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Babes in Bookland
A podcast celebrating women's memoirs, one story at a time!
Babes in Bookland
The Weight of the Law // Anna Dorn's "Bad Lawyer"
What happens when the system you joined to fight injustice turns out to be part of the problem?
Anna Dorn's memoir "Bad Lawyer" takes readers on a journey through the disillusionment that awaits idealistic young lawyers who enter the profession wanting to make a difference. My friend, Cara (a retired lawyer!) and I discuss how to stay hopeful and find the positives in a "bad" criminal justice system.
Though she refers to law as a "hideous heirloom" passed down from her father and grandfather, Anna aims to be one of the "good lawyers" defending vulnerable populations rather than corporations. Because she was able to attend law school fully paid for, she writes she can avoid the "golden handcuffs" shackling so many other well-intentioned lawyers.
Anna's memoir shines brightest when exposing the stark realities of America's criminal justice system. Through her work with juvenile offenders and marginalized communities, Dorn reveals how the system serves to "enforce social stratification" rather than deliver justice. She unflinchingly describes a world where most of her clients share identical backgrounds—abuse, poverty, racial disadvantage, and mental illness—trapped in a cycle that offers no real path to rehabilitation.
Anna's powerful and honest self-assessment as a "bad lawyer" who couldn't embrace the system's rigid rules speaks to anyone who's questioned their career path. Her journey reminds us that true fulfillment often lies beyond the expectations others set for us, and that sometimes the most meaningful way to fight injustice is to tell its story.
Listener discretion advised: this episode includes adult language
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Show Links:
Enneagram Test
Death Penalty Statistics
Countries with Death Penalty
The Danish Prison System
The States Project
Five Calls
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Link to this episode’s book:
Bad Lawyer by Anna Dorn
Transcripts are available through apple’s podcast app
This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Technical editing by Brianna P
Theme song by Devin Kennedy
Special thanks to my dear friend, Cara. My article sharing angel!
Xx, Alex
Hello and welcome to Babes in Bookland. I'm your host, alex Franca, and today I'm discussing Bad Lawyer a memoir of law and disorder, by Anna Dorn, with my friend, kara. But before we get to the episode, here's a review by Callie Walker on Apple Podcasts so glad to have come across Babes in Bookland, a great addition to my podcast channel. We're so glad you came across it too. Let's get to the episode. Hi Cara, hi Alex. Thank you so much for coming over. Today. You're in studio, which is always very fun. What did you think of the book?
Speaker 2:As a lawyer, I definitely appreciated how well Anna explained legal concepts. It felt like she really trusted the reader in my case, listener. I was listening to her book to follow along and really learn something about our legal system and I found that the later parts of her book where she really talked about her views about gender and race and how those constructs play out in the legal system, to be pretty valuable and thought-provoking. So I appreciated those things and I appreciated her self-deprecating humor. Sometimes I would have liked her to grapple a little bit more with her self-described shortcomings, but overall I really enjoyed those aspects of it.
Speaker 1:Very good. I thought that this book was extremely fascinating. As a non-lawyer, I also thoroughly enjoyed Anna's voice. I thought she was witty and, yeah, self-deprecating, and she broke things down in simple ways so that I, as a non-lawyer, could really understand. And honestly, I did leave the book feeling kind of frustrated and heartbroken, because she asks a lot of questions and she brings up a lot of issues and obviously, as one woman, she doesn't really have the answer. But I think that's the biggest takeaway for me is that sometimes you have to know that these problems exist for people.
Speaker 1:And the more people know about it, the more hopefully that things can finally change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hope we can talk about that some more.
Speaker 1:I think we will.
Speaker 2:Okay, great.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, anna realizes that being a lawyer was not the best way for her to leave her mark on the world, so we'll also get to that. Great Bad Lawyer was published in 2021, and this is her dedication for Kitty, so I like to start off all the episodes with some quick topics. Anna writes about the Enneagram personality test, which was all the rage when she was at Berkeley. Enneagram test is a personality test that categorizes people into nine types based on their motivations, fears and perceived strengths and weaknesses, and I asked you to take it and you actually took like a very legit version. What were your results?
Speaker 2:I took it actually relatively recently and, as you know, I'm a little bit later in life. I'm later in life than you are.
Speaker 1:Different generations, that's okay.
Speaker 2:We are, which is actually kind of nice, and I found it challenging to answer the questions because it was a little bit like well, if I were to answer this at 20, I'd give you one answer, if I were to answer it at 40, it'd be another. When I was taking the test, I was pushing 60. So it was sort of like what are my answers? I did my best, I did my best and I came out as a. My top score was as a nine, which is the peacemaker. That makes a lot of sense. And then the two closest to that pretty close next to it were achiever and helper, and for most people who know me, they'd go yeah, that test is about right.
Speaker 1:Nailed you, nailed you on that Kind of nailed it.
Speaker 2:How about you?
Speaker 1:So mine, which I just took before we started talking about this, mostly because you reminded me that I asked you to take it and you wanted to know what my results were. So thank you for that, kara. I am a one which is a perfectionist.
Speaker 2:And then I took it online and I'm trying to unlock my full report, but I don't want to pay $2.
Speaker 1:You can come back in a bonus episode and just really like talk it all through and I do feel like I am a perfectionist though that's pretty kind of hits hits the nail on the head a little bit. I was also towards a seven and towards a four. Which, what are those numbers? The enthusiast?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, okay, I can see that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know what? I've been working on that, so I take that as a win. And then the individualist they are emotionally honest, creative and personal, but can be moody and self-conscious.
Speaker 2:So here's the thing about yeah you know, and the thing with the Enneagram, that's interesting. We all kind of have our. I personally would rather be this than that, but they each come with a little bit of. Here are the sort of pros and here are the cons of this type, and these are the things that tend to show up for you and and maybe issues. So it's really intended to just almost like give you a little bit of a leg up. If you're on a therapy journey, you know, it can kind of give you some insights and maybe some things you've not been super conscious of and and it. But it's not sort of you want to be a four and if you're only a one, don't? You know? It's not like that. It's just they put the numbers in a circle and everything just has things that are near it and relate to each other, and it's interesting that way.
Speaker 1:I think it's cool to always be sort of discovering the way that you to be able to give yourself a vocabulary to understand how you view the world, how you aim to view the world, maybe how people view you. That's what I really liked when it said your perceived strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker 2:I like that too.
Speaker 1:Because maybe they don't always match up. But yeah, like you said, obviously with a perfectionist, I can tell you what the dark side of that is. Yeah, this is really interesting and I will link the test that I took online in the show notes if anybody else out there is interested in taking it and wants to pay the $2 to unlock your full results. But you will get at least the number that you, I guess, lean most towards. Let's dive deeper. Okay, anna's book is called Bad Lawyer. It's about her journey to become a lawyer and then her journey to not be a lawyer anymore. And, kara, you mentioned that you are a lawyer. Why did you want to become a lawyer and what type of law did you practice? You are fully retired now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm fully retired now and becoming a lawyer was not a long time passion of mine. After college I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do when I was doing various jobs managing an office I'd been a server in a restaurant, you know, like all these kinds of different things but I felt like getting a higher degree was going to give me opportunities that I wouldn't otherwise have, especially as a woman. So several years after I graduated from college, I took both the GMAT, the standardized test for business school, and the LSAT, the standardized test for law school, and after that it was very clear go to law school. Because the GMAT. I was like no, no, it's not really meant for you. And you know Anna makes a lot of references and jokes about her lack of interest in business and lack of business acumen and so on, and some of those things really resonated with me. So I went to law school and, unlike Anna, there were absolutely no lawyers in my family, but my mom was Really, yeah, none.
Speaker 1:No, interesting, but your mother was a high achieving woman.
