students here as well so now my question uh is for all panelists and i'm happy for anyone to jump in for this first question so are there any particular campaigns or projects that you are working on right now that challenges an area of injustice if so can you provide a brief overview of this campaign and why it is or this project and why it is particularly significant uh in a social or political sense at this present time everyone's too polite i might ask her look i can honestly i can talk to this question for like three hours but i'm gonna try and keep it sitting so the short version of this is um and i alluded to it with the introduction so i've um fell into this work around counter-terrorism legislation knowing that um in my undergrad i studied criminology and legal studies so my work was exposure to the criminal justice system um or sometimes my friends call it the criminal injustice system because there's nothing just about it anyway we'll get there what i found in my community as someone who identifies as muslim um is that in around uh around the time i graduated actually and around the time we formed the muslim legal network there was significant exposure around pieces of legislation that were contraries who commonly held understandings of civil liberties in australia and around the world um australia has enacted a number of um and i would say it's in the dozens of pieces of legislation that are geared towards national security and have been if i'm frank targeted towards the muslim or minority communities in australia we know this because of the way people have been charged we know this because traditionally this is how they've been reported why that's important why that's something that's still going on is we know that they are those sorts of things are intrinsically related to how race um and power plays into policy making um and it's in a lot of ways transitioned into what even though i don't specifically campaign on this work at getup at the moment it is so intertwined with our democracy work because you can't separate um what we loosely call uh the democratic process from uh racist policy or racism implementation of that policy so when we talk about civil liberties at get up and we talk about uh what's something that we just recently done which was the democracy dossier or the democracy report which people may have seen it's about 90 pages long there's a youtube video of me scott ludlum a few of the academics from usw speaking about it if anyone's interested but what it does is it demonstrates um in a very matter-of-fact way just how poor australia's observance to what most people around the world would see as something really simple um you know i mean we know in australia there's no um inherent right to free speech um it comes out as a result of some case law um but when we go down that rabbit hole we really see that there are there's a lot of work to be done around this particular area and it's ongoing work um the unfortunate thing is we see um these you know these different pieces of legislation where sunset clauses keep getting rolled over for you know every few years you know it comes up um in a pandemic for example most people don't know there have been half a dozen sunset clauses have been automatically rolled over over the last 18 months like this is extraordinary we're talking about the ability to detain a 14 year old without charge um hold them and not tell their parents there are extraordinary things occurring and i think um it would be remiss of me not to mention that as an important campaign because i think it's really emblematic of how we as a profession and if we want to talk about social justice really understanding where our power lies and our power lies in challenging the power that we create and we reinforce as being a part of the system so there's like a whole thinking that needs to go behind it and we don't do it generally as lawyers um i'm trying to do it more so in my work but yeah so that's probably one of the more interesting things that i'm working on at the moment that you know get ups doing that i think is really important we should be speaking about and we shouldn't necessarily just be going blindly into it 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 have a real closeness to wanting to see justice so we want to we almost get drawn to policing in some way like we're like we want to serve justice and then we very quickly pull ourselves away because we realize policing is often attached to the injustice that's served on our communities so when we talk about democracy and civil liberties we can't necessarily talk about power and injustice and how that influence is really um stigmatizing a lot of um communities you know selfishly with my community but like i said at the start i work quite closely even i get up with our first nations communities and i think we really need to recognize that but i'll let um allison and talia no doubt speak about that issue um so i actually don't work on any kind of grand um unified campaign the a lot of the work that i do um is concentrated on serving directly um families first nations families who experience the death of a loved one in custody um and there was a report released today that had finally crunched the official numbers that said since the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody back 30 years ago 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. um and so of course that's really quite um quite diffuse work in it in the sense that every death and every family must be honored in in the work that you are bringing them along with um it also means that every time you encounter every time you are kind of meeting people in these review systems you're trying to guide them through um you're also trying to help them um do things that i guess you could describe as not being served by the legal system um actually trying to build campaigns that put whether or not this is something we can kind of openly talk about as um lawyers or as legally minded people actually kind of put a political campaign pressure on the design of the courts to make them more just or on these review processes to make them more just um so one example um in which a family is kind of led through these mandatory inquests that happen after a death in custody um as they've met with hostility um virtually all first nations there wasn't met with some kind of um hostility in these review systems but one family who has um won an extremely um exceptional version of this cruelty is the family of lane fella morrison uh and latoya rule his sibling who is actually a phd student and scholar um here at uts uh and that um the circumstances of fella's death just a heads up i'm going to talk about them was that he was um restrained in a hog type position with his arms and legs behind him um he was placed face down in a van um with a split hood placed over his head um and in the period in which there was no cctv coverage um of what happened to fella uh he lost consciousness and he passed away a few days later in an icu unit um and the immense difficulty in addition to um the the horror and trauma of his death and his loss in his own right um was that the the guards who put him in the back of the van refused to speak um and to this day still refuse to speak claiming a novel penalty privilege um a right to protect themselves against professional consequences not criminal ones um including um things like pay deductions or reprimand in their workplace um but one in this space obviously because as has already been noted there's this huge power dynamic that means a lot of what you do in social justice lawyering is lining up to lose and lose with dignity and lose in a principal way um we there was a victory in this case that it was because that family had organized um so specifically and in their power understanding the limitations of the system and in honor of somebody who they loved um to get a legislative ban on spit hoods like those that were placed on fella's head through the south australian parliament and so to my understanding that's the first time there's been at all settings um ban on the use of spit hoods that's enshrined in legislation um across all custodial and medical settings in the state which is obviously um not complete justice that they're seeking um but one incredible way that concerted organizing including um where there's a role for lawyers um can actually achieve really tangible outcomes in unexpected places in this case certainly not in a court that has been resisting them in every move um so that's an example of i suppose a campaign that's been um very topical because it's happened so recently um but also that demonstrates just a model of um not quite hope but a model of possibility for how we can do this kind of lawyering going forward um and it has me really excited um for what's possible um acknowledging of course that with every first nations death in custody is this this new wave these new wounds being opened in our community um and while these are crucial points for us to carry people through as lawyers who are doing kind of direct service work or as campaigners who are doing direct service work um they're not just opportunities for change but opportunities to hold close the dignity um and the sorryness of those families as well um yeah wow so i guess my um campaign if i were to focus on one at the moment is on covert in prisons so it's probably doing some of the work before it gets to the stage that alison's campaigning is around so trying to stop deaths in custody as a result of covert um we know that prisons are inherently unsafe places um and especially unsafe for first nations people due to systemic racism in the quality of care and the level of care um and i think the gravity of the situation with covert has brought together families um justice organizations prisoner advocates um and first nations organizations like deadly connections in new south wales um so we've been working on trying to especially release people from prison because they're overcrowded environments which give rise to the rapid transmission of diseases like covert and indeed last month we saw um an outbreak of delta um and it's continuing every day there are new cases i think today there were yesterday there were five new cases and um last month there were over 400 covert cases in prisons in sydney um and this rate was at one point in time ten times the transmission in prison than the general community so the risk is much greater and yet of course these people have no choice to be there their loved ones are in absolute fear for their lives and in addition to that the way that it's been managed is through lockdowns so keeping people in their cell um we've heard for a day for several days not even having the opportunity to shower so there's lots of demands around the conditions in prison and also the risk of dying from from covert and um just from unfortunately really personal experience with my auntie i know that even a a hospital in the community an icu ward and um sorry a ventilator might not save your life and they don't have any of those things in prison um so it's it's a really um critical situation and what with some of the things we've been doing include um we're obviously bringing families together for support trying to advocate 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 and we've appeared at parliamentary hearings and and and have press conferences and continue to share information on a facebook site we moderate so we're trying to um i guess use legal avenues but also use other social and political organizational avenues and we've had i mean it's not been i guess the clear type of victory that allison referred to but i think we've had success in the sense that prison numbers have rapidly increased in the last couple of months and so um judicial officers and parole boards are awaken to these issues that we're trying to keep you know in the public's attention but it's been a struggle you know it's prisons and allison's research um very much speaks to this it they're something that are um filled generally with silence in the papers um in the in the digital media and on the tv and um in the overwhelming i guess covered um news cycle prisons really feature so it's been a challenge but i think that um it's gaining momentum and and i think this the legal case will be another tool in our toolbox to to ensure that the rights of people in prisons um are not forgotten and that they have a voice as much as possible thank you thalia thank you everyone for sharing those really personal and important uh i'm just going to ask one more question because i also want to ensure there's time for student questions uh and so that will um be to any panel member