John Blomster: Welcome to 红桃视频, a podcast where we explore today's biggest legal and legal adjacent issues with distinguished guests and experts from around the globe. I'm John Blomster. And today we are honored to be joined by Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, the newest Associate Justice on the Washington Supreme Court. She's also a 红桃视频 alumna who is visiting the law school as part of a special traveling court session. Justice Montoya-Lewis has more than 20 years of judicial experience, the last five of which spent on the Wacom County Superior Court. She has also served as chief judge for three Native American tribes in Washington state鈥攖he Nooksack, Skagit and Lummi tribes鈥攁nd she is a former professor at Western Washington University. Her appointment by Governor Jay Inslee in December was a historic one as it made justice Montoya-Lewis, the first Native American to sit on the Washington Supreme Court, and just the second Native American in the country to sit on any Supreme Court. So, this is obviously another huge first and a career full of them. So, we're excited to dive into your career, and also the challenges that we're still facing as a legal community moving forward. So, thank you very much for taking the time.
Raquel Montoya-Lewis: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
JB: So, first off a huge congratulations on the appointment. How are you settling into the new seat?
RML: Well, it's been very much a whirlwind. I had assignments and things to do the first day I was at work, which was the day I was sworn in. So, from that day forward, there has been, it's been nonstop.
JB: Just hit the ground running.
RML: Absolutely.
JB: How did it feel when you received the news from Governor Inslee?
RML: It was surreal in that moment and has continued to be fairly surreal. Every day there's something that makes me sort of reflect that this is a real thing, part of my life. And you know, as you noted a historical appointment that is is meaningful to other people. So, it has been a pretty remarkable ride, and one that I feel really honored to be able to take on. And also, there's a fair amount of pressure associated with it to.
JB: Your appointment is obviously a historic one. And also, you know, a huge personal professional achievement. And we'll definitely get into that. But I'd like to take it back, you know, sort of to the beginning. How did you first become interested in the law?
RML: Well, I think if my dad who passed away a number of years ago were here, he would say that I was a born lawyer because I argued about everything all the time. And so there are many people who suggested I go into law school. I never had a real drive to do that when I was in college. I was really interested in writing, I was really interested in other things that really didn't lend themselves in my mind to being a lawyer. What I really wanted to do is be a professor and I was really interested in studying how the institutions that surrounded us鈥攕ocial institutions, legal institutions鈥攊mpacted people, and when I looked around at that I believed that the law was one of those things that impacted the most number of people and was almost invisible to most people.
Most people don't really think about, why do I stop at a stoplight? Other than you're supposed to. And I became really interested in how the law functions as this kind of underpinning of our society and codifies the ways we interact with each other in ways that we don't even really think about.
So, I went to law school with the intention to really study that question and think about that in very academic terms. And when I got here to the University of Washington, I very quickly became very frustrated with the tone of the way the classes were taught, which was this very theoretical discussion that never really talked about the actual people in the cases that we were reading and I became more and more frustrated by that tone and more and more interested in really looking closely at how people were affected by the law.
JB: So, you also received your master's in social work from the University of Washington. How do those dovetail together with your experience? And you know, you're wanting to focus on how the law affects people rather than necessarily the theory. So, why did you choose to pursue social work as well? Do those dovetail together?
RML: Well, I wish I had a better origin story to tell you about that. But this is the truth. I was literally walking from the old law school in Condon Hall across campus to go to the gym and I walked past the School of Social Work and thought, 鈥淥h, I wonder what they do in there.鈥 And I literally wandered in and picked up a brochure and started talking to someone. And they were talking about the things I cared about. They were talking about the people that were impacted by those institutions, and not just the legal institutions, but all kinds of institutions.
So, it made sense to me very quickly that the two things could work together pretty well. Now, there's many formalized JD MSW programs. When I was pursuing that there were very few and so I had the flexibility and in some ways the challenge to be able to craft a joint degree.
JB: You mentioned your father who as a result of his military career, you know, you really have lived all over the world. And your father is Native American from New Mexico. Your mother is Australian Jewish. As you're growing up in all these different parts of the world. How did your parents influence really your sense of self and you know, the development of your goals for yourself as you're kind of coming into your own and figuring out like how you want to impact the world?
RML: Well, I really had the opportunity to watch someone鈥攖hat being my father鈥攈ave the experience of being the only native person in the room virtually his entire career and he talked extensively about what that meant to him and what he believed it should mean to me. And what it would mean if I went into the professional world, wherever we were. There's a lot of complexity to the way that I was raised, as you noticed, because I was raised everywhere. I was raised in a mixed family. My mother, being Australian, and Jewish, and not American didn't really have a sense of U.S. society, and what it was like to be a person of color in this in this country. And when we came back to this country after having lived on U.S. Air Force bases, in England and in Spain, I think she really didn't have any experience of what it meant to be an interracial marriage in this country, as well as to be raising a child who look like me in this country. And so I didn't have a whole lot of support from her in terms of understanding what it meant to be a person of color. And my father had absolutely had that experience and the two of those things coming together were sometimes very confusing for someone that was a young person growing up.