Speaker 2:Yes, she was very politically active, very successful businesswoman, and becoming a lawyer felt like the best way for me to try to follow in her footsteps in those respects, and so my plan was go to law school, get my degree and figure out what kind of lawyer I was going to be. No idea what I was going to look like, but I wanted it, of course, to be socially valuable. I just really didn't have a clue what that might look like, and then I didn't really really understand what debt would do to that equation, which we will talk about.
Speaker 1:I'm sure.
Speaker 2:But I became an employment lawyer so, and that ended up being a nice path for me.
Speaker 1:And just to, I guess, give further detail to our listeners. So you would represent people who had been hurt at work.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so employment law is right. People who it all revolves around the workplace didn't get hired or were fired for reasons that are unlawful or harassment stuff. Now you're either representing the person suing the employer or you're representing the employer, and I was representing the employer.
Speaker 1:So we will talk about that Interesting. Okay, yes, there's so many different ways to represent the law, to understand the law. Which gets so confusing to me as a lay person, because to me it's like, shouldn't the law just be black and white? Shouldn't it just be the law? And so it is so interesting that that's part of your job is to take what I feel like are facts and interpret them or encourage other people to understand your interpretation of them. As such, that helps you win your case.
Speaker 2:I think as we get into the memoir there are a lot of things that strike these chords of how does that feel for an individual in this ecosystem? Yeah, yeah, it can be challenging at times, other times very rewarding, and it's a whole world for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, All right.
Speaker 1:Well, let's keep going. Okay. So, like you mentioned, the law was passed down in Anna's family. She writes it was passed down in my family like a hideous heirloom. My dad was a lawyer. My grandfather was a lawyer. Most of my uncles are lawyers. You'll note something in common among all the lawyers I described a Y chromosome, Despite my two X chromosomes.
Speaker 1:The idea that I would someday become a lawyer always felt inevitable. I don't recall being interested in the law, but I was endeared to the idea of being right, of convincing someone else they were wrong, of intellectually embarrassing them, and throughout my childhood I watched my mother struggle to assert herself. I watched her get walked over and demeaned. I watched her shrink herself, literally and figuratively. I watched how she'd abandoned her own ambitions to do what was expected of her to get married, raise a family and accommodate the family's every whim. This could not be my fate. I needed to be somebody. I needed agency. Becoming a lawyer felt like a vehicle to respect. Is there anything about your parents or their behavior that you have made a conscious effort to learn from or be different about? Or are there ways that you are like your parents, even though you swore you wouldn't be.
Speaker 2:I think over time I internalized the idea that my worth and lovability were achieved through worldly success, so climbing some kind of ladder that either led to financial success or social status or, if you're lucky, both. But I want to. You know, as I look back I don't feel like either. That concept was overtly pushed by either of my parents. You know, I got a lot of approval from getting good grades and I certainly felt becoming a lawyer brought a lot of approval, but it was more about role modeling. It was more showing, not telling, and my two parents could not have been more different as role models.
Speaker 2:So my dad was an artist who did not have great worldly success. The example he set was more free-flowing, iconoclastic, kind of reckless at times, but he died when I was in my teens and he was sick even earlier than that. So I don't really know how much of his example I really took in and either used as something to emulate or something to push back against. So my mom was really the person who loomed larger and who I'm much more like constitutionally, and she had great success, as we talked about a minute ago. But one thing I did not want to emulate was sort of the extremes of her life.
Speaker 2:She worked incredibly hard and she was known for barely sleeping and always being late because her plate was just so full and work was just a real constant, and so all the choices in my career spoke to my constant desire to keep working a healthy balance. I really wanted it at all times to be a meaningful part of my life, but not the primary thing and certainly not my entire identity Not that I think that was my mom's entire identity, but I do feel like it took up more of the literal time than I was personally wanting. So I suppose, like my conscious learning as I've gone through life, has been to kind of be open to what I could learn from both parents and what they modeled and the examples they set, but finding my own path in a way that really strikes the right balance for me, given who I am and how I tick you know, that's probably the best any of us can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and do you feel like, as a young woman, you missed your mom?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think if I'd been a boy in my family, I would have missed her too.
Speaker 1:You know, sure Like I think Just, I meant like being a younger person. Yeah, you were. You were aware at the time growing up that you wanted more. I would have liked to have seen more of her. Yeah, it's hard to find that work-life balance. I got to know your mom for way briefer moment in my life than I wish, and I just wonder how much pressure she felt as a woman to, to enter the workforce and like prove herself. These are the conversations I wish we could have. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know, I know and we and fortunately we've, you know, my sisters and I have had some of those conversations with her before she died. But yeah, I think she felt a lot of internal pressure to break ground and she did. She did a lot of groundbreaking work and was very successful and achieved a lot and accomplished so much. But, yeah, it meant that she had to devote a whole lot of time to it. That's the way it was. Oh, it's so hard. Had to devote a whole lot of time to it, and so it was.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's so hard to find that work-life balance. Yeah yeah, it's really tricky.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Back to Anna. She doesn't paint her father in a very good light, she writes. When I was four, going on five, I asked my mom whether she thought my dad would remember my birthday. She just shrugged. When I was 12, I ran through a glass door and ended up in the emergency room. This was before cell phones, and when I couldn't reach my mom I called my dad's office. He said he was in a meeting and hung up. In high school. Bold friends asked if I even had a dad. She continues growing up. People always said my dad and I were similar, a comparison that deeply offended me. I guess we're both disciplined and self-absorbed, insecure and depressive. I guess we're both disciplined and self-absorbed, insecure and depressive. A law firm preys on these qualities and exploits them. Why did you want to be a lawyer? I asked my dad when I was little. The richest person on my block was a lawyer. He said, so that seems like such a tricky relationship to navigate.
Speaker 2:It does, it does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was pretty sad when I heard, when she relayed those stories, it was sad and then it was really interesting to me that I mean she does explain why she decides to become a lawyer, but she sort of did follow in his footsteps.
Speaker 2:She did, I know, I know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the relationships between fathers and daughters are really tricky. I personally feel that a lot of my self-value and self-worth was something that I picked up from the way that my dad treated me and helped instill in me at a young age, as opposed to my mom for whatever reason. So I do think you know there's a reason why they say that they call it daddy issues, you know sometimes we've got to navigate those later in life.
Speaker 1:At one point he responds to learning that Anna is a lesbian with a statistic, with evidence, as though it was moral support, and to Anna it's just her dad's classic behavior. Kara, I would love to hear a little bit about your coming out experience. I have an idea that it probably went a little bit better than Anna's, I think it did, and you know it's funny.
Speaker 2:I hesitate to call my experience a coming out experience.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And the reason I say that is, you know, after years of being in relationships with men, I met a woman whom I fell in love with and, you know, if she and I were no longer together we've been together more than 25 years now, we're married and so on but if, for some reason, we weren't together, I have no idea if I would end up in another relationship or if that relationship would be with a man or a woman. So and I was in my 30s when this was all happening, so that's just background when I was working at the law firm where I worked right after law school, that's where I met my now wife and we were both practicing attorneys in the same firm. So everybody knew us and everybody knew us as friends and knew me as a straight woman. And so after we became a couple, we just like, matter of factly, jointly, like linked arms, and walked around to the various offices of the partners and other attorneys we worked with.
Speaker 2:I mean, our friends knew what was going on, but we went and like sat down and knocked on the door and walked in there and said, you know, hey, guess what? We're a couple now. Everybody kind of did a double take and they were just a little bit like oh what? Okay, well, it's cool, I guess. And people were really quite chill about it in retrospect and I will say I'm pretty aware of what a luxury that is to feel the real freedom to choose this quote, unquote alternative type of relationship and assume it will be accepted. I really honestly didn't think twice about that. I think being white and professional has a lot to do with that and I just try not to be oblivious to such things. But that was it and then from then on, it was just like okay, so, so that happened.