can you uh 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 uh and i'll ask allison first yeah you gotta pick on us i don't think any of us will volunteer um yeah it's a really fantastic question the answer is um in all ways it can be either and what's required is a really principled vigilance as social justice practitioners whether we are engaged in the formal practice of law whether engaged in campaigning community organizing if we're doing in-house work it requires vigilance not just about um the impact or like the relative impact that we think we can make in the world but also the forums for which we choose to ventilate them and the methods that we use to get things through um it's yeah i don't think we're gonna have time to cover it today but um it's the moment that you stop wrestling with these questions i think is when you have the capacity to do real harm on a grand scale and what's really really critical is that you continue to wrestle with um i guess the the way that you engage with the law and whether you are creating injustice or whether you are using the small bit of capacity that i think settlement law has to to push back and to minimize the harm in our communities and so here would you like to add any observations there i think without going over what allison said which i agree with completely i'll give this perspective and that is because there's a lot of students online you'll find challenges in your career particularly early on with respect to what i like to call the question of integrity if you're going to go down this path the question of integrity revolves around whether or not you're willing um in your heart of hearts and you won't know the answer like we just said it's a constant learning and a constant educating yourself and if you ever stop you're in trouble because that means you've given up on you know teaching yourself something new but i i might just say because we know the law has as a system has the potential to do harm unfortunately because people aren't balanced in um even though lady justice is fine and the scales are supposed to be you know even um we know that you don't come we don't come the same way to the law um and i think if you're ever in a place where something feels wrong in your gut and as ridiculous as this sounds i'm sure my panelists will agree with me when it feels wrong it probably is wrong so you need to think about whether or not if you're going to live in this space of social justice um are you willing to stop and think back to it's a really bad reference point but i do it all the time um often my parents used to say to me when i wanted to become a lawyer you know you know the law was of one of the first professions and it was like medicine the law and the clergy and the reason they say that is because it was supposed to be you're servicing something greater than yourself and i think that's the approach we take in sort of social justice or what we now is often termed movement lawyering what is this what is the service you're doing um is it taking this greater practice forward if it's not you have that question of integrity and do you want a question you do you want to sit there and think um what does my integrity say about me in the decision i'm about to make and often that will guide you as to whether or not the law is helping you or hindering you it's not a real answer but it's a feeling that i think it took me 15 years of practice to get on top of and i'm still working on it now so i thought i'll give everyone here a head start sally no they they were really um brilliant answers about kind of the um i mean i guess the way in which we negotiate um our relationship with the law and perceive the law and what i what i wanted to add is that um while it's really clear to me and i get a lot of my um impressions of and and their deep feelings often deep feelings of outrage um of what injustice is i get those from from people i work with people who are who are affected by injustice well well it might be clear to me we shouldn't take for granted these terms justice and injustice because for some people um that you know the rule of law which can in many ways uphold um power and privilege is a system of justice and many people who work in the law would say they work with integrity um so for me the way i perceive it is more around what the law does to uphold or challenge structural relationships especially relationships of oppression and it's about identifying where you see yourself in that relationship um because i don't think anyone would you know i know going to sydney university it was so um normalized that you would go into a large firm as a clerk and no one would ever say that they were going on to do the work of injustice um so i i think you know when we talk about social justice we're talking about something that is about um the broader community in the broader society and how that is affected by laws and that is and how we work that out is by being engaged in the broader community it's really difficult to make those kinds of judgment calls from the sidelines and and i would say once you get too embedded in a profession it's hard to do that critical work so the critical work needs to start now and i think students uh i wouldn't 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 is part of your life and some of the most amazing social change in the world has happened through student movements so don't underestimate your own power and that will help you navigate i guess how the law works and what your role in it will be thank you sally i might hand over to georgina now uh to field questions from the audience yeah of course and thank you so much to our panelists i think those insights were absolutely amazing um so we've got a few questions coming in on the chat which i'll be able to read out but um if anyone wants to ask a question to our panelists um live face to face feel free to use the raise hand function and i can call upon you but if you're not comfortable we're totally happy to i can you can listen to my voice and i can read out the questions um so we have what a first question from melanie and i think that this is probably a question a lot of students might have um what are some things university students can do in commencing change when we are not yet in roles such as you all are um so yeah if any of the panelists want to contribute to that