JB: How do you navigate that balance?
RML: I'm not sure I have a great answer for how I navigated it. I think that because my father's experience more closely reflected mine, I often looked to what he did to navigate those complicated situations I found myself in. I'll give you an example. I went to my last year of high school at a private high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I just went there for my senior year. I was admitted, sort of, it was very unusual for someone to come in, in the senior year. And when I got there, I was one of three or four students of color in the entire senior class. All of us, the four of us, were scholarship recipients. And I'm not quite sure what went through the head of the administration, but they crafted those scholarships, that sort of work study types of scholarships, and so they had those four students of color, picking up garbage on the campus.
And you know I remember thinking like 鈥淭his? How is this a good look?鈥 And it wasn't just me that had that thought there were others of us in the group thinking this can't be what they mean to do. So, I had a lot of experiences along those lines where, you know my father on the one hand would immediately see the problem. And my mother on the other really struggled to see that that issue and that that complexity was, as I said, deeply confusing to me as I was growing up, but it became more and more something that I figured out how to manage for myself, and I did it very differently from the way my father did it. My father was someone who took those kinds of experiences and said, 鈥淲ell, I'm going to work harder and, and not really address it.鈥 And that became untenable for me, particularly in law school.
JB: So, like you said, You didn't always know that you wanted to be a practicing attorney or a judge, even though, you know, you were becoming this expert in the law. But in many ways, you kind of naturally moved into this world through your experiences with various tribes in Washington state. What was that process like? How did you first get involved in the law and in tribal law?
RML: Well, when I graduated from law school and for my social work program, I had a clerkship in New Mexico with justice Pam Minzner, who was someone that I had admired for, proceeding law school for many years. And I was lucky enough to get a clerkship with her and work with her. I still had the plan of being a professor, but she really encouraged me to go out in the world and practice before I pursued that, and that was excellent advice. So I ended up really wanting to focus on representing tribes. And I did that for a couple of years, working in a small private law firm, and found that to be really interesting, and sometimes very frustrating. Or in the course of that my own tribe asked me to come in and be a judge on one case, they were pretty clear that they just needed someone to come in and do this one very complex civil litigation case that the judge who was there didn't feel like he had the legal skills to manage.
Everyone told me not to do it, not to be a judge for my own community. Justice Minzner said you need some more time being a lawyer before you can become a judge and do it well. Everyone was right about that. But I did it anyway. And that was, sort of began my career as a judge. There have been many places along the way where I thought, well, this is the last time I'm going to be doing this kind of work. And then I found myself doing it again.
JB: What were some of those challenges as you're working within the legal system, you know, representing woefully underrepresented communities, interacting with the criminal justice system? What, what were some of those challenges that you faced, especially as a young judge, just starting her career?
RML: Well, I think in my own community where I served as a judge, there was a lot of resistance to me being a judge. Because I didn't grow up there, although I was living on the reservation at that point when we moved back to New Mexico, we moved into the home that my grandfather built in Isleta. And so there was some resistance to that I didn't, I was not fluent in the language and often the tribal court ran in the Tiwa language, and so I had a translator. And there were also had been other judges who are not from Isleta, but because I was from Isleta, and they didn't have the language skills and I had not grown up there, there was a lot of skepticism about my commitment to the community and my ability to do that work. So, that was certainly a challenge.
JB: How did your experience there with tribal court influence the work that you have gone on to do in Washington and in the Superior Court, and then also now in this new role?
RML: Well, I've worked now for many different tribes as a tribal court judge and many different roles. Some tribes I went in and did one case, others like Lummi or Nooksack, I was there for a long period of time. And one of the real gifts of that work has been the ability to see justice defined in ways that are specific to particular communities. It's not just one legal system that works the same for everyone. In my job as a travel judge in any community, whether it was one case, or I was going to be working there full time was to come in and learn about that community, what they wanted from their legal system, what they were looking for from their judges, and what the law was. And so that experience of seeing different justice systems created by communities, developed in a way that was responsive to those communities and seeing the law, passed by those communities and then interpreted by the judges, in a variety of ways has given me a perspective that I think is pretty unusual. And certainly when I came into the Superior Court, I came in with that experience and those ideas and immediately recognize that while it was amazing to have the kinds of resources that I had as a state court judge, there were also a lot more restrictions on what I could do from the bench in Superior Court.