Speaker 1:That was kind of it. What was the experience like telling your mom?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that was interesting.
Speaker 2:You know my mom was, I think, more struggling to understand it and I think, to be really fair to her, if I'd come out at 17 and said I'm gay mom and you know this is me, I really think she would have embraced that and been very loving and open.
Speaker 2:And I mean back in the 70s she had close friendships with gay men and women and it was at a time when that wasn't that common and I remember that as role modeling for me, like I, her actions spoke very loudly and she wasn't a big talker that way. But so I think she would have been fine. But like for me to sort of shift gears a little bit and just start bringing home this woman was just, I think it was took her some adjustment time and it's fair, you know, but she really, over time, came to embrace my wife, embrace our relationship. It was probably if she was here she might say it wasn't her first choice for me, but she knows how happy my relationship made me over time and that's what I think really brought her around. She just could see that I was deeply happy and deeply fulfilled by this relationship and that she was thrilled by that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all we can want for our children and I have to say, your wife is extremely lovable, oh thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I think so I think, so.
Speaker 1:Okay, back to Anna. She doesn't paint her mother in a better light either, this woman man. She has some familial stuff that she's baggage. There will be a few things that I'll comment on throughout the rest of the episode, but at one point her law school boyfriend will break up with her, breaks up with her and Anna will text Anna. Sometimes I don't know why I change my tenses so much. I'm like okay, but at one point in the memoir Anna's law school boyfriend breaks up with her and Anna texts her mom Charlie broke up with me. She doesn't get any response. And then a few days later she's on the phone with her mom. She asks her if she got the text and her mom responds I did.
Speaker 2:And so.
Speaker 1:I think this anecdote is very telling of the way that we will further paint these important people in Anna's life. Like, your parents are important influences, for better or for worse.
Speaker 2:They just are yes, even if they're absent. Exactly.
Speaker 1:All things that you unfortunately have to deal with at some point in your life, I think, to get to a healthy place, to move forward, to live your best life. Currently working on it now with my therapist. You know it's just something you got to do. Towards the end of the memoir, anna writes I've since let go of my sadness of being such a disappointment to my mom. I know her anxiety comes from a place of love and she is just trying her best to give me a good life. My mom wanted me to be a career woman because she grew up in a time and place where having a career wasn't presented as an option to her. She wanted desperately for me to be what she couldn't be, but she never considered what I wanted to be and when I didn't want what she wanted, she took it as a personal attack. So, as you talked about earlier, your mother was very much a career woman.
Speaker 2:I think her feminism too, her being an active feminist and a career woman, just it.
Speaker 2:I walked through life from the earliest days always assuming I would have a career, not always assuming I would get married or have children. Those were just not massive drivers for me personally. You know, there's just this right constant like feeling in me that my duty as a woman as my mother's daughter, shall I say was to live my life to its full potential, both for my own fulfillment but also to continue to pave the way for future women. So that kind of duty got a little bit instilled and got a little jumbled up with some psychological baggage I carried around with. You know, achievement is a way to learn, earn love and stuff. So I had to kind of do some work to tease out the healthy aspects of finding value in my professional work from the unhealthy feeling of feeling like my worth depended on receiving validation from the external world, whether in the form of money or status or what have you, or proving something to my mom or any of those kinds of you know just maybe not fully clear sort of motivators.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying I've figured it all out yet, but I still, like you, I've managed to find things to talk to my therapist about. But I do feel like this phase of life for me has given me a lot more space to look at these things and see kind of where I've been and where I am now, and I do wish I'd had more insights into my motivations earlier in life. But it's in that category of it's never too late to really explore those topics.
Speaker 1:That's true? Yeah, I do think. Collectively, as women, we get so many mixed signals. There are so many pressures coming from all sorts of sides. Even now, some of these pressures have been really turned up. Yeah, what are you doing if you're not procreating? What are you doing if you're not getting married and having children? That feels like a duty. What are you doing if you're not getting married and having children? That feels like a duty. What are you doing if you're not joining the workforce? Don't you know the women who have worked so hard to break through these glass barriers for you, and you're choosing to stay home and just take it, it's like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.
Speaker 1:Back to Anna. She ends up taking the LSATs after college because she kind of had nothing better to do. Kind of a little bit like your story.
Speaker 2:A little bit, a little bit, I really not gonna lie.
Speaker 1:She wanted to stick around Chapel Hill where she went for undergrad for the summer with the boy that she liked and he was taking the LSATs. He ends up not taking them and quitting the prep course, but she enjoyed the material and studying. She liked logic, she writes. I like how reducing the world to logic distracted my mind from the darker places it tended to go. Everything was theoretical, so in a way nothing really mattered. It was less stressful than, say, figuring out my purpose in life or thinking about the fact that one day I and everyone I know would die. So we can tell Anna's a big thinker. She goes straight to that, she does. Yeah, she continues.
Speaker 1:I would go to law school and it would be paid for. This was huge, because the exorbitant cost is the major obstacle to getting a law degree. You may go into law wanting to save the planet, but debt forces you to eventually defend corporations accused of poisoning children. But because I was going gratis, I could be a quote good lawyer, the kind that advocates for the vulnerable populations and defends people who are wrongly accused of crimes, or at least that's what I told myself. I didn't have to be like my dad. I would change the world.
Speaker 1:Okay, I feel like there's a lot to unpack here, it is really interesting to me that obviously for decades law firms have been this place of privilege and when she laid it out like this, like the cost of it and how that plays out for the rest of your life. People who defend people who can't pay them, these underprivileged, underserved people, victims in so many circumstances, then how do they get?
Speaker 2:paid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just the state public defender service right and that's not going to pay a lot.
Speaker 2:That's not going to pay a lot. That's not going to pay a lot. It's going to not be possible to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. I mean, it's a real issue.
Speaker 1:It's a huge issue, and this was really the first time that I'd even stopped to think about it. You already have to come from a place of privilege in order to be able to do something like this, and in order to be able to do something like this. And yes, of course, there are people like Anna who clearly came from privilege. Her grandmother set this up so that she could go to law school Gratis yeah, gratis.
Speaker 1:When you come from a place of privilege, you do view the world a certain way. There's some things you might have to unlearn. I don't know. It all gets a little tricky for me.
Speaker 2:It does. I mean, she's coming from that place and she at least she did want to say like I don't have debt and I have the luxury of doing this kind of work that is not well remunerated and a lot of people wouldn't even do that. And even once you pay off debt, it can be very challenging to shift gears and suddenly say now I'm going to do work that pays very, very little and I'll live a whole different lifestyle. And that's most humans, frankly, just don't quite have that in them.
Speaker 1:That's a very sharp turn to take.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:All right. So, like you said, you went to law school in the 90s, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, what law school did you go to?
Speaker 1:I went to Georgetown.
Speaker 2:That's a very good law school.
Speaker 1:What was your experience like?
Speaker 2:She talks about feeling pretty isolated, almost as a woman in law school, or just not very supported. I would say I didn't really have that experience. There were plenty of other female law students really have that experience. There were plenty of other female law students and this is a lot earlier than when Anna went. So I'm a little surprised, but a good half of my class was women. I would think that was my feeling. I will say professors were much more often men than women and yeah, it felt kind of like a world devised by and designed for men, I mean. But that's true of the world, not just a legal world or a law school world. So it's more that law school and legal profession is not an exception to those things to patriarchal, you know, world.
