Senior Marketing and Communications Intern for the Loeb Center Ava Zielinski ’25 sits down with Alumni-in-Residence guest Chelsea Tejada ’14 to discuss her career as a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Reproductive Freedom Project and what advice she has for students.
The transcription below has been edited for clarity.
Ava
I am here today with Chelsea Tejada.
We’re so happy to have you.
Chelsea
Thanks for having me.
Ava
Before we get started, what’s your little elevator pitch that you give to people? You know, someone’s coming up to you on the street. They don’t know who you are. They don’t know what you do. What would you say to them? What would you say?
Chelsea
Well, my quick little intro song,
Chelsea Tejada, she/her pronouns.
I’m a staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project.
What I do there is impact litigation on access to abortion, contraception, and birth equity.
And basically what that means is we do litigation that affects a wide swath of people rather than individual representative services for one person in order to improve people’s access to abortion, contraception, or birthing services. And we do that through federal and state constitutional law.
Ava
Awesome. Awesome. Perfect. That was great.
So specifically, what do you do? You know, we have career day when we are little kids, and it’s like ‘I’m going to be a firefighter’ or ‘I’m going to be a hairstylist’ or ‘I am going to be an actor.’ And then there’s you who works for a really cool organization.
You’re an attorney, and you know, not you’re not your typical 9 to 5 that most people think of.
Is this something that you always knew you wanted to do? How did you sort of find this pathway from Amherst to where you are right now?
Chelsea
Yeah, this is not something that I always knew I wanted to do. I did have an aha moment, but it didn’t come for a little while. I was a sexuality women and gender studies and Asian languages and civilizations double major while I was at Amherst. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.
A lot of folks were like, You know, you’re learning Mandarin Chinese. That’s going to be so useful, and actually what has been most useful, I mean, other than just a general liberal arts degree, is the sexuality women’s and gender studies piece, which was just so interesting to me. And I was interested in exploring that, but I really didn’t know what I was going to do when I graduated. I applied for a Fulbright during my senior year, and I got that to go to Brazil, but it actually didn’t start for like ten months after graduating college. And so I had this kind of gap to fill. And I was, you know, I thought about just like bartending for a little while, but I ended up getting a paralegal position in a big law firm because they were in desperate need of Spanish speakers. And so they were fine with me leaving in ten months for Brazil. And that was, you know, really a helpful place to be in that it helped me realize a lot of what I didn’t like, right? So I really didn’t like being in the big law space, but there were pieces of it that I did like. And, you know, we did some pro-bono work, immigration work, and I was like, “Oh, look at this” Like using the law to help people, that’s really interesting. And like, I took that with me as a reason that I might go to law school.
I did my Fulbright and then coming back from my Fulbright, I didn’t really know what I was going to do next, but I started applying for kind of non-profit positions at nonprofits that had something generally to do with sexuality and gender studies. So like a domestic violence shelter, doing sex education, that kind of thing. And I ended up at Ibis Reproductive Health and I did social science research on access to abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean and extralegal settings, and that was really awesome, I enjoyed doing the research there. And that’s kind of where I learned a lot about abortion and medicine and science.
And that kind of sparked my, “okay, this is the piece of sexuality, women’s and gender studies that I’m going to keep doing.” But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do research forever. And in 2016, the U.S. The Supreme Court, which was more favorable at the time, used the organization’s domestic research to show an undue burden under the old legal standard and struck down a Texas abortion law. And I was like, “oh, that’s really interesting”, you can use the research that this organization does. Instead of doing research, I can use the research. And so that was kind of where I was like, “okay, that’s what I want to do.” And so I took the LSAT and decided to go to law school, specifically keeping in mind that I wanted to work in the reproductive rights space. And so I do think it was helpful to have had that kind of meandering path a little bit, because it helped me really hone in on exactly what was important to me and what I wanted to do. And so I was able to go to law school with that in mind. I got a public interest scholarship so that I could really focus on staying on the public interest path and not being distracted by money from big law. And I was focused on “these are the types of places I would want to intern at, and these are the professors that I want to get to know and work with. And so that’s kind of how I landed there, and one of the places that I was interested in working in was the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, and I was able to work there as an intern my first summer. And then I went back as a fellow, which is basically just an externally funded short staff attorney position. And then after my fellowship, I was able to stay on as a staff attorney, so that’s how I got here!
Ava
That’s fantastic.
I noticed you mentioned that you had a little bit of a meandering path, as you put it, before you went to law school. And I talked to a lot of students here who are interested in the pre-law track, and a lot of them are like, ‘I need to go straight out, I don’t think I could, you know, step away from school for so long’, or ‘This is something that I feel pretty certain is what I want to do and so I just have to get there right now’ – What would you say to those students?
Chelsea
You know, I mean, if you’re so sure about it, good, I don’t think there’s a lot of people who do, and that’s totally fine. My general advice, though, is because of my own experience, especially if you are interested in the public interest space, potentially, it’s good to just kind of get some experience, some life experience. And yeah, it can be scary, you know, you’ve been in school your whole life basically, and so it’s a little scary to leave that space and go into–quote on quote–the ‘real world’. But the school option is always going to be there. You can go back to it, and oftentimes, I think, you come at it with a new perspective. I really treated law school as a job, and I think that was, you know, it came from having already been in the job market. Right. And so I think it was a healthy perspective on law school. And I think it’s helpful to get some life experience and also if you want to jump right in, don’t let other folks’ experiences stop you. But I do give that as advice that it’s good to take a little bit of time, maybe try things out that you realize that you don’t love, especially if you genuinely don’t know what you’re doing – like what you want to do – that is helpful because there’s a lot of cool things that are not being a lawyer that you can do and trying those things out before going to law school can save you a lot of headache and money, frankly.
Ava
Oh, definitely.
Chelsea
Because there’s a lot of cool stuff to do. For example, if you are interested in policy, you do not need to go to law school – law school is not necessary to do policy work