I was used to in tribal courts, being able to understand the people in front of me and what their role was in the community broadly. And there was always a perspective in tribal courts that if someone had committed a crime, and you were going to send them to jail, or you were going to do something along those lines, there was always a perspective that that person was going to come back and be a part of the community. There was never the idea that someone was gone and would be gone for good. That's very different in the state court system. There's a much more of a sense that people who engage in criminal behavior are by definition criminals, and that's the most important thing about them. And that shift in the perspective of the people that I was working with wasn't a shift in my perspective, because I don't believe that and still don't believe that. That was something difficult for me to navigate and also difficult to understand because it is simply true that for the vast majority of criminal defendants, they're going to be back in that community at some point, sometimes very quickly, much more quickly than people know.
JB: So we touched on this and we'll bring it bring it to the present. So, you know, your appointment to the state's high bench is such a huge milestone. The media attention has, including us, has really homed in on the fact you know, that being the first Native American to sit on the Washington Supreme Court. Do you feel pressure or some kind of different responsibility that maybe other justices in the country may not feel as someone who comes from a background that is not represented on state high benches really at all?
RML: Yes and no. I certainly know that pressure exists. And there are ways in which I feel that pressure for sure. I will also say, though, that that is not particularly distinct for me from any other part of my career. So, it has come along with everything that I've done. And I can remember in my first year of law school, before I really had any sense of the idea that I was going to practice law, or really what I wanted to do other than to teach, I don't even really think I had a sense of what I wanted to teach. It was more that I was interested in research and writing and teaching something. When I came to the University of Washington law school, I was here with a group of other Native students, there was a handful of us and I really mean a handful. There were six to 10 in the entire student body. The response I had from professors, none of whom were native was the assumption that I would practice Indian law or that I would do something for my tribe or something along those lines. And I was kind of stunned by that assumption, because it certainly wasn't my assumption. The world was pretty open for me in terms of what I wanted to do. Ultimately, that is what I did. But I felt very much like the expectation was that that is not just what I would do or what I was interested in doing, but what I ought to do. And when I looked around at my peers who were non-native, there was never that assumption that they should go into a particular field. And so from very early on, there were assumptions made about what my role was that were distinct from assumptions made about what other people's roles were, or that they were kind of assumption free.
So, that pressure started immediately and continued and in in some ways, it's been really positive, because it has given me the opportunity to talk about what that looks like for people who are like me and had that experience in other ways. I'm the first person in my family to go to law school, I'd never met a lawyer before I went to law school. And so those kinds of pressures are things I've been able to talk about.
JB: You know, you mentioned how the Native American students numbered by the handful in your experience and you know, that really continues today, as well. What can we as a law school, and also as a legal community, do better to break down those barriers to entry, and to kind of make a more proportionate representation of the community within the community at law school?
RML; Well, I think that there's sort of the short answer and the long answer and I think many of those things start so much earlier than even students who make it to college. There are so many barriers for Native students in particular鈥攖he quality of the education they receive, if they're living at home on their reservations, the experience they have if they're going to schools where they're one of a few native people or are the only native person at their school. There are so many things that make it very difficult for someone to get to law school if that's their goal. And so I think that that is something that, you know, the legal community itself can't really address because there are these other institutions I think need to address those things like the educational system, among many other things.
JB: For students of color who are in law school, where are the opportunities for the legal education system to prepare them better for a career in the legal field and to really make that experience better because there's obviously so much work to still be done? Where are those opportunities to improve that experience for students of color as they're looking for careers in the legal field?
RML: I think that it's up to the institution of the law school. It's up to the legal community to figure out why those student and those lawyers are expressing feeling marginalized, or whatever it is that they're talking about. My experience throughout my career has been that when I raise those issues, the first thing I have to do is get past people's resistance to the idea that my experience is a real one, and it's actually happening. And so that's something that students of color really can't fix. That's something that the institution and the people in it鈥攖he professors who are white鈥攂ut the institution that is sort of built on an educational system that was not built with me in mind, and people like me in mind has to address and that's not something that is fairly put on the students of color, or the lawyers of color shoulders and it is always put on our shoulders. The first thing is they think that institutions have to recognize that the problem exists. And what typically happens when you have those conversations is that the people in the room when you start talking about these issues will say, 鈥淲ell, I see that problem happening at Institution X. I'm a part of Institution X, but I'm not the one who's doing it.鈥 And so there's this gap in understanding like, Oh, yes, you're the professor in the front of the classroom, you do have a responsibility and some work to be done. And if you're lucky enough to have a student come to you and give you some information about what you did in the classroom was ineffective or offensive, or whatever it is. That's a gift. That's an opportunity for you to think about what happened there. And I think that institutions and 聽faculty have a lot of work to do in my experience to recognize that as a gift and not a criticism, or maybe both can be possible at the same time.
