The Real Lawyer: Shruti Rana (Part 1)

In this episode, Shruti Rana reflects on her multicultural upbringing, her parents' civil rights experiences, and her journey through UC Berkeley, LSE, and Columbia Law. Inspired by a purpose to create change, she shares her formative work with the Journal of Gender and Law, the UN, and her passion for women’s and human rights advocacy.

Transcript

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:03.758)
Welcome to the Real Lawyer podcast, where we get real about life, working in law, and everything in between. I'm your host, Joyce Sophia Hsu, and our guest today is Ms. Shruti Rana, Assistant Provost for Strategic Faculty Initiatives and a Professor of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law.

Judy is a prominent legal scholar, having spent decades focused on issues related to human rights and international law and policy. And prior to her current role, Judy was in several important roles in legal academia, the United Nations, as well as in private practice.

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:52.642)
Welcome, Shruti, to The Real Lawyer. Thank you. It's great to be here. Great to have you. There's a lot for us to talk about today. And before we delve into all the interesting projects that you are working on right now, I wanted to take a step back and have you tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and also I'm interested in your journey to law school. Yeah. Well.

I grew up all over the United States. Most of the time, or the majority of my childhood was spent in between Pennsylvania and California. And I think my childhood really led me to the law, actually, in hindsight. I think there are lot of factors that push me towards wanting to be a lawyer.

And I would say the primary thing is, my parents were immigrants from India who came to the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And they were part of, I've heard this phrase called the twice blessed generation, which is the first blessing for that generation was being born into freedom because they were born shortly after India's independence and the end of colonial rule in India. So born into freedom. And then

was in the late 1940s. They came of age and came to America just at the beginning of the massive changes spawned by the civil rights movement. So that's the second blessing is coming of age and coming to an America where they were able to come here and be a part of the all the changes happening with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. So that I think made a big difference in my life because I think for my parents

It was both their privilege and their burden to be coming into young adulthood and building a life in America during all of these changes. And that had a really strong influence on me because my parents were always thinking about civil rights issues. They were always thinking about issues of international development, colonialism. And those were things that I saw all around me. I was exposed to...

Joyce Sophia Xu (03:06.49)
the experiences they were having, the ways that they had to learn how to live in America and navigate the challenges facing them. And I had a chance also to spend quite a bit of time with my relatives in India. And my parents also loved to travel and really wanted to see anything they could of the world and would take me and my sisters on these trips. And they also, you know, really

were building their careers as I was growing up and that's how we ended up moving all over the United States. So I was born in Los Angeles and then moved to, spent elementary school in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, junior high school, a little bit of high school in Pennsylvania and I went to high school for a year in Texas, two years in Pennsylvania and one year in California. And then I ended up in California for college. And I went to college, I think at another pretty contentious and

interesting time to be in college, which was in the mid 1990s. And California at the time was going through a lot of both demographic and governance changes. And there were a lot of referendums, initiatives, a lot of changes going on in the state. And I got to see that there were a lot of civil rights issues that were top of mind. There was a lot of efforts to

target immigrants and undocumented immigrants. There were efforts similar to what we see now to target things like affirmative action and civil rights issues. And so what I saw as all of those things were going on around me was that it seemed like the lawyers could make a really big difference in all of these issues, right? Like, you know, people might be able to write letters and...

protest something or talk to people about something, but I felt like it was the lawyers who went into court and would challenge unjust laws and or if something was happening to a group of people and they had a way to create change was what I saw. And I didn't really understand what they were doing. Like I would read about it in the newspaper or hear about it or watch what they were doing on TV. And I just thought that's really exciting to be able to be the person who can create that change and who can see a problem.

Joyce Sophia Xu (05:21.388)
do something about it and try and help and make an impact on their community around them. So that was what led me to law school. And I didn't really know any lawyers. I hadn't, I hadn't met any. I told my mom, I wanted to go to law school and she called all her friends and she was able to find a woman who was a friend of a friend who was a lawyer who had moved here from India and

taking the California bar and was a lawyer in the United States and she was telling me a little bit about her career. And that was all I knew about law school. I talked to this one person who went to law school in another country and then I think she did additional training here to be able to take the bar. And then I watched the news and read the newspaper and saw that there were all these really interesting court cases going on. And that was enough for me. I was like, that sounds really interesting. I'm gonna apply to law school.