Speaker 2:Can I tell you the anecdote about Sandra Day O'Connor? Yes, if you don't know about it world, can I tell you the anecdote about Sandra Day O'Connor if you don't know about it? So she famously is the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, right? So she graduated from law school, from Stanford Law, which is far fancier than Georgetown, as we kind of got gleaned from Anna's book. That's right. But so she graduated in 1952 and she was within the top three of her class of 102 or something like that. There were only a few other women, so she's the very first one to make it to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2:So she graduates in 1952 and she applied to every law firm in San Francisco and Los Angeles that was recruiting all her male classmates. Most did not respond at all. Several expressly said we are not hiring women lawyers. And then she finally gets an interview at a firm in Los Angeles because one of the partners there was the father of her college friend. In that interview the friend's father explained that the firm's clients quote would not stand for it if the firm hired a female lawyer and he offered her a legal secretary position. It's famous she was like could not get a lawyer position, offered secretarial positions. She eventually turned to public institutions. She finally got a job as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo in California and she initially offered to work at no salary with no office. She shared a space with a secretary. So I'm just saying this is the early fifties. Okay, her intelligence and abilities were obviously off the charts.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:She was a classmate of Rehnquist who was eventually a, you know, chief justice of the Supreme Court. Her experience brings up like two things for me. One is like there's very competing strains in law. One is adherence to tradition, and Anna talks a lot about that and how it's very staid and it doesn't move and it's, you know she takes a lot of issue with that. But the other is the avenue it offers for progress, you know, incremental or sweeping.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we can change how rights and responsibilities of individuals in society are defined without the use of force. We do it through law. I mean, that is our system, to do that without violence, without force. And so you know, for all its faults, it's been an important avenue for women to, you know, make progress. And Sandra Day O'Connor is a great example of that. Over 30 years she is hired as a secretary instead of a lawyer and then in 1981, she was appointed to the US Supreme Court. So it's kind of they're both sides of it that I think it's important to kind of recognize, because there's a lot of tearing down of rightfully so, of a lot of the flaws of the legal system, but there's a little bit of recognize where it is designed, within it. There are ways to reform it.
Speaker 2:And that's an important piece of that system and we've done it.
Speaker 1:It goes back and forth but we have done it Right. I know, Because when you said that, I was like oh, that's also scary that there are ways to reform it within the system.
Speaker 2:It's true, it's true. It's true, we have to stay diligent, so yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1:So back to Anna. She writes about an internship she has before starting law school with the San Fernando Public Defender. There's no way that I can very quickly simplify a lot of the cases that she talks about so you can listen to her. I believe she narrates her own audio book. You can download her book or get it from the library.
Speaker 1:She continues when people asked me why I wanted to do criminal defense, I would say, without irony, because it's where the badasses are. And at 23, I was starting to feel like one. I smoked weed every day, defending criminals. It was a far cry from the white shoe law firm where my dad had spent his entire adult life. I just wanted to be cool. I didn't think about how inappropriate and problematic it was that I, a blonde woman, was getting a strange high off my proximity to poverty and crime, but at least I was on the quote good side. I was helping people who lack the resources to advocate for themselves, whose rights had been trampled upon by the police and generations of systemic racism and injustice. That was the refrain at the San Francisco public defender. At all public defender offices, we were good, noble, and the prosecutors were bad, evil, and it seems like Anna really does become a lawyer to try to help and as a lawyer, you always hopefully feel that like what you're doing is the right thing.
Speaker 2:For starters, I think we all consciously or unconsciously justify a lot of things that we are not fully aligned with with our moral or ethical compass.
Speaker 1:Oh man, you are just, you are like laying the truth out for us today. It's true.
Speaker 2:We convince ourselves that we're good people, even when we do shady things. And I'm not saying that defending criminals is shady, I'm just saying it's really hard to live with the moral burden or, like I said before, the cognitive dissonance otherwise. So we find our ways. But this is a pretty classic question, right? How can this lawyer sleep at night defending this person who?
Speaker 2:did some horrible thing, and they know that they did it. I've never had to do it, so I have to kind of imagine, along with all the others who have never done it, but I feel like it really does seem to require kind of widening the aperture on the lens like Anna does. It's like she's looking at the ecosystem of injustice in our society and our systems and she's commenting on how often the people she's defending were basically set up to fail the thing the sort of thought that came to my mind when I was listening to her book about these topics. It's like we say to people okay, to survive in this society you need to swim the length of that Olympic size swimming pool. And then we throw some people in who don't know how to swim and we don't teach them how to swim. And then some of those people, we throw weights on them and say carry this weight over it too. And then we say, if you don't make it, though, we'll decide you're unfit for society and we'll throw you away and lock up the key.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a reality right, that is such a great metaphor. Did you come up with that on your?
Speaker 2:own. I did, I'm so I am very impressed, excited to have you respond that way, but so there's so much deep injustice and unfairness to that. So being on the side of advocating for those swimmers, you know it would feel like and is doing the right thing. I can see how that's like a really meaningful purpose in life, but would there be individual cases? That would still be incredibly challenging.
Speaker 2:Like yeah, yeah, there would. I was not brave enough to wade into those waters, so I really I appreciate that there are people who do. We have to have this element of our system. We cannot just, you know, have yet one more you know anvil dropped on top of this person. It's literally the one little life preserver we throw in to that water. So, and we have constitutional rights that have been laid out that say individuals are entitled to some form of defense, and that's where the public defense system comes from.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, but it's it's really challenging work.
Speaker 1:I can?
Speaker 2:I would imagine. I mean she the way she describes it? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it is tricky right, because people come from these systemic. We've failed them as a society, as a system they've been failed and there are people of privilege who commit crimes. And so it's just such a wide berth Now the people of privilege probably can afford to pay their lawyers.
Speaker 2:The people of privilege probably can afford to pay their lawyers, and there's a whole different sort of system that supports them and supports them well.
Speaker 1:So she's really talking about those who are not in that scenario and are kind of already got mostly the short ends of the sticks, you know, as they were getting divvied out, the type of lawyer that she aims to be at the beginning, which are defending these people who are defenseless without her Right, but then because she says the golden handcuffs are the people who have to pay off the debt, and then they end up doing this type of work where you know you went in it to defend David and then you end up defending Goliath, Right, right right Because you have to pay your own bills Right, and then you get sucked into that world.
Speaker 1:Yeah so those are the ones that I like I understand where Anna's coming from, because I do, like I agree with her, I think, labeling some of these people as criminals as opposed to victims of circumstance themselves yes, do they do bad things, of course, and I mean it does get really really muddy really quickly. At the end of the day, if this is a system that we all subscribe to, which we want to because, in theory, it helps more than it hurts, then you have to have people who are willing to defend everyone.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's as she's shining this light the legal system. On its own. It certainly has it structured, but even if it was perfectly well-suited for these issues, it wouldn't be enough. It's not going to fix the education system. It doesn't fix the fact that there are major economic disparities that get wider and wider every minute.
Speaker 2:So it's stuff like that that you kind of can get a little bit overwhelmed if you go too far down that rabbit hole get a little bit overwhelmed if you go too far down that rabbit hole, but it's definitely shining a light on that question of just how can a lawyer defend a particular person who is guilty of something. They're playing an important role and it's the role in the larger ecosystem that's important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. It's time for Anna to go to law school. Remember this was just an internship, oh, right, it's hard to remember that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. So she writes it's said that where you go to law school matters for your legal career, the better the school, the better the prospects. But I didn't care about career prospects, I just wanted a prestigious institution of a higher education to validate me. I understand I needed to get into a top law school so I would know I was worthy. It wasn't rational, it was neurotic and law school is kryptonite for neurotics.
Speaker 2:That was funny. You know validation, it never goes. The need for validation never goes away, or the fuel that it provides. I would say At least it hasn't been my experience that it goes away, but it shifts dramatically. Like what validation I looked for at 20 or 40 or 50 even, versus what I look for now at 60. It's just a different kind. So it's not anymore that external validation of, like, professional achievement and so on, but the internal validation that comes from being in touch with my values, staying true to them and being someone stable and reliable to others.
