Examining Immigration in the Post-9/11 World

Former ACLU attorney will establish an immigrants' rights clinic.

Photo: Steve Gladfelter

As an electrical engineer educated at the University at California at Berkeley, Jayashri Srikantiah thought she would apply her love of mathematics to a job at one of Silicon Valley's high-tech firms. But after two years of working for Intel Corp., Srikantiah had a change of heart. The Bombay native, who was raised in San Jose, felt a growing political awareness she could no longer ignore. So she quit her job and applied to law school, graduating from New York University School of Law in 1996.

"It was a really good decision for me," said Srikantiah, an immigration law expert who left her post as associate legal director of the ACLU of Northern California to become an associate professor of law (teaching) at Stanford Law School. "The engineering degree gave me a familiarity with problem solving, and the transition was a lot easier than I expected."

Srikantiah will launch an immigration law clinic at the school in spring 2005. It will allow law students to represent individual immigrants as well as immigrants' rights organizations on a wide variety of cases.

Srikantiah clerked for Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge David R. Thompson and practiced law at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin in San Francisco before moving to the ACLU in 1998. There, she covered immigrants' rights cases, including the high-profile Reddy human trafficking case, providing legal representation to young South Asian women who were trafficked into this country. To Srikantiah, it was a question of ensuring that trafficking survivors be accorded full human and civil rights. "Trafficking is a global problem and requires a global solution, but we can start at home by fully protecting the rights of survivors here in the United States," she said.

Srikantiah said her own background informs much of what she hopes to convey to students in the hands-on clinic. "A lot of the issues faced by immigrants are ones I've had personal experience with, and my experiences have motivated me to work in this area of the law."

—Nina Nowak