That's super interesting, Shruti. And I just want to go back to what you said earlier about how you grew up and you went to all these different states. That must've been very different at that time, you know, during the era, which is pre-internet. And I personally was born and raised in China and didn't come to the States until I was a teenager. And then when I first arrived, I was in Western Pennsylvania in a very small college town. So.

Looking back, you I didn't know any different states and what the culture was like in different parts of the US and it sounds like you had the opportunity to live in all these different parts and I would imagine that some states were a bit more diverse than others. So I'm curious how did you adjust to that having moved around so much when you were little?

At the time that I was moving around, first when I was younger, I think I was just like, well, this is an adventure. When I was older, and especially switching schools, it was more difficult. But looking back, I think I learned so many important life skills from those experiences because I think that the thing that's always sustained me is that I have a lot of curiosity about what people's lives are like and just learning about different areas and cultures.

Joyce Sophia Xu (07:42.574)
And so it was always somewhat exciting for me to move to a new place and just learn about the place and see what people were doing. I learned to be very adaptable and resourceful and also have a sense of humor. There are a lot of regional differences in the United States. And as you said, as a child, it's hard to figure that out. And I didn't have access to the internet or anything like that. And a lot of cultural things I learned by just showing up and doing something the wrong way.

Or I would just, you know, I'd say it's soda instead of pop or something. No one would know what it's talking about. That was such a big deal back then. Right, right. Exactly. And, and I was always wearing the wrong thing. Like whatever was in style at one school was like just no one had ever seen that at whatever new school I'd go to. Or they were like, no, that's, that's so three years ago or something like that. Right. So I just had to.

a little bit, but I think it gave me lot of perspective. Like at the end of the day, does it really matter what sneakers you're wearing as long as you're comfortable? Someone's gonna like them and someone's gonna not like them. And you just have to decide how much their opinion is gonna matter to you. And I think with that.

helped me realize is that I had to figure out how to have a genuine connection with people because I wasn't going to be able to say, well, that's how I grew up or my family does that too. Or of course I know what you're talking about or that's how we celebrate Thanksgiving too, you know, because none of those things were true usually wherever I ended up. And so I just had to figure out how do you connect with a person and the way you connect with people when you don't have these shared cultural

understandings is to be really interested in what they have to say and ask them questions and hear about their lives and hear about what matters to them. And then you get to that common point of everybody has dreams, everybody has something that is a sad child, know, it's a moment of grief in their life or a challenge that they've faced or ways that they look at the world.

Joyce Sophia Xu (09:46.582)
And even if they're different from mine, it's really interesting to learn about it. And at the end of the day, everyone or, you know, most people care about the communities they live in. They care about their family and friends and they care about the issues that are impacting the most. Right. And so somewhere in that range, there's always something to talk about is what I've learned. Yeah, that's beautiful. So then you got to law school and how did you find law school?

Well, I was just talking about different experiences and I actually found law school to be a big culture shock because I had come from California. I'd spent a year in London and I was used to really informal, laid back California. And I got to New York City. By the way, so you went to college then at UC Berkeley, is that right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So that, and then you were in London also for school?

Yeah, so I went to college at UC Berkeley and then I went to graduate school at the London School of Economics in London and that was, and I studied international relations, so that was a really interesting adventure. And then I had applied to law school just before I went to London and then from there went to Columbia Law School in New York City. And I had been to New York City a bunch of times when I was growing up, especially when I was living in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

but I'd always wanted to live there. And I thought this was such an exciting opportunity to live in New York and learn about the city and just see a completely different environment. And New York itself was transitioning at that point in time, right? And the neighborhood around Columbia University as well. And so for me, it was a culture shock to go from a big sprawling public university in a place that was laid back, sunny and warm, and get to New York City. And I felt like...

