An Exploration of Civil Rights Law with Jonathan Abady
This interview was conducted in the Spring of 2023. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): What are some key moments that have shaped who you are as a lawyer today?
Jonathan Abady (JA): Well, that's a tough question because I think that there are so many things that affected me and that have influenced, motivated and inspired me, and it would be difficult to single out any one specific thing. If I go back to sort of the beginning, I grew up in the south, in Richmond, Virginia, which was an interesting place because it sort of contained all the contradictions in American society. It was the capital of the Confederacy. The south is known for its racism and its mistreatment of African Americans. And certainly that is a feature of growing up in the South, that you live that and you see it. When I was growing up in the 70s, it was the moment when the country decided to do forced busing as a way of achieving integration. And when that initiative occurred, there was a tremendous amount of white flight. My family did not leave Richmond, and I was bussed to schools that were predominantly black. So I grew up really sort of in black culture in Richmond and was one of very few white kids that were in these schools. I think that was a formative experience for me in sensitizing me to the racial divide and the difference in our culture and in our country.
And then I think that there's so many people and figures who influence you as you grow, and I had many of those figures. I think maybe an additional formative experience happened to me after I was in college. I went to school at American University in Washington D.C. The campus was extremely lively and politically active with students from about 153 different countries. That played a part in my awakening as an adult in understanding international politics and the role that the United States has played historically throughout the world.
After college I ended up doing international human rights work in Nicaragua during the war in the 1980s. I was traveling in war zones and documenting atrocities committed by the Contras, who were supported by the United States. And it was an example of the sort of negative influence and impact that the United States could have on its neighboring countries. And so that also shaped me in a significant way. So those are some of the things that triggered my interest in international human rights and in civil rights. And that interest in those issues resulted in me looking for a law school experience that would be weighted toward public interest work. NYU at the time still had a very strong public interest component. And I went to law school with the idea of wanting to have a positive social impact in my work as a lawyer. Since my graduation, I've looked for work that I felt would have some meaningful impact in the society at large.
My first job out of law school was at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, which at the time was an innovative public defender office that provided indigent criminal defense to the community in Harlem, an underserved community in terms of resources. It's been sort of an incremental process where I've looked for ways to have an impact and ultimately joined a firm and started a firm that has a very strong emphasis on doing high impact public interest work and civil rights work.
HULR: Why did you choose civil rights law?
JA: People go to law school for different reasons. I know that there's a huge percentage of law graduates that go into corporate law. That was never my orientation or my interest. I think I was one of the few students in law school that didn't interview with a big firm because it wasn't the reason why I went to law school. So I always had an interest in public interest law. And why the interest in public interest law? And why the interest in civil rights law? I guess I like to think because I had some awareness of what it meant to be living in the United States of America with all of our history of unfairness and oppression. The lack of fairness, the racial divide, the inequality and wealth were sort of inescapable features of living in this country. And I felt like I wanted to be involved in some kind of work that was addressing those inequities. And so that's what led me to an interest in civil rights and criminal defense and to some degree, international human rights.
HULR: When dealing with high emotionally intensive cases, what are ways you protect your mental health?
JA: Managing the emotional load of working in civil rights or in social justice causes is a challenge for everybody because it is exhausting. You're taking on the problems and the difficulties of your clients, and they're frequently people who've suffered in some very significant way, and it is emotionally exhausting. I mean, I did public defense for about five years, and it was inspiring, but also taxing emotionally. And how did I deal with that? I think that people who work in social services or in social justice, public interest work, have to take care of themselves. Sometimes there's a false dichotomy of thinking that your work life is in one space and your personal life is in another space, when actually I think they're connected and joined. At least in the sense that if you don't take care of your mental health, emotional health, physical health, and medical health, you are not going to be as effective or as available to the people that you're trying to help. It's not helpful to be a martyr or to sacrifice your own personal health. Part of dealing with that is taking time and taking space. This work is more like a marathon than a sprint. If you don't prepare yourself for a long trajectory, you’ll burn out.
Surrounding yourself with like minded people for emotional support and being in a social network is essential. Searching out colleagues, projects, and people that share your values, insights, and views can be very booming. It can sustain you, because there's a lot of conflict in the world. There's a lot of conflict embedded in civil rights sort of causes, and there's a lot of conflict in the law. It's the adversarial system. There's a tremendous amount of oppositionalism in this profession and in the culture. Living and working in that zone of combat means that you need to have allies and that means that you need to surround yourself with people who are nutrient against the tremendous amount of toxicity and evil in the country and world right now.
HULR: Meek Mill had been in a legal battle for over a decade. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when working on that team?
JA: Well, I think Meek Mill's case was just one symbol of the unfairness and the racism that we've been talking about that exists and persists in the country. And there was an interesting irony that played out in Meek Mill's case that is not different from some of the things associated with Tyre Nichols, a recent case of police brutality that had officers of color inflicting harm and violence on a person of color. In Meek Mill’s case there was a completely unprofessional, incompetent, and repressive, trial judge who felt the need to act out on Meek Mill. Our judicial institutions are supposed to be neutral and fair, but the reality is they're not.
