I decided to go law school specifically because of a report I heard on NPR. The report told the story of a 13-year-old girl who was a ward of the state of Florida. Her parents’ rights had been terminated, and she lived in a state-run group home. She disappeared from State custody for a month, and when she returned she was pregnant. State authorities blocked her from accessing an abortion. Because the girl had good lawyers, a juvenile court judge granted her request and she was able to have an abortion. That girl’s story presented a concrete reproductive justice issue: this was a marginalized, resource-less child caught up in the midst of multiple overlapping state systems, all of which failed her when she needed help the most. The State attempted to use the mechanisms of the law to prevent her from taking care of herself. After I heard that story, I knew I wanted to go to law school so I could be an advocate for young women. I figured I’d end up doing public policy or impact litigation work on issues impacting women and families.

I started an LSRJ chapter in my 1L year. LSRJ was my anchor throughout law school. The Hamline chapter, along with the other Minnesota chapters at William Mitchell College of Law and the University of Minnesota, and all our coalition organizations throughout the community, have put on amazing education programming, volunteer opportunities and social events for the last 3 years. The new leaders coming into the organizations are poised to continue that great work. I was incredibly lucky to work with all of them.

More profoundly, the RJ framework has deeply impacted the way I think about the social justice work I’ll do after law school. LSRJ has made me a more thoughtful advocate. I used to think the most important work lawyers could do was to litigate big cases, pass big laws, and generally make a big scene about the work they were doing. But one of the most important things about the structure of the RJ movement is that the legal team stays in the back. We “listen more than we speak” and “follow more than we lead”. What is most important in RJ, and in all sorts of movements, is that the people most impacted by injustice lead the charge for justice. Those of us with the privilege and legal expertise use our skills to serve the goals of those who lead.

In thinking about my role as an advocate for justice these days, I focus on how one small administrative regulation, one piece of paperwork, or one oral motion to a judge, can make all the difference in the life of the one person sitting across my desk from me. I will be very proud to work as an RJ advocate in the trenches, under the radar. Activism through the RJ lens leads me to think less about the big cases and legislative changes I can make, and more about the small, piece by piece chips I can take out of bad systems one client at a time. I find focusing on those individual trees in the forest to be a small, important, and humble way to use a legal education to do work that makes a huge difference to individual people who are marginalized by the legal system, based upon their individual circumstances and the intersectionality that impacts their lives.

In a way, the RJ movement has moved me to think about that girl from the NPR story in a different way. When I first heard her story and decided to go to law school, I thought about her in the context of the abortion rights movement, and about big policy changes that could be spurred by publicizing the injustice that was done to her. Now, I think about her story in the context of what those lawyers in the trenches did for her. Their focus was not on a news story, a legislative push or some big legal challenge. Those lawyers’ focus was on what was best for that one young client, in the moment when she was most in need due to her unique, individual situation. That’s real reproductive justice lawyering.

-Kate Hannaher

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