Growing up in a household with a labor lawyer father and political activist mother, Juliet Brodie had great role models to influence her decision to become a lawyer.

“My dad had a fantastic career as a lawyer. His work was engaging and integrated politically and intellectually,” said Brodie. “I grew up with that as my image of what it meant to be a lawyer.”

Brodie still retains her first impression of law, “that it can be a powerful engine of progressive social change.”

A visiting professor in 2005–06 from the University of Wisconsin School of Law, Brodie now joins the law school as director of the Stanford Community Law Clinic and associate professor of law (teaching). A deciding factor in her move to Stanford was the law school’s growing clinical program.

“One of the main functions of clinical education is to engage in the highest quality practice of law while simultaneously reflecting on that practice,” said Brodie. “We put enormous emphasis on the attorneyclient relationship and on the lawyering skills that are required even at the earliest stages of representation—with interviewing, fact investigation, counseling, and so on.”

Brodie received her BA from Brown University and her JD from Harvard Law School, where she was active in the clinical program and president of the Legal Aid Bureau. After a stint as a litigation associate at Hill & Barlow, she was an assistant attorney general in the Wisconsin Department of Justice where she prosecuted health care providers accused of defrauding the Medicaid system. As a lawyer and clinical professor, her emphasis has turned to the legal needs of the working poor. She has written on the role of clinics in developing and testing new models of legal services delivery to low-wage workers in what she calls the “post-welfare” economy.

“Directing the Stanford Community Law Clinic is a phenomenal opportunity for me to work with remarkable students as they begin their journeys in law and to identify creative ways in which to deliver legal services to the working poor of the local community,” said Brodie. “I can only hope to be for my students some version of what my incredible clinical mentors were to me as a law student.”