Speaker 2:I look for validation from the external world to see if I am living up to that. That's kind of what I'm, at least I'm aspiring to that. Okay, there may be some other things mixed in there, but it's very seductive. You know external validation and it can be a really it can be very productive because it can fuel us to really work hard and accomplish good things, you know, and be productive members of society, like there's nothing wrong with that. But it just has to stay balanced with a strong sense of integrity, clarity on why we're striving and what we're striving for. And I'm afraid in my younger years I didn't quite have the balance as much as I would have liked, and so you know that's been a lifelong journey.
Speaker 1:So back to Anna. She writes that law school was cushy, nowhere near as bad as people make it sound. It was definitely better than a job and way easier than putting on a duvet cover and I had to include that because I hate putting on duvet covers, I know it's so tricky, so tricky. She's waitlisted at Berkeley and her friend tells her to write a letter of continued intent detailing her experiences at the public defender office and that she will 1000% go and she gets in. And I thought again great that she had this friend who was like, oh, if you get waitlisted, just I would have never known to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't have either.
Speaker 1:I would have just been like oh well, let's see if they ever call me or write to me, you know so anybody out there who's applied to law schools. I wanted to include that nugget for you. She writes the first day of law school. I wore a suit, a black one that's hilarious. With a striped blue button-down blouse. I thought this was what I was supposed to wear. I guess I wanted to look professional. She and Elle Woods, both Okay. Did you feel like you had to dress or look a certain way to be taken seriously at law school?
Speaker 2:Not at law school. I was in jeans and a t-shirt the whole time, which?
Speaker 1:now everybody wears leggings and t-shirts.
Speaker 2:This is the early 90s, so I don't even know what is happening.
Speaker 1:People are rolling in with sweatpants, now Berkeley too.
Speaker 2:I mean it's not like Harvard or something, anyway. But yeah, as a female lawyer after law school, once you're a lawyer there's definitely some pressure to look a certain way. And she talked a little bit about how women lawyers she would run into are like perfectly manicured, every hair in place and every nail done perfectly, and like the men would be messes, you know, and that resonated Like in my law firm. Those women partners were put together and then the men not all of them, many of them were perfectly well-groomed, but a few of them kind of that pigpen thing like dust all around them all the time and they could just kind of get away with being all schlumpy in a way that women couldn't and probably still can't. Let's face it, we still have so many double standards out there.
Speaker 2:But also back when I was practicing, you were required to wear skirt suits in federal court, not in state court, but in federal court. You had to wear a skirt, not even a pantsuit. Like you know, a pantsuit, a formal pantsuit, was not going to cut it. You had to wear a skirt and that means you're stuck with uncomfortable shoes and I have to say there's a lot of being on your feet. Where you're walking a lot, you're standing a lot, you're waiting around, probably wearing pantyhose.
Speaker 2:Totally, totally. So all that, the shoes in particular, really got to me. It's not a small thing and I do think being so big on comfortable shoes is probably the most stereotypically lesbian thing about me, but it really killed me the idea that this just it was really a norm that you couldn't buck. You had to do it. It feels like bullshit honestly. It was ridiculous. It felt so stupid at the time. It went away eventually.
Speaker 1:Hi, alex, popping in here. So in doing some fact-checking research I found quite a few articles that say the law might have actually changed in the 80s. But even Kara's wife backs this experience. So maybe the law technically said that women could wear pantsuits, but that doesn't mean that women actually felt able to do so. Back to the episode. Did you have to stick to a color scheme?
Speaker 2:You know, no one ever said, as far as I remember, these are your three colors, but it was really blue and black. And then the occasional tan when you were feeling really like spicy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And then, when it came to makeup very nude makeup I feel like you don't wear a lot of makeup in your life, but did you?
Speaker 2:I wore more back then. I don't know if that was being a lawyer or just being younger and it would being a little bit more the style.
Speaker 1:Sure, the nineties were mascara, masc. They went heavy on makeup a little bit yeah.
Speaker 2:Mascara was a little out of control, I think so I did. I was also just, I don't know, that was just my look.
Speaker 1:I don't feel like I really got a lot of pressure one way or the other on that. That's good. Back to Anna. She writes I didn't even have difference between a trial court and an appellate court or a state and federal court. Trial is all about facts, meaning what happened. Appeals or appellate law are about the law. Were legal procedures properly adhered to at trial or in the lower courts, as you mentioned this?
Speaker 2:was an education. Yes, this is basic knowledge every citizen should have.
Speaker 1:Honestly, truly Like. Why are we taking some of these classes in high school?
Speaker 2:and not these classes Couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:She writes about the different types of female professors. She has writing about one who, in Anna's opinion, was a quote pawn in a patriarchy that gave women a very narrow space to occupy in professional settings, be flawless or be attacked. She continues it was a struggle for me to find female role models in law school. They seemed to favor men, found nothing worth noticing in me or any female classmate who didn't fit within their narrow vision of womanhood. And you had mentioned that you didn't have a lot of female professors, but you had a lot of women as peers in law school with you. Yeah, did you have to be like an even better lawyer than the men or an even better law student than the?
Speaker 2:boys, I don't think. Law student, because so much of that was just kind of. Could you write a good essay? Could you take?
Speaker 1:a good test, so you didn't feel like you had to prove yourself as a woman to these male professors.
Speaker 2:No, no, I didn't really have that experience and I was really sad to hear that that was her experience some years later. But you know, I want to say that there's this whole body of feminist literature tackling the issue of women who try to kind of go along, to get along in a patriarchal system. It's just a reality, you know, and so.
Speaker 1:And this comes up in so many of the memoirs no matter what their career is.
Speaker 2:It's a constant theme the women who lift the ladder up instead of reaching down to pull up and you know, I personally try to focus my ire more on the system than on those women, because they are caught up in it and, yep, they're doing something that maybe I would prefer they not. So I didn't personally experience that issue and I had strong female mentors in the law firm, these great female partners who were very powerful in the firm I chose, partly because employment law had a fair number of women in it and in this firm women were in strong positions and they were mentors and they were looking to bring women along. I had a different experience. It's, of course, a constant problem and issue in patriarchal culture, so that's the way it goes.
Speaker 2:But I mean, I think women are under pressure to be more perfect in pretty much every profession and the legal profession too. But I hope it's really changing because women have also made a lot of strides in the legal profession. There are women at the top in law in ways that they have not risen as well in many other professions. So I feel like that's actually gone pretty well. No, that's true, I did look up.
Speaker 2:I love Catherine McKinnon who is Kitty of the dedication and she talks a lot about Kitty and some of my favorite stuff in the book.
Speaker 1:And she is the author of Sexual Harassment of Working Women and inspired Anna to start thinking about gender all the time.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and I went online to look for a succinct summary of her thesis, kind of you know like what she really was saying, because I didn't want to butcher it, but so I came across this. Her thesis was that men have power over everything of value in society, even the power to decide what has value and what does not. Men use this power systematically to shape and define social beings we call men and women in ways which enhance the power of men and keep women subordinate to men. That's kind of her way of expressing how the patriarchy, which is a word that Anna in this book throws around a lot.
Speaker 1:And it's thrown around a lot right now.
Speaker 2:Examining what that word really means you know, so yeah, the double standards. You know, patriarchy has been around for eons, thousands of years, and the feminist movement has been around for you know what, 50, some odd years or so. So it's not shocking that it's not perfect yet. It may never be, but we just keep working at it, right?
Speaker 1:We do. Speaking of the word feminist, anna writes this about her relationship with that word. Growing up, I never considered myself a feminist. In fact, I had a negative association with the term. This partially came from my mom, a low-key men's rights activist, the type of woman who reads about a man being charged with rape and says, as the mother of a son, you have two daughters, you sick freak. I'd later hiss back at her. I'd internalized some of her attitude. I suppose Feminists were weak, frumpy, stuck in the past. I wanted to live in the future. I also wanted to be pretty, she continues. It was about a battle within me, within all women, between the side of us that wants to be accepted and pretty and the side that wants to buck the system and demand respect. Kara, what does being a feminist mean to you?
