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March 2, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 7S
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| THE ADVOCATE: Powerful human stories and the ability to make an impact attracted Jayashri Srikantiah (B.S.’91 EECS) to immigration law.
MICHAEL JOHNSON PHOTO
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An immigrant herself, alumna finds her calling in law, defending immigrants’ rights
Jayashri Srikantiah (B.S.’91 EECS) loves to ask
what’s fair. Is it fair to imprison a Muslim man without due
process? Is it fair to deport an undocumented Mexican woman who has
testified against her husband for abusing her? As director of Stanford
Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Srikantiah confronts
these questions every day, helping law students protect the rights
of noncitizens.
“I think immigrants’ rights are a major civil rights issue of
our time,” she says. “I really connect with that movement,
and that’s where I get the passion for my work. It informs everything
I do, from working with students to bringing cases to court, to my
own scholarship. It’s what makes me care so much about this field.”
Srikantiah and her family immigrated to San Jose from Bombay when she
was a young girl. (She’s now a naturalized American citizen.)
Though her family didn’t face legal challenges, she knows what
it’s like to be an immigrant wanting to be treated like everyone
else. But she never imagined herself as a lawyer.
“I enjoyed math and the technical side of things and had a great time
as an EECS student at Berkeley,” Srikantiah says. “I also
really enjoyed writing, debate and being involved in the South Asian
community on campus. I minored in South Asian Studies.”
After graduating from Berkeley, Srikantiah worked at Intel as an electrical
engineer. But she missed writing, she says, and decided to make it
part of her career. Law school seemed a natural next step, so after
two years at Intel, she enrolled in New York University’s School
of Law.
Though no longer in a technical field, Srikantiah says her engineering
training prepared her for the rigors of law school, from analyzing
a subject to taking tests, to simply feeling confident that she could
complete a law degree. It was after law school that she got her first
exposure to immigration law. “When I was clerking on the Ninth
Circuit, I saw a lot of immigration cases that were incredibly compelling,
and I related to them on a personal level because I’m an immigrant
myself.”
After graduating from law school in 1996, she joined a private law
firm, and in 1998 took a staff attorney job at the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), working on its Immigrants’ Rights Project. Eventually,
she became the associate legal director of the ACLU of Northern California.
In 2004, she accepted the director’s position at Stanford Law
School and launched the clinic the next year. Today, she supervises
a dozen law students each semester who represent individual clients
and work on broader advocacy projects. One of her clinic’s biggest
successes so far is helping to secure a Supreme Court victory in Lopez
v. Gonzales, a case dealing with the immigration consequences of a
drug possession offense.
“We get so much demand for our work that it can be overwhelming, but
I love being in this world,” she says. “I don’t see
myself anywhere else.”
For more information, go to www.law.stanford.edu/directory/profile/55/Jayashri%20Srikantiah.
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