one um it's not always like uh something that's replicable because i know people it's much more difficult now and i also know that um a lot of people have to work and to take up their own time that they're not studying to get through university um but a really critical thing that you can do and we don't want to discount like direct service work to the community is go and volunteer for community legal centres do a lot of paralegal work it has the added benefit of helping you um develop that sense of intuition that we were just talking about as well as beginning to understand um and maybe even make explicit like your values and how they relate to the process of law as well as a very practical matter just developing skills that are going to be really really useful in this toolkit um because it's um all very well to kind of go in with some principles blazing but actually there's sometimes a practical matter of making sure that you're useful to the communities that you're serving as well um so i personally cut my teeth at the als office in parramatta immensely immensely valuable work um and i would encourage everybody to do the same amazing thank you oh thanks for that to say that um we run a subject called strategic litigation um it's run by craig longman and i support him um craig longman is based at jambana as a senior researcher um and part of that is getting an understanding of doing community-led work especially with first nations communities so i'd really encourage people to to look at that subject and um yeah just kind of being part of those organizations is a great experience for you but often it's really valuable for the organizations as well um so i think um i think it's a really good way to um immerse yourself in something that is um is really part of building the field because social justice and so here said this it's it's something that you might get paid for but a lot of those centers continue to rely on um pro bono or volunteer work even as legal graduates and even if you do take a path that um you know might for example being a law firm there's nothing that um means you can't continue with these opportunities and i'm sure they you know many of those services would value from having those types of skills thank you felia um zahid did you want to add anything to that or no i'm good okay amazing well the next question is directed to sahir anyway so um rebecca has a question for user here she asked when you're in private practice for 10 years was this mainly revolved around commercial law and if so did you still know that your heart was in social justice and then she says that she feels as though law students are often steered towards a commercial law career which is something we've kind of all discussed tonight but i know it's not for me and that her heart is still in social justice what a great question thanks rebecca um i asked the same question um i'll tell you what i did because i can't speak for everyone else um i got a job as a paralegal um i worked sort of out of necessity but i also began gauging what i was doing i didn't work in commercial i was a litigator um and it was a deliberate decision for me not to work in m a or majors and acquisitions i actually give my way towards litigation largely because i understood um and i think you know if people go and do the strategic litigation course i don't know about it but i'm sure you will find out that strategic litigation is quite literally uh you know avenues of litigation better commercial litigation or um targeted litigation in the climate space or um in any space that is important um so to answer your question yes my heart was has always been in uh social change and social justice i don't think that will ever change like i think that was pre decided before i was born like in apartheid south africa i had no choice right i came here and that was it it was done protest when i was five you know it's been going ever since but the reality is um and as much as you know audrey lord says you can't use the master's tools to break down the system etc etc you do need to learn it um and i'm really proud of the fact that i worked at a top-tier law firm for a couple of reasons um i worked at a talk to your law firm where i was the only visibly muslim person there like and that for me was important because i was the first visibly you know identifying muslim person there in the legal team and that was important in and of itself so the reason i mention that is when you appear as a solicitor who has a social conscious for example you actually change the environment you're in like you impact that environment that you're in so don't think if you know if you think i can stick it out for maybe two years you know do my grad rotations you will learn great things i'm still applying the same tedious you know stickler for detail in certain things now that i learned in 2007 and 2008 when i was between 2008 to 2010 is grad because i knew it was important um you know and those things i'm using now working at get up um those things i'm now using when i'm you know responding to government notices um trying to do all of those little bits and pieces i think it's really important that we recognize where our heart is but we also realize that we we work and play in the system that is not necessarily built for social justice we've got to push it and force it and massage it that way um so i hope that helps rebecca thank you so much to here um allison othally did you have any comments on that question no no amazing thank you so much um and yeah i think those sentiments are really important for those of us progressing in our law degree when sometimes it can feel like the corporate world is this big bad crazy place and we don't really know how to maneuver it um so margaret has a question which is a bit broader zooming out a little bit um and it's just very simply what challenges do we still face today when reaching justice um so a bit of a broader one to change the um way a bit so maybe alice and orthalia if you wanted to comment on that one um so much uh one of the um recent this is probably a critical campaign that um everybody here should be concerned with there's some recent changes to charity regulations that actually impact the capacity of not-for-profits who rely on tax deductible status to engage in the kind of movement lawyering that we know actually makes a difference