Palestine Legal: "The Great Difference a Movement Lawyer Can Make" [TEASER]

Cool.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks for having us this year.

Should we take a selfie?

Yeah, we should.

Definitely we should take a selfie.

Hi, everyone.

It's Rhiannon.

No Peter, no Michael this episode, because this is my special episode, okay?

Honestly, you're welcome.

This is the second episode in a little five to four side project that I'm doing.

A look into the work of lawyers who are advocating and fighting for social justice in all kinds of legal spaces.

From the environment to racial and gender equality, shrinking the prison industrial complex, queer liberation, expanding rights for the disabled, you name it.

We talk so much on the podcast about what's wrong with the law.

So I think it's important to talk about the good fight that's happening in the law right now.

People ask us all the time, how can I be a leftist and a lawyer?

What work is there to be done in the law?

Is it all hopeless?

This is why I was inspired to start these episodes.

Broadly, in this series, we're talking about movement lawyering.

Movement lawyering means taking direction from directly impacted communities and from organizers in our legal work.

Movement lawyering is about building the power of the people, not the power of the law.

So to that end, I was thrilled to talk to Radhika Sinoth and Dylan Saba, two attorneys at Palestine Legal, an organization whose mission is to bolster the Palestine Solidarity Movement by challenging efforts to threaten, harass, and legally bully activists into silence.

Heads up, this episode is pretty different from our usual.

Our conversation was long and winding.

We talked about the historical context of the Palestinian liberation movement.

We talked about personal experiences and memories, how we each navigated finding social justice work and the law.

We talked about cases at Palestine Legal Right Now.

And we talked about intersectional cross-movement activism and solidarity.

I felt so much love while recording this episode, so much security and care among true comrades.

As we know, the personal is almost always political.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and apartheid suck.

I want to jump right in, so let's get started with intros.

Maybe let's just start with each of your names and your role at Palestine Legal.

Sure, my name is Radhika Sinoth.

I'm a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

I oversee our intake intake and casework, and I'm based in our New York City office.

Been here for over nine years now.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

And I'm Dylan Saba.

I'm a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, also based in the New York City office.

I've been with the organization for about a year and a half, and I do a number of different things within the organization with a focus on intake work, so representing.

clients directly and our public, I oversee our public education program.

Amazing.

Thanks for being here, Dylan.

I'm really excited about this conversation.

When I was first sort of coming up with the idea of doing this mini-series, I already had in mind Palestine Legal on my list.

So I'm really excited that it's our second stab at this.

So either one of you, let's kind of jump in.

What is Palestine Legal?

What do you do?

We are legal defense for the Movement for Palestinian Rights in the United States.

We started about 10 years ago when our director, who's Palestinian herself, Dima Haladi, kind of surveyed the movement and was asking the question together with other movement lawyers, like at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

And the question was sort of like, how can lawyers best support Palestinian liberation?

How can U.S.-based lawyers support Palestinian liberation?

And there is this growing movement for Palestinian rights here.

It's exciting.

It's thriving.

But at the same time, there is also this organized effort to try to censor and stop that movement for Palestinian rights.

Yeah.

A powerful movement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Institutionally backed, money-backed, all of the things.

Exactly.

It's well-funded and activists are getting censored, punished, fired.

And so that's how Palestine Legal got started.

I was one of their first attorneys.

We did everything in the early days.

You know, the attorneys were out there on Twitter.

We designed our own website.

And we were also, of course, advising activists and, you know, trying to push back against this censorship machine.

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