Speaker 2:It's so interesting to me how many younger women either don't identify with the word or find it off-putting, and I do think it has to do with feminists being portrayed as kind of frumpy and man-hating, that whole thing.
Speaker 2:But as far as what feminism means to me, I cannot talk about it without talking about what it is a reaction to, which is patriarchy.
Speaker 2:Patriarchy is a system in which men as a group are constructed as superior to women as a group, which is expressed through legal and cultural authority of men over women.
Speaker 2:Yes, I looked that up and wrote it down, so that's obviously I'm reading that, but it's a nice, clear way to express that Feminism is a rejection of that constructed system and specifically a rejection of the notion that men are inherently superior to women and therefore entitled to authority over them. So being a feminist to me simply means that I hold the view that women are whole and complete human beings who have the same dignity and are entitled to the same rights and autonomy as men, and in my view, anyone who holds this view is a feminist, even if they don't describe themselves that way. And people can disagree with specific policies or specific tactics, but if you fundamentally feel what is true, if you ask me I don't really want to call it a belief, I just want to say it's knowledge that women are equal in that sort of whole human being way, then you're a feminist, yeah, which I am, me too Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Proud card carrying one, I do sign the petitions by the way, give me a card. I want one.
Speaker 1:That is just a beautiful, clear, simple way to say it. Thank you All right. So Anna goes into way more detail about her experience at law school and there's some really interesting stuff in there. She also talks about a couple of internships that she has in between law school years which I guess are really important and really necessary to establish some relationships Throughout these internship experiences in law school. Anne is trying to figure out what type of lawyer does she want to be. She knows she doesn't want to be like her dad and she knows that she's able to go after a type of job that others can't, and she's drawn to criminal law.
Speaker 1:Writing criminal defense is chock full of human drama and it involves philosophical questions about which acts society should punish and why. Criminal procedure is a challenging logic puzzle, enjoyable to nerds like me. It also involves fighting injustice by holding corrupt cops and prosecutors accountable. The reason I went to law school in the first place? Although I was feeling less and less optimistic about my ability to make a difference, but I needed to do something. That was the real reason I went to law school because I needed to do something. And it was the real reason I wanted to do post-conviction criminal defense because I needed to do something. So this means that she's working in the appellate court Appellate oh my God.
Speaker 1:Why is that worth the appellate court right Post-conviction criminal defense? They've already been convicted, correct. This speaks to exactly what you and I were talking about the systemic injustices. She writes Most of her clients had all experienced essentially identical childhoods. All of them were abused as children, they were all neglected, they were all dirt poor, they were all people of color. They were all diagnosed with PTSD and various other mental illnesses which went back generations in their families. With what they had been through and how society and their own families deprived them, they didn't stand a chance of being functional, law-abiding members of society, and I loved your beautiful metaphor that you spoke of about the pool. And it is really, really tricky because you're right, like you said before, the law is just such a small cog in this machine of what needs to honestly be rebuilt and reworked to really have a truly functioning society where people are created equal. That's something that our constitution promises, and I don't think that's something that our constitution delivers on quite yet.
Speaker 2:It falls short In the execution of it. It falls far short and it's pretty disturbing and I could see how being on the front lines of it in that capacity day in and day out, would be very, very challenging. And I appreciate that she brings to light, just how you know her anecdotes of how this was playing out in specific cases and what that looks like Sometimes.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not always easy to talk about, even in the abstract, but it's where we stay and sometimes it's really helpful to get down to very specific. This is a human being, this is their story and here's how this played out. And she does this also with she does it with both feminism and women and she does it with race and sort of both of those things, and she kind of toggles back and forth between those two topics, it seemed, but she really highlights some important things. So I appreciated it.
Speaker 1:I completely agree, and there was a really interesting part about the death penalty and how, while Anna feels that there definitely are some people that are quote dangerous beyond rehabilitation and killing them is the safest and most efficient way to protect society, putting somebody on death row is actually extremely expensive, which is something that I hadn't realized. According to a 2014 study that she cites in the book she does cite all of this stuff, which I'm not going to sorry Pennsylvania spent $350 million on the death penalty over a period of time during which the state executed just three people. She also explains about these nine opportunities a person convicted of a capital crime has to challenge his or her sentence, and how time consuming and costly this is as well. You know we were talking about how the education system is broken. It's like when you look at this, you just wonder there's gotta there's gotta be a better place that this money can be spent.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God yeah that actually implements a bigger ripple effect or change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know the death penalty situation, you know how people I don't know what the current statistics are on how people feel about it.
Speaker 1:Hi popping in again with the current death penalty statistics. So in an October 2024 poll, gallup found 53% of Americans in favor of the death penalty, but that number masks considerable differences between older and younger Americans. But that number masks considerable differences between older and younger Americans. Gallup's polling also shows that more than half of young US adults millennials and Gen Z, ages 18 through 43, oppose the death penalty, while approximately 6 in 10 adults in the older generations the silent generation, gen X and baby boomers favor the death penalty. It always struck me as odd that a country that flaunts its Christian values supports the death penalty. Hopefully, when people also realize how expensive it is, they'll rethink their stance on it.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I'm going to link this info from deathpenaltyinfoorg Back to the episode. There are many states that do not have it and it really varies across the country. I'm just speaking to our country. It certainly varies across the world and most countries we respect.
Speaker 1:Alex popping in again. I'm going to link a BBC article from January 2024 in our show notes. And when you look at the list of countries who have the death penalty and you see our country's name on the list, it's a head scratcher. Back to the episode.
Speaker 2:Is when I was in law school, one of the more interesting constitutional law classes involved the Eighth Amendment, the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and it wasn't even so much the argument that death would be a cruel and unusual punishment.
Speaker 2:It was the way it was implemented is the thing that people were challenging. And she talks a little bit about this and it struck me as quite interesting that it wasn't even exactly. If a person is not white and they're a person of color, they're more likely to receive the death penalty. It was. If the victim was white, the person is more likely to receive the death penalty. And the more you sort of look at where those pieces fall, the more you can just see quite starkly a racial component to it. And then you throw in all of the things that we've already talked about and I won't repeat, and it feels to me like there are both practical and moral reasons to eliminate it and sort of protect society if that's what's needed in a different way. I mean we can have life without parole and those kinds of things, but to me the real problem is we have to stop creating these criminals.
Speaker 1:We have to prop people up so that they don't have to turn to this way of life, which leads to a different way of life. We know that there's a root of the issue. And we're just slapping band-aids on it, we're look to other countries and see very different systems.
Speaker 2:You look to like Denmark and other Scandinavian countries, they do it very differently. There's a whole different mindset to it.
Speaker 1:Hi popping in again. I wanted to give a little bit more context about her reference to the Danish prison system. I'm going to link an article from berkeleycentergeorgetownedu, and the main takeaway is that there is a theory of rehabilitation which is the core philosophy of the Danish prison system. It encourages solving the problems that led an individual to crime rather than punishing the crime itself. It works to retrain and reintegrate criminals back into society. You can check out that article I'll post in the show notes. Back to the episode.
Speaker 2:We seem to have just gone all in on retribution and protect society, but you know, in the short run what we do is fill up prisons and in the long run we have the legacy of generations and generations that never receive any kind of real help to break those cycles, because going to prison for even a short time really disrupts the whole world around that person, not just that person's life.
Speaker 2:So it's partly just a choice that's been made that I would like to be rethought and re-decided, and I certainly vote for people who are more aligned with the values that I espouse, which include being against the death penalty. That's you know, that's me.
Speaker 1:That's me too. I love that Anna talks about this stuff so that we can have these conversations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's bringing up important things that aren't really. They don't get brought up in a popular culture kind of way typically, right.
Speaker 1:They really don't.