um so maybe um i will send around a link to some information about that in that campaign because that's a direct attack on our capacity to mobilize um and it's um not really a surprise that it came after this massive um growth in people talking about black lives matter first nation steps in custody that we saw come about in the middle of june last year which was very much enabled by the not-for-profit sector who um in that moment to their credit did something very brazen bold um in a period of great hostility so i will share some links to that with you later on um dalia also if you wanted to comment on that one as well maybe no okay so maybe i think we have another question from psy which is what is the role of the criminal justice system in providing alternative avenues for convicted individuals to not add to the prison problem and the issues with come that which come with being in prison or detention so maybe thalia if you wanted to comment on that one yeah um that's a great question because i think it's been on a lot of people's lives especially in in light of the black lives matter movement that's exposed the harms of the of the criminal system um and and prisons um and with that movement there has been a lot of talk about abolition and imagining a world without prisons um on the basis that it's not simply about liberty it's really about building communities and building safety and that prisons are not safe places so what a lot of these um proponents of abolition talk about uh building for example mutual aid where um we have communities that support one another um many people who end up in prison not only do they face issues of say discrimination or bias in the stages of policing or even as elise can talk to how we define offenses like offensive language and how they're policed but also because they have a lack of opportunities to things that many of us take for granted such as housing education employment a regular income so if we looked at all of these issues and we focused you know investment and resources on those types of um you know basic rights really um i think we would redress a lot of the underlying issues um but also that you know there's the problem you know the the the tragic issue of trauma that many people who come to prison have and prison often re-traumatizes um rather than deals with underlying traumas um it's it's not a system that is proven to reduce offending for instance indeed going to prison is often a way to increase offending um so i think we need to accept the shortcomings of prison and look at other systems that need to be buttressed and i know in victoria for example where they're looking at building a women's a new women's prison they have a campaign called um homes not homes are not prisons is that right allison am i um and so so there's a lot a lot of attention to these underlying issues and um i think we need to also remember that the great majority of people in prison are not serious offenders um and and in in fact they're there for very short times often less than six months so we totally dislocate people you know they may lose their homes they may lose their their children their jobs um and then we put them back in society um you know with with very little um so it's not a it's the opposite of building building communities so i think i think there are um there are alternatives that we need to think about as a society um and i and i guess i i would just say that um i i do feel like um i have a lot of issues with crime i don't want to suggest that i you know that i um tolerate crime but what i'm concerned with is the crime we tend to focus on um which which tends to be a lot of personal property minor crimes rather than some of the major crimes of corporations in the state um for example when um a mining corporation blows up a sacred site we don't imprison anyone on the board and so we i think we really have to rethink the the criminal law paradigm the prison paradigm and have a vision about what society we want amazing thank you so much dahlia did anyone else want to make some final comments before we wrap up for tonight amazing well on that note on behalf of the uts faculty of law the uts law student society and all the students here tonight i would like to thank our three panelists and allison dalia and zaheer for sharing their knowledge and comments with us tonight i know i can definitely speak on behalf of all the students here that it was inspiring to hear your insights about pursuing a career in social justice as we've discussed especially in this time it can be extremely difficult for us as students to conceptualize the best way to be able to pursue a career in social justice so thank you for giving us your insights on your own experience and providing us with a look into what community level change actually looks like so thank you again um a big thank you to crystal beck mack renata elise erica and the entire social justice and brennan team for helping to administer administrate the event tonight thank you as well to our dean leslie hitchens maxine evas and other members of the faculty for joining us we encourage all participants to participants here to act on the tips learned tonight and google their community legal centres and seek out any volunteering opportunities which you can claim lts for we always post new and exciting opportunities on the brennan collective so we would encourage you all to get involved with that a reminder to all participants that they will receive five roj for attending this evening's event and we encourage all brandonites to keep their eyes peeled for our brennan summer circle for 21 to 2021 and 2022 with some exciting new opportunities involved within the summer circle uh so thank you a big thank you again to our panelists and to everyone attending we can't wait to see you in 2022 for another great year of justice talks so thank you everyone and we'll see you soon thank you georgina thanks everyone thank you to our panelists as well uh it's been such an interesting discussion i felt it went too quickly but i do encourage all um the brennan knights i didn't know that was a word uh to go and follow our panel members uh thalia zahir and alison and the work that they do um you can follow them on twitter and various other channels as well so please do that uh i i hope you all stay safe everyone and have a lovely evening thanks again.