Faculty Spotlight: Professor Pooja Dadhania
Professor Pooja Dadhania is in her sixth year at California Western School of Law, bringing a lifelong passion for mentorship to the classroom and vital perspectives on immigration law to the community at large. California Western’s 2019 Professor of the Year sat down with us to talk about what drew her to the law and to teaching and how her research connects to some of the most important global issues we’re facing.
What got you interested in the law? Family tradition? A formative college class? Something else?
I’m the first lawyer in the family. I was in undergrad, writing my thesis on gender-based violence in South Asia, and my thesis advisor was an expert witness in asylum cases. Up until then, I had been volunteering in some capacity or another, like teaching children how to read and tutoring high school students, and I wanted to help people in my future career. He said that if I wanted to help individual people directly, if my goal was to help people fleeing violence, then law school would be the best fit. So, I took his advice!
What drew you to academia?
When I got into practice, I realized that what I really loved doing was mentoring newer attorneys and law students. I found it incredibly rewarding to help somebody learn how to run a trial or a hearing and then see them do it. My whole life I had been involved in education, but I hadn’t put it all together until that moment that education was where I needed to be. I decided to go on the market for full-time positions and was very lucky to get this job at Cal Western.
Do you see advocacy as the primary motivation in your research?
It is definitely a very strong motivation in my research. I want to write articles that practitioners or adjudicators can use. Earlier on in my research, these types of articles were a primary focus, because a lot of my ideas came from what I found problematic while I was practicing.
I am turning more to theoretical work now. I’m trying to reimagine the legal system in a variety of ways. Last year, for example, I published an article called “State Responsibility for Forced Migration,” which argued for using a different theory of international law to protect people who are forced to flee their homes but are not currently protected under existing treaties.
On that point, in your writing you’re often reframing legal precedents in immigration, asylum, and refugee law, looking for ways to expand migrants’ rights. What misconceptions and or injustices in these areas of the law do you find yourself drawn to address?
The first concern would be that the definition of who is a refugee under international law is so limited. It’s only a small subset of people that countries have to protect. Unfortunately, people are displaced for many reasons that go beyond that narrow definition. So, I find it compelling to research and write about how to expand protections. For example, in the context of violence against women—some of my work is using creative arguments to try to fit survivors of gender-based violence into the existing refugee definition, because when the drafters of the Refugee Convention wrote the document, they weren't contemplating protection from that type of violence.
What would you say are the most pressing issues to tackle in the global refugee crisis, and what role do you see lawyers and academics playing in it?
The big one is people displaced by climate change, which is already starting and will continue to get worse, especially if countries don't take action to combat climate change. Right now, there is no international protection for these people. So, it's up to individual countries to decide whether they want to let people in or not, and the trend across the globe right now is to not let people in.
Then there is domestic policy. It is very hard to get Congress to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, so the Executive branch ends up taking more action than they did in the past. We have seen the Biden administration trying to dismantle some of the Trump-era policies, and also keeping some of the Trump era policies. So, it will continue to be a question of what the Executive branch is going to do in terms of immigration.
I think this is where academics play a role-- we have the space to think about potential creative solutions.
Has your work been cited in the field?
Actually, my most cited article is one I wrote when I was a law student. It was about how to analyze criminal convictions for purposes of removal (i.e. deportation). Two courts have cited it. It’s something to remember—that people are reading student work, too!
Another piece that has gotten interest recently is about language access in the immigration system. I've been invited to speak to the American Constitution Society to their State Attorneys General project about the government's failure to provide interpreters to asylum seekers at their asylum interviews (the regulations that require non-citizens to bring their own interpreters). In the piece, I suggest a due process-based solution that people could use to argue to change those laws.
You were CWSL’s Professor of the Year in 2019. What's your approach to teaching and what do you think resonates most with your students?
In Civil Procedure, to help students understand how things fit together, I decided to focus on teaching students how to use procedure strategically to advance their clients’ objectives. I think this makes the subject feel more concrete and accessible. I also try to give real world examples of how lawyers are using these strategies in practice.
I like to give students a lot of opportunities for practice. I give them factual scenarios and ask, “What are you going do to help your client in this circumstance?” That helps students understand and retain the material.
What are you looking forward to in the coming years in your teaching and research?
In terms of teaching, I just taught immigration law for the first time this year. I look forward to teaching that again, because we have a lot of students who go into immigration work or who, even if they don’t go into it, are still very passionate about this area of law.
In terms of my scholarship, I am looking to do more work on language access. I am collaborating with a social scientist, bringing some interdisciplinary perspective into my research. I'm very excited about that, because there are a lot of scholars who study language access in the immigration system who aren't legal scholars. There aren’t many people in the legal academy doing this work, so it's been nice to find scholars to collaborate with. I'm learning so much from them!
What to you is unique about California Western students? What do you appreciate most about them?
California Western students are very eager and willing to learn. They bring a high-level of engagement in class and outside of class, and that makes teaching a lot more fun.
I also really appreciate that students bring many different life experiences to class. It always enriches our class discussions, because everybody comes at the issue with a different perspective, different experiences, and that forms a really excellent learning environment.