JB: Finally, if you're speaking to individual students who, you know, are not seeing themselves reflected as much in the legal field or among聽 their peers in law school, in terms of having to face those different kinds of pressures and challenges than other students. What advice do you have personally for someone who's trying to, you know, really make a difference in the legal field, but doesn't necessarily see themselves reflected in the community as it stands right now.
RML: One of the things that helped me to get through law school was having one or two close friends who understood what I was talking about and kind of had my back. And when I felt like walking out the front door and never coming back, which happened a lot, that they would sort of be able to kind of ground me. And I came in with the hopes, I think, of finding a community, you know, lots of people who were interested in the same things I was interested in and wanted to talk about those things, and I did not find that. But I did find one or two people that could do that for me and I also had a professor at UW, at the law school, who's retired now and he really saw something in me and really supported me. And he also held me accountable to the work. And so he listened. He was empathetic. And he also said, and you still need to go to class and do the work. And you can do that., He believed that I was capable of doing that. And I felt like I got a lot of messages that I was not.
I have told this story many times, I think in public, that my very first day in law school, a peer in my class came walking up to me, and I thought she was coming to introduce herself to me and she didn't, she just said, 鈥淵ou're taking my best friend's seat.鈥 And for a second, I didn't understand what she meant, then I got it very quickly. But her assumption was that, you know, I was there at the expense of her best friend and that I'd gotten there through some affirmative action formula or some nefarious reason, none of which were the case. So, those kinds of things make you nuts.
And I think the best thing you can do is find someone that you can鈥攐ne or two people鈥攖hat you can talk to about it who believe your experience, because in the absence of that, you really feel like you're isolated and like you're losing your mind. And so I think reaching out to those people, personally, and finding some sense of community, even if it's just one person is really important. And then the other thing, I think, is in this, I had a couple of people who have been really critical mentors in my life, say to me, when I felt like, I couldn't keep going for whatever reason, 鈥淚f you don't do it, then there's no one else doing it right now.鈥 So, you know, I had a lot of reservations about applying for this appointment to this position. And once I was moving through the interview process, I became very, I guess, scared that I might get it and then I did get it. And throughout that process, I had two or three people saying, you should have a seat at that table. And it's important, not just because of you and if you don't do it, who's going to do it?
JB: One last point. So, your swearing in celebration had some distinctly personal touches, you know, before you had to hit the ground running and get behind the desk and get to work. But can you tell us a little bit about the the swearing in? And then also just what was that experience like for you?
RML: Well, when I was appointed, I had conversations with the clerk's office and Chief Justice Stevens who was also sworn in as the chief justice on the same day that I was sworn in as associate justice, all of whom said, you can do this however you want to do this. You can craft it the way you want to craft it. And as I said at my swearing in, and something that I said to Governor Inslee when I was interviewing with him for the appointment, I felt very strongly walking in that building, that it was not a building that was built with someone like me in mind. And in order for me to feel like I could work there I wanted the experience to start with something that reflected me and I will be honest and say I was really scared about what the response would be to having drummers in that courtroom, to having who I am be such an important part of what that day was. And when I started this process applying for this appointment, there's a very complicated and lengthy application you have to fill out for judicial appointments that the governor's office puts out. And I had done that application, and I woke up at four in the morning after it had been done for several days. And I thought, I have said things in that application that I'm saying because I think it's what they want to hear. And I'm not going to do that. I'm going to put myself forward as myself. And if they don't want that, that's fine. But I'm not going to take this position, I'm not going to apply for this position as someone I'm not. And so I rewrote the entire thing. Probably shouldn't say that out loud, but I rewrote the whole thing at four in the morning, but I did. And that's how I've gone forward with this process and why I created that swearing in the way I did, because I am who I am. And very early on in my career, my husband said to me when I was facing something very difficult and very difficult series of decisions that I had to make, he said, 鈥淚f you make those decisions with your integrity in mind, and you never let go of that, you will never regret that, even if you lose the job, or even if things don't go the way that you think they should, you'll know you made the right decision.鈥 And that advice has been my touchstone as has he ever since then, and that's why I created that swearing in the way I did because it was important to me to say, 鈥淭his building was not built with people like me in mind.鈥 I don't know that there's ever been a drum group in that building, or those sounds in that building. But there are now and I'm going to make it a public statement that we're here and that I belong there.
JB: Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis is associate justice on the Washington Supreme Court. Her appointment to the state's highest bench is a culmination of more than 20 years serving with distinction in the judicial branch. She's visiting the law school today as part of a special Washington Supreme Court traveling session. You can learn more about justice Montoya-Lewis's career over on our podcast page at law.uw.edu.
Justice, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us.
RML: Thank you for having me.