Speaker 2:And her book is light enough. You know it's not a legal treatise and it's a memoir and she includes a lot of humor and a lot of real stories and so hopefully it reaches some people and they think, oh, I want to understand this better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's more about her time at law school and her memoir. We've covered some good stuff, but now it's time for her to take the bar. Don don don. She breaks down the format of the bar and it seems extremely intense.
Speaker 2:It is so intense and everybody's stressed as all get up.
Speaker 1:She writes about a list of things that are allowed into the exam room, and this is for the California State Bar. Some normal things like specific pens, pencils, but there's also a ruler, one footrest, a standard size pillow, without a case. Anna writes that in Virginia, where her friend is taking the bar test, takers are required to wear a full suit to the exam.
Speaker 2:That's insane.
Speaker 1:That seems insane.
Speaker 2:My God, how uncomfortable, as if it's not bad enough.
Speaker 1:I know, and I'm sure the women had to wear skirt suits Probably Hopefully not anymore Blue or black. Thank you very much, alex. Popping in here again. Quite a few this episode. I have a friend who took the bar in Virginia and confirmed this. Plus, she told me that at the time she lived there, which wasn't too long ago, judges in Virginia still required women to wear skirt suits in court. But now she's in California and she can wear all the pantsuits. Back to the episode Anna preps herself for the test by listening to rap music. I'd love to just hear briefly about your experience with the bar?
Speaker 1:How did you prep, how did you decompose right before Decompose, decompose.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I hope I didn't do too much decomposing.
Speaker 1:Decompose. Oh my God.
Speaker 2:I need to decompose right now. Oh my God, no, I totally just like leaned into all the materials. Barbary she was like oh, that's short for barrier review and Bar Review Institute. That is what I used and I took all the practice tests and just like got to the point where I was passing those tests and I am just naturally a decent studier and test taker and most, I bet you, most people who go to law school probably would say those words.
Speaker 2:You know so kind of taking the bar was not. I mean, yeah, it was intense, you had to study many hours for a lot of days and months, and if you did that, though, it wasn't too crazy.
Speaker 1:You felt at least like you had a grasp. I felt prepared, yeah.
Speaker 2:I did. I did Even the even probate law or the things that they do not cover in law school. It's really weird. You're like I just went to three years of this thing and then five subjects I've never even touched on. I have to be able to answer questions.
Speaker 1:How odd is that.
Speaker 2:And yet again you got to pay for that Barbary stuff. Hopefully you have some means. It wasn't insanely expensive. But one more little barrier.
Speaker 1:Right, or you at least have to pay for rent while you're studying to take this, yes the luxury of being able to study all that time yeah, as a full-time good point yeah, anna becomes a lawyer, but it's not what she thought it would be.
Speaker 1:She writes everyone entered berkeley law wanting to make a difference, and I'd been no different. I wanted to give a voice to the vulnerable populations fucked over by our appalling criminal justice system. People in my class wanted to save the environment, find housing for the homeless and provide fair, adequate representation for people with disabilities or those seeking US citizenship, but for the most part they all moved on to associate positions in big law, shuffling money around between Chinese billionaires. I do not fault them for this. You cannot pay off a $200,000 debt if your clients are homeless. Again, just kind of pointing out a problem here.
Speaker 2:I don't know what the solution is, but it does feel like institutions are getting a little out of hand with how expensive they're getting, and you do wonder why there's no transparency about it, or at least I'm not aware of how it really works, and I just think it all kind of gives you the icky feelings.
Speaker 1:It really does. It really does. Anna quickly realizes that this life is not for her. Did you ever have a moment where you second guessed your path?
Speaker 2:I didn't only because, you know, first of all, taking a five year break between college and law school kind of gave me an opportunity to really like learn that it was the right profession for me and, as we talked about earlier, I found the niches that really were right for me and helped me be productive and feel good and do something meaningful without feeling some sense of like you know, my soul's being sucked out of my body or whatever you know she would say so it just wasn't something. It kind of suited my personality, to be honest, to be part of a profession that has a little bit of well-grooved paths. I didn't second guess it.
Speaker 1:Anna. On the other hand, her passion for writing is bubbling up. She writes writing was my only escape that year. It was the only place I felt confident and excited and in control. So she decides to pursue an MFA in writing and she is hired as a research fellow to study juvenile life without parole. She learns that the US is the only developed country that sentences juveniles to life in prison.
Speaker 1:During her year working for the fellowship, she, with her group, is tasked in creating a report to basically argue against the life sentences for juveniles as unconstitutional. She's ready for this to be her last job as a lawyer, but as the year ends, the report is written and she's still working on selling her book. I wanted to bring that up because I couldn't believe it. And she goes into this report a lot more. And this work also leads her to this next step, which is when she moves to LA.
Speaker 1:She's still jobless. She needs a job to pay the bills so she can keep pursuing her passion of writing. And she applies to be on all of California's criminal appellate panels and is accepted to three of them. And here she is tasked with writing appeals on behalf of clients she never meets and she would normally lose. She writes I neither had hope nor faith in the system. This was just something to do, a way to pay rent. But she does feel more invested in her juvenile clients, especially after working on this report, because this was more of an opportunity to make a difference. She writes if you can keep a juvenile out of prison, you can save their life. Throughout the memoir she references a lot of cases and has personal anecdotes that really show how unfair the judicial system can be, and I don't blame her for getting out. This seemed like an extremely tough path. She became just as passionate about something else and it almost seemed like a self-preservation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it seemed like she was really never quite cut out for being a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Maybe yeah.
Speaker 2:She did it for interesting reasons in the first place, and the writing was always this passion.
Speaker 1:And there's still a way to feel like she's impacting the system.
Speaker 1:But in a way that just is a little bit maybe safer for her soul. Potentially, totally, totally. There's a really poignant example of when she was focusing on juror prejudice and she came across a case where a juror had written this to the judge. I strongly feel that this case should not have taken as long as it did with the deliberations, but some of us were faced with dealing with some jurors feeling that all Blacks are guilty regardless. Again, I just wanted to include this stuff Like these are real things that she encountered during her short years and they're recent.
Speaker 2:They're not from the. You know this isn't to kill a mockingbird, Exactly.
Speaker 1:In a legal system where guilt or innocence is determined by people with all their own baggage, their own inherent bias, their own prejudices? Kara, how do you remain hopeful I?
Speaker 2:remain hopeful by focusing on the fact that the legal system is one that includes its own mechanisms for reform. With the political will, with education and understanding and people deciding it's important, we can reform it. It's not hopeless. It's not some system that's out of our power. It is not functioning the way we want it to, but there's a path to changing it and it has been changed. It doesn't always last. Sometimes we slide back, but that's what keeps me hopeful is it is not a closed, impenetrable system that has no opportunity for reform.
Speaker 1:I can get on board with keeping hope alive with that too. Unfortunately, with this specific case that I just mentioned, the DCCA the District County Court of Appeals found no abuse of discretion in the trial judge's denial of the mistrial notion, in other words, the juror's statement that some jurors felt that quote all Blacks are guilty regardless was not the type of rare and exceptional circumstance that warranted an investigation. So this plants the seeds of her cynicism.
Speaker 1:She continues to become more and more jaded and she writes I was also very bad at it, not because I wasn't smart enough, but more because I couldn't get myself to play by the rules. The draconian citation requirements is, if we don't all have Google, the slavish reverence for American tradition, as if our country doesn't have a vile past. When it comes down to it, the law is horny for rules. In a way, my rebellious ass could never get behind and the legal system was so unjust. If I let myself care too much, I would probably end up in a mental hospital. Wasn't working for her.
Speaker 2:I don't think I could function effectively in that system either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it'd be way too hard, so yeah. She continues I wrote Bad Lawyer because I know that I'm not the only bad lawyer and I'm definitely not the worst. I've seen prosecutors lie and file briefs so lazy. Their reasoning is the defendant is guilty because he is not innocent. I've seen judges sipping on bourbon in chambers and perusing actions on eBay instead of listening to homicide testimony.