you know, we were just talking about like sneakers and things. I was wearing sneakers and t-shirts and sweatpants and I got there and I felt like everybody was dressed in black and much more formally dressed. And to me, they were talking about art and theater and all these things. And I was like, I need to learn about those things. I don't know what they're talking about. Yeah. Just so you just so the audience knows, Shuli and I actually went to law school together. We were in the same class year. So

Joyce Sophia Xu (12:09.698)
This brings back a lot of memories for sure for me as well. Yeah, and the other thing that really stands out for me and I wonder if you had this experience too, but I felt like I told you how I was really excited about law and I thought it was this way to bring about transformative change, but I didn't really know anything about it. Didn't know what lawyers really did other than you what I read on the news. And I felt like I got to law school and there were so many people who had just come off of a couple years of working at a law firm.

or they had parents who were lawyers, or they just seemed to know all these things that I just had no idea and had never heard of. And I remember people would say things like, so-and-so is coming to the school. Did they do this or that? And I'd say, what's that? I have no idea. I knew that lawyers went to court and they wrote briefs, and that's it. I didn't know anything else. So that was a little bit intimidating, actually. Yeah, it was the same for me. It was more than a little intimidating.

Because I was also one of the very few kids who had come out of a public school. I had gone to Penn State and when I landed at Columbia, it was such a different world from Happy Valley in the heart of Pennsylvania. So I could definitely relate to what you were just saying. So did it end up being a long adjustment period for you? Did you end up finding some favorite classes or projects while you were there at Columbia?

Yeah, I had, you know, it took me a little bit of time to find my way and find my path. And then I ended up, you know, just getting to know, you know, so many amazing people and having this great group of friends. And I think the, I was part of the Journal of Gender and Law and the people who were on the board of that with me were still friends to this day. And it was a very, it was a non-hierarchical journal that was very different in the way it was set up from

a traditional law journal and that was by design. And we, I just felt like we had so much fun, like reading articles and thinking about issues and then talking about the issues that we cared about. So that is something that really stands out to me as one of my most fun experiences. also, the classes I remember the most are, I took Martha Feynman's Feminist Legal Theory Workshop in some of her classes and loved those. I thought those were just so interesting.

Joyce Sophia Xu (14:32.672)
In hindsight, I now realize she ran them in a way that is similar to being a law professor, where you read articles and discuss them and think about ideas. And I would say the last thing that I did that really ended up playing a big role in my career is that we had a program at the law school where you could volunteer at the UN. I joined that opportunity and I was able to volunteer at the UN.

during the Commission on the Status of Women meetings, which was really interesting. So first I got to see how the UN worked, and then I got to learn a lot about the Women's Convention, and there's so many advocacy groups and nonprofits and things who come to the UN to talk about international human rights issues, and that was my first kind of glimpse into that world. I see.

Wow, so it was the perfect intersection between human rights and international law with a focus on women's rights. Yeah. That's great. What was your involvement? Like, what type of things did you do with that initiative? So when I was in law school, what we did was help out where needed. So I think we just kind of did anything. Like, if somebody needed copies of something.

We attended meetings and took notes for people, just literally kind of showed up and were extra help for the different organizations and the various events that were going on at the UN, which again is a really fun way to see what was going on. But that led to a number of really interesting experiences in my career, actually, because while I was in law school, we had a human rights fellowship program at Columbia where it was that you.

abroad for summer. My first summer, I did that and I worked at an international women's rights organization in Malaysia that worked closely with the UN and played a big role in leading the shadow reporting system for the women's convention, which is basically for any international treaty that goes through a UN treaty body.

Joyce Sophia Xu (16:44.728)
The states that sign on to and ratify that treaty are obligated to produce reports explaining how they're complying with the treaty or where there's challenges. And the countries that have ratified the Women's Convention do that as well. It's called periodic reporting. So usually something like 48 years, they're supposed to submit a report kind of talking about the challenges and how they're complying and where they need help and things like that. And women's rights is an issue.

where you can't always rely on the information that a state is providing. It might be that it's a developing state with a lot of challenges kind of measuring or gathering data or may not have a big presence in certain parts of their country. It's also an issue where governments really want to look good. So they might gloss over some of the problems that are actually going on in the country.

