Sara and Misasha’s guest today is Ji Seon Song, a former juvenile public defender. 

Join them in this fascinating - and often heartbreaking - journey inside the juvenile legal system.

Ji Seon Song went to Columbia as an undergrad and also to Columbia Law School. Her scholarship currently focuses on criminal and juvenile justice. Ji Seon’s research explores the intersection of the criminal and juvenile justice systems and different institutions and areas of law. Her current project examines policing and hospitals. 

In addition, Ji Seon has been active in local, regional, and national justice reform. She trains practicing juvenile defenders throughout the country. She is currently at Stamford where she teaches federal litigation in a global context and legal research and writing. 

Prior to joining Stamford, Ji Seon was a public defender in California where she represented youth and adults in delinquency and criminal proceedings. During her time at the public defender’s office, she expanded the juvenile unit to include education and post-disposition representation and worked with local stakeholders on improving conditions of confinement and re-entry for youth. 

Before then, Ji Seon worked in a different capacity as a senior policy advocate at the National Juvenile Defender Clinic and as a Fellow at Georgetown University’s Law Center Juvenile Justice Clinic and as a federal judicial clerk in New York. 

She is a founding member of the Asian-American Criminal Trial Lawyers Association and the Bay Area Public Defenders for Racial Justice. She currently serves on the executive board of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center. 

Show Highlights:

• Ji Seon provides an overview of her educational and career background.
• Ji Seon addresses the difference between jails and prisons, and the role of stakeholders.
• Juvenile practice takes a lot of knowledge in different areas: criminal law, education law, mental illness, and collateral consequences, for example.
• Ji Seon discusses the problems juveniles face with re-entry into school and the opportunities that are lost in the interim.
• Racial discrimination exists at all stages in the juvenile legal system.
• Ji Seon puts a vulnerable face to some of the clients that she represented and ponders boundaries within juvenile representation.
• If we have the idea that the juvenile system should be rehabilitative, what we have in place right now is not. 
• What could we do with an alternative, re-imagined world of justice than what we have right now? 

Resources / Links:

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Books Mentioned:

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates