Feature Friday: Julia Neusner

Julia completed her undergraduate education at NYU before participating in the New York City Teaching Fellows program, working five years as a special education teacher in New York public schools. She came to study law at Stanford Law School, but eventually applied to the joint degree with the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) Program to augment her interests in law with her interests in human rights policy.

Julia has been interested in the global dimension of human rights advocacy for a long time. As an undergraduate student, she studied international human rights through the lens of literature while working towards a Comparative Literature degree with a Spanish language focus and a Sociology minor at New York University (NYU). There, she was exposed to border justice and human rights issues in Latin America, which would end up shaping her later interests in immigration policy.

After graduating, Julia worked for the New York City Teaching Fellows, a program committed to recruiting, in the words of the program, “a critical mass of exceptional teachers” dedicated to raising student achievement in NYC classrooms and helping young aspiring scholars who need them the most. She completed graduate coursework at Long Island University, Brooklyn while teaching full time, earning a Master’s in Education.

What began as her two-year commitment to the Teaching Fellows program became a five-year tenure teaching special education in middle and high schools in the Bronx and Manhattan.

“As a public school teacher in New York, I was exposed to so many different manifestations of problematic public policy. I worked with students experiencing homelessness, students from immigrant families torn apart by deportations, and students who became ensnared in the criminal justice system,” Julia recounted, “and I saw the extent to which chronically under-resourced and poorly managed schools fail to meet students’ needs.”

After witnessing firsthand how systemic inequality impacts students and families, Julia was drawn to law and public policy. Unlike some others in the MIP program, Julia started at Stanford Law School (SLS) before applying for a joint degree with International Policy.

“I was particularly attracted to Stanford because of the law school’s robust international law program as well as its Law and Policy Labs, which enable students to work directly on current policy issues.”

In her first year at SLS, Julia participated in a Law and Policy Lab under Professor Emeritus Paul Brest, where she worked with the San Francisco-based NGO Accountability Counsel on creating accountability standards for the unintended adverse consequences of impact investment projects in developing countries.

After taking classes cross-listed in both Law and International Policy, Julia decided to apply to the joint degree in International Policy in her second year of law school, specializing in Governance and Development.

Julia specifically mentioned Professor of the Practice in Law Erik G. Jensen, who directs the Rule of Law Program, as someone whose classes were “eye-opening.” His Global Poverty and the Law class, cross-listed in Law and International Policy, included a week-long field study trip to India, where she was able to meet with government officials and judges and see court proceedings firsthand.

The experience had sparked enough interest in her that Julia stayed an extra week to do independent research for a paper on the Right to Information Act (2005) in India and its implementation, as well as how human rights advocates have used it in their work.

“It started as a grassroots movement by activists in rural areas,” Julia said, “but they were eventually able to get enough support from civil society and people in government to get it implemented into law.”

“It’s really an incredible story in a country that’s been battling rampant corruption for so long to pass this law aimed promoting transparency,” she added.

Julia is hoping to do more research into implementation challenges, including whether ease of requesting and obtaining information from the government is affected by special privilege or contingent on having a certain amount of resources.

In the State Building and the Rule of Law seminar she took in the past fall, which is also cross-listed in MIP, Julia studied states mired in conflict, those engaged in post-conflict reconstruction, and the role of legal institutions in developing states. As her final project for the course, Julia joined a team co-authoring a textbook for the use of students at the University of Rwanda law school, which involved traveling to Rwanda over winter break to meet with professors and law students at the university. Julia will co-lead the project through her remaining time at Stanford.

Julia’s work on human rights issues has been extensive — her experience ranges from the field of labor unions during her time as a delegate for the United Federation of Teachers in New York and as a law clerk for the Operating Engineers Union in Alameda, to immigration and civil rights work as a legal researcher for Dejusticia in Colombia, and even to trade policy with her research in the Dominican Republic on conditions for workers in free trade zones.

The biggest project with which she is currently engaged involves advocacy work for asylum seekers and recent deportees at the U.S.-Mexico border, providing legal assistance and Know Your Rights trainings. She has led four trips this year to help with the effort, bringing over 50 graduate students from Stanford to Tijuana to work with lawyers on the ground to advise asylum seekers and document conditions at the border.

Looking forward, there are a lot of options on her mind; including doing more work with labor or immigration issues, clerking for a judge, practicing litigation, and eventually working in politics — though she still has some time left at Stanford.

Julia looks forward to gaining more on-the-ground experience in the MIP Practicum next year. Of her classmates, Julia said, “everyone has such fascinating backgrounds..it’s been incredible to be able to get to know brilliant people from so many different places in the world.”