But the shadow reporting process is, it's a process for individual people or organizations like nonprofits or educational institutions or researchers to produce their own reports that they also submit to the UN. So they can do that to bring extra attention to a particular issue. For example, focusing in on what is the experience of incarcerated people or what is the experience of rural women in a particular country or part of the country.

And what they're able to do is supplement the state party report by doing that. And it's not, you know, it's not an official document or anything, but it's something that the commission can look at for additional information on what's going on in a country. Or sometimes a shadow report will raise an issue and the commission will say, okay, we didn't know that that was an issue. We want to learn more about that. We're going to look into it. So, so things like that.

So the organization I worked for in Malaysia was a big part of that process, which I thought was just so interesting because it's a way for ordinary people and people who are experiencing an issue to participate in a UN process. I got to meet a lot of really interesting people. I got to see the work that different international organizations were doing. And I sort of kept that in the back of my mind as I was going through other parts of my career. And ultimately I ended up working at

Joyce Sophia Xu (19:05.96)
the UN as my actual job and I worked specifically for the Commission on the Status of Women and was able to see this whole process from the inside, which was just really exciting. And after that, after I left that position, I've continued to be involved in that space around the Women's Convention and I do a lot of research and volunteer work.

you know, just kind of participating in the civil society mechanisms, which is basically a fancy way of saying, this is how ordinary people, researchers, advocates, professors can contribute to and participate in this international human rights work. Well, I love how these experiences are built on top of each other. The shadow reporting work sounds really fascinating to me. It almost has this air of intrigue to it, like

detective work. And I could see how you could apply more creativity in designing these independent monitoring programs to keep those participating nations honest. And it's also cool how one thing led to another, that your work at the International Women's Rights Organization led to a stronger tie to the UN.

and then put you on the path of doing more research and volunteer work over the years in the international human rights arena. So that's really cool. So let me get the timing straight. Did you end up working at the UN right after law school? No, I didn't. This was about seven or eight years after law school. So I went a little bit out of chronological order.

So tell us, what did you do right after law school? So I, again, when I graduated from law school, I had this idea that I really liked research and writing, and I was interested in these court cases. But I didn't know how to do that. And I had this really interesting experiences working abroad, working at the UN, and things like the Journal of Gender and Law. And I didn't know how to translate that into careers.

Joyce Sophia Xu (21:26.382)
And I was also just thinking, I really want to understand how the law works. so first I started out at a law firm in San Francisco, and then I clerked for the Ninth Circuit in California. And from there I went to a law firm in DC, and from there I went to the UN. wow, okay. What led you from San Francisco to DC? So I...

wanted to pursue international law. That was what I was so interested in. And that was part of the reason that I went to Columbia Law School because it was known for its international law programs. I think it's because I went to Columbia that I had the opportunity to see what was going on at the UN and get involved in some of the things that I did. And I didn't realize how hard it is to get into the international law field, especially as an American lawyer, because your training is different.

Yeah, your training is different. It's focused very heavily on American law and American lawyers are less likely to be fluent in multiple languages. And often that's a critical skill that you need to do international law or practice law in some kind of transnational way. And so I was thinking about how can I do international law work with my American law degree?

And at first I went to this law firm that I was just really interested in. I'd summered there my second year in law school in San Francisco. It's a firm that was called McCutcheon Doyle Brown and Anderson. It doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. it was just, I thought it was a really great atmosphere. And I felt like I got great legal training. I got a lot of personal attention on my brief writing. I had the chance to try out a lot of different things. But what was really difficult was

working on international law cases because at that time, I think this is still the case, but the San Francisco legal market and the Bay Area legal market was heavily tech focused. So there was a lot of intellectual property work and some of that intellectual property work, tangentially touched on international law or involved international clients, but it wasn't something that you could like.