What unites Tyrone Nichols and Meek Mill is the idea and phenomena of institutionalized racism. When we say that racism is institutionalized, we're saying that it's not just a problem of individual moral defect. It's in the fabric of the country and DNA of the country. And when it's in the fabric of the country, it means that it invades everybody's consciousness. Everybody sort of adopts the racist mentality and the racist notions. Even Black judges, even Black police officers, can be guilty of internalizing racism and racist impulses. In Meek Mill's case, there was a particular judge who was off the rails and out of control, working within a system that for a long period of time was incapable of correcting itself. Another important idea we saw illustrated through Meek Mill’s case was how individual actors can make a difference, because the person who ultimately made a difference in the Meek Mill case was the prosecutor, Larry Krasner, who recognized that he had the responsibility and the authority to correct an injustice that was not being corrected. Not only was it not being corrected by the judiciary, the injustice was being perpetrated by the judiciary, but Larry Krasner, to his great credit, recognized the unfairness of what was happening to him and he intervened.
I'm a person who believes that politics is everything, and everything is politics. It is incumbent upon us. If we want change, we must elect and insist that people that occupy positions of power are responsible, fair and conscientious. It matters like who the judges, prosecutors, Congress people are. It matters who the president is. It all matters and it really gets down to people needing to exercise their right to vote. The right that so many people have died and fought for over the years. That's our major vehicle for change. I don't believe there will be an armed revolution in the United States. If there's going to be change, it's going to be through our highly flawed democratic process. But that's the weapon that we have, and that's the weapon that we have to use.
HULR: Can you explain the Tamir Rice case and the process of reaching a settlement with the city of Cleveland?
JA: That's one of the many unspeakable tragedies in our country and in our history, that a twelve year old child playing in a park could be gunned down. It was really like a drive by shooting by police officers who are supposed to be protecting the community. It's an unspeakable tragedy, an unspeakable crime, and there's no amount of money that could ever replace the loss of that life. Many times you hear people crying for justice in response to police brutality or the use of excessive force when that brutality results in death. I'm of the view that in cases of police brutality resulting in death, there is no such thing as justice. Justice is something that happens or occurs when there is fairness. And there's no way to make that situation right. There is perhaps accountability, there is perhaps compensation, but the compensation is never going to be adequate. One of the animating enraging things about the Tamir Rice case, which is not distinct from many other cases in this country, is there really has never been any accountability. There was a terrible failure on the part of the District Attorney in Cleveland to hold the officers responsible for the crime that they committed. And there was an extremely disappointing and horrible failure by the Department of Justice that has continued even in the Biden administration under Merrick Garland, who failed to hold these officers accountable when they should have been, by the law.
We lobbied very hard after the District Attorney in Cleveland. We petitioned the chief of the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. We submitted a letter signed by 50 of the nation's leading constitutional scholars demonstrating why it was imperative that they charge these officers for the death of that young child. Almost every major civil rights scholar in this country from Bryan Stevenson to Lawrence Tribe to Burt Neuborune to Kimberly Crenshaw to Erwin Chemarinsky and more said, you must indict under the law and under the facts. And they refused to do it. And so that was a tremendous disappointment that survives to this day. It is a stain on the Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division.
The tolerance for this misconduct by multiple police departments, the district attorney's office and by the Department of Justice demonstrates how much work remains to be done and how there is still a manifestly unacceptable level of tolerance for police misconduct, a level of tolerance that pervades when the victims are black and brown people. You don't hear about these injustices for the sons and daughters of people who live on Park Avenue or in affluent white communities. Many of the victims here are black and brown people. So you have to ask, like, why is that happening? And why is the system so tolerant of that?
HULR: Where do you see the future of civil rights law? JA: The future of civil rights law is in the hands of people like you.You're the next generation. My generation has our culpability in the state of the country. I mean, it was under our watch that we had the emergence of the grotesque phenomenon of Donald Trump and we have to live with that and take responsibility and own it. But I think every generation has had its struggle and the struggle, I think, is perpetual to try to make our society look, in reality, more like the ideal. That's a long term struggle and there are enough issues and dilemmas to keep us all occupied for a long time. And so I think the future is in the next generation. And I think that as horrific a period as it is that we've been living through for the past several years, every action creates a reaction. And I think that one of the consequences of this horribly belligerent, repressive, ignorant, incompetent experience that we've all lived through during the administration of Donald Trump and in the aftermath is that it has triggered a counter response. And I think the hope is that it's going to trigger interest in action by your generation to pick up the torch, pick up the baton and carry it forward. That's not to say that all of us don't play a role, because we all do. But one of my longtime clients and mentors is Harry Belafonte, who is one of the great civil rights activists in the past century. And he has always been of the view that youth are the engines of change and social justice. And I share that view. I think that the future is in the next generation.That's not to absolve us of responsibility, but I think that the future of civil rights will be written by your generation. So the pressure is on.