Speaker 2:I didn't have those kinds of experiences. I don't think civil law necessarily led to quite as much of that sort of bad behavior extreme things on.
Speaker 2:Most of the lawyers I've known have, and judges have been people who've worked hard and trying to do that with integrity. More extreme things Most of the lawyers I've known and judges have been people who've worked hard and trying to do that with integrity and all of that which can run the gamut. People have different views of what integrity means, but the criminal justice system feels like it's so much more challenging and likely to lead to extremes because the stakes are so much higher. You know like what actually happens and how it plays out in people's lives. I would just picture more extremes with selflessness and passion for the work, but also extremes in bad behavior or some version of numbing or ways to avoid what's going on. Given operating in that system day in and day out. Not shocked by her experiences, but that wasn't my experience on the civil side.
Speaker 1:That's the important thing is obviously, this is Anna's experience. This isn't just like some broad strokes situation. Maybe other women, other men can come forward and say, yeah, I've had this experience too. My hope is that the system is working more than it's not working right. We do sort of have to believe that.
Speaker 2:I hope, or, like I said earlier, if we don't think it is. You know, pay attention to the positions taken by the politicians you're voting in and the judges.
Speaker 1:There is a way that you can be a part of the solution. You can. There really is, just as a citizen who doesn't have a clue what the legalese is saying, we vote for the district attorney here in LA. Yes, we do. We vote for that person and they put out their position statements.
Speaker 2:So part of it is just being educated on the realities and then saying, as an active member of the society, I'm going to do what is the simplest thing I can do vote, actually vote and do some research to do that. With things online it's pretty doable now you know.
Speaker 2:So yeah, you're right about the DAs, and that's true for the Attorney General of California too, you know. And yeah, you're right about the DAs, and that's true for the Attorney General of California too, you know. And we do vote for judges. There are ways I send a little email around to friends and family who want it, of people who have some insights into the judges, because that's a toughie.
Speaker 1:People don't really it's hard to know and you're like, oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, whatever. Yeah, you know it's hard to know, but some of those other rules, like we talked about, matter, so that's at least one thing we can do.
Speaker 1:Here's what I feel like we can't do Throw up our hands, say the system is broken. What are you going to do about it?
Speaker 2:I agree because, listen, a system based on a rule of law is better than just about any other one I can think of. I don't want a different one, I want to just keep trying to make the one we have better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me too. It also is helpful sometimes to look back at our history and see how much success there has been in reform and in what has been able to be changed, and how that can be a real source of hope too. You have to fight to sustain it, but there's an overall trend that you can glean a lot of hope from.
Speaker 1:That's very true, kara.
Speaker 1:That was Bad Lawyer by Anna Dorn.
Speaker 1:I thought that she just did a really good job of mixing in her personal journey and feelings about law school and the law system, while being really informative about the justice system, what things mean, why the court system works the way that it does, really laying it out in a really humorous way, like you said, and it does get heartbreaking I mean it does.
Speaker 1:I think, especially if you're a compassionate person, it can feel like there are a lot of injustices and she lays them out all on the table and I'm glad that she did. Me too, I'm glad that she did, and I think it's really brave when someone decides to dedicate a huge portion of their life and schooling and money and time to something and then realize that that's not a road that they want to continue on. But how can I continue to make a difference? By writing this book, she's at least shining a light on some of this stuff that you mentioned earlier that you read some of her other articles and you really appreciated them, and so she's out there continuing to fight the good fight, but just not as a lawyer in the criminal justice system anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she brought up a lot of good, interesting stuff to really raise some consciousness. Yeah, I appreciated that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, kara, before I let you go, I know I've come to you and I felt hopeless about the way that things are and we've had some really wonderful talks and you shared something with me that helped me feel like differences were being made in the way that, in the direction that I wanted them to go, like differences were being made in the way that, in the direction that I wanted them to go, and there's a way that we can join them and be a part of it.
Speaker 2:So if you would like to talk about that, I'd love to give you the floor.
Speaker 2:Last year, my wife and I learned about something called the States Project and what they are doing is really focusing in on the state and local elections and including things like state Supreme Courts and midterm and off-cycle elections throughout all of the 50 states, where they are really trying to say to individual people who want to be part of something that moves the needle more directly than you or I can do in a big federal election whether it's for a US senator or the presidency or that kind of thing those elections, the amount of money that gets spent is so massive that our involvement whether it's as a donation or just helping to raise awareness that this is a very strategic way to make donations that's what came to our attention.
Speaker 2:So the states project does a lot of research and make sure that they are using funds in a very strategic and smart way, so that you aren't putting money into some election that's unwinnable, but you are looking at and paying attention to that Iowa state Senate seat that just flipped to Democrat after having voted for Trump in the election.
Speaker 2:So it's those elections that, over time, build a more solid infrastructure for our country so that within the states, within local governments, within school boards you know, we need to be aware that those races, those elections, all of those things really matter significantly and you and I, as just individuals in the process, have an actual shot at affecting those, because it's not as much money that's needed to be involved. And so the States Project is just a very smart, very well organized and strategic organization that is making tremendous strides since 2016, when they started, and they have the results to show it. So it's easily found online, just Googling the states project and it'll pop right up and you can read all about them and see how they do what they do and see if you're interested.
Speaker 1:And I think that people underestimate the effect that local elections have. I think so too.
Speaker 2:I think so. First of all, they don't realize this goes back to our education but they don't realize that most of the things that really do affect their day-to-day lives are probably happening at the state level. More so Now, this very moment in time as we are recording this, it's just a bit of a moment, right.
Speaker 2:So, let's just put that aside and talk about normalcy, where the thing the bread and butter issues. What's my health care going to be like and what does the education system look like? And is my water clean? Is the air that I'm breathing clean? Those are things that are primarily driven by whoever's in the state house and the governorship, so it's really critical to focus on them. And that was a light bulb moment for me just a few years ago, never gave second thought to my state senators in Congress. Yeah, men and women.
Speaker 1:More often than not we don't know who they are Right or what they stand for, and maybe you should Exactly, in a country that really is putting a lot of importance on state rights these days.
Speaker 2:There you go, there you go. That's not a drive enough. It's really worth checking out if you want to be active and involved.
Speaker 1:Yes, I will link the website to the state's project in the show notes so you can check that out for yourselves. I also want to share an app I really like called Five Calls. It's an app that provides you with a script and tells you who to call for your chosen issue, from representatives and senators to governors and attorney generals. You just click on the concern that you want to give voice to and they do all the hard work. This is so great for people like me who get really nervous about articulating themselves. They make it really easy breezy. So be sure to check out that app and we will link that in our show notes as well.
Speaker 2:I think that's fantastic and I am going to right now. What I had done is like in my contacts, I have my wife and I both have all of our. We have our two state senators, we have our you know congressperson, we have our attorney general for the state and we've been making calls and we I think we put it in favorites or something. But this is fantastic because a lot of times people just don't even know what to say.
Speaker 1:It becomes daunting. And then you just kind of go oh nevermind you know, yes, but this makes it easy Anything that makes it easier for people to actually express what they're actually thinking and feeling to elected officials. Fantastic in my book Because, remember, they're supposed to work for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the way that it's supposed to work, and there needs to be a clear expression of what people really want here.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. We have voices, we'll let them be heard. Yeah, kara, thank you so much for talking about Anna Dorn's book with me today. This was enlightening, illuminating, a joy to sit here across from you and I could just chat with you for hours. Thank you, anna.
Speaker 2:Fortunately we have no more time.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. All right, I adore you, thank you, oh, thank you, bye, bye. Thanks for listening to Babes in Bookland. To access the full version of this episode, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or support us on Patreon. Visit babesinbooklandcom for more information. Bye.