Joyce Sophia Xu (23:45.01)
intentionally, I couldn't have said I only want to do international law cases, I'm going to spend 100 % of my time on it, right? I had to, you know, look around and hope there was an international aspect to a case asked to be on that case, kind of thing. Yeah. And then I thought, so I spent my clerkship year really thinking about what I wanted to do, and looking around at different opportunities. And I realized that if I wanted to do international law, at that point in time, I think it's a little bit different now.

that it would be really helpful to go to DC or New York. So I applied for jobs there and then I got a job at, I got, like I applied for government positions, a fellowship that I was really excited about. And ultimately for a number of reasons, I decided to go to this law firm in DC, Williams and Connolly, which I thought was a great experience. And I did have the chance to international law. Yeah, it was great.

Again, it was a tremendous learning experience. I just learned so much from these incredible lawyers who really believed in spending a lot of time mentoring and training and building the careers of the lawyers they worked with. they actually did have international law cases that they worked on. Yay. Wonderful. And then did the UN position come after?

Yes, so I ended up, I thought about going back to California. I went back for a little bit and then it was actually just sort of a stroke of luck that I ended up at the UN. I was talking to a friend of mine who had been part of the UN program also at Columbia and she mentioned that she'd seen a job opening.

and it looked really interesting and it was a job opening. They were looking for somebody with legal or policy experience and it was working with the commission on the status of women and I thought, that was where I volunteered. I worked for this international women's rights organization and I'm just gonna apply and see what happens and I ended up getting the position. So that was really fantastic. That sounds like it was just meant to be. How long did you end up working at the UN?

Joyce Sophia Xu (25:59.178)
So I was there for several sessions of the Commission on the Status of Women meeting. So that was a really exciting position. As I said, it was a lot like my clerkship, actually. I felt like I got to see the secret sauce, like how the decisions are made. I got to listen to the committee members debate issues. While I was there, they were working on some important...

amendments and provisions to the convention. So I got to see how they developed those new provisions, how they talked about them. I got to see how the committee members, you know, would review. They were obviously very dedicated, very committed. So they'd review all the state party reports. They would review the shadow reports. They'd ask us to do additional research, look into what was happening in a particular country or

dive deeper into the issues that were raised by the reports and then analyze how the country was doing with respect to their obligations and whether they'd improved over time. What was happening in that country, obviously countries can be in a moment of crisis and things change rapidly. So it was just really, really interesting work. The research and writing work that I did was just incredibly interesting. And then being a part of the process and seeing how the process worked was...

just such an amazing learning experience. And then it was also really inspiring to be around these UN committee members and just people at the UN. Yeah, I bet. Were they mostly lawyers or people with different backgrounds? There were people with different backgrounds who usually, know, what they had in common was some sort of human rights or women's rights experience. And often that was legal experience. There were a lot of judges,

or former judges, lawyers, a couple of law professors, but there were also people who had been politicians or government officials or who had played some kind of policymaking role in their country. By the time they come to the commission, they've had long careers behind them and a lot of experience. So it was incredibly varied. And of course they're from all over the world. And some of them have been part of their country's independence movements. Some of them had been...

Joyce Sophia Xu (28:19.022)
part of high court judges and things like that. So just really interesting. That is really interesting. And it sounds like even though there were people from all different countries and with different personal experiences and backgrounds, there was this transcendent commitment to human rights and women's rights issues. So it definitely sounds like it was a totally inspiring environment for you to work in.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's people who are deeply committed to making sure that every person has opportunities and education and things like that, and that they're also aware of the tremendous global challenges we have around these issues. And also, you know, we're thinking about all of these large, complex, challenging issues and something a group like the Commission

ends up having a small role to play, right? So you see these very big complex challenging issues and you see that, well, they're honing in on this issue and this is how they're trying to improve the situation. And then you can see, well, the commission can do this, know, commission and treaty bodies and the work around them can do these certain things, but you see what people in the country themselves are doing and, you know, all sorts of different ways that people are...

really engaging in their communities and trying to make a difference, basically.

Joyce Sophia Xu (29:51.896)
Thank you so much for listening to part one of my conversation with Shudi. If any part of it resonated with you, please do leave a comment and share your thoughts with us. And please do subscribe to our show and join us again on Wednesday for part two to hear more about Shudi's path to legal academia. And if you want to find out more information about the show and about Shudi, please connect with us through the Sophia Media page on LinkedIn.

or the real lawyer dot podcast page on Instagram. Until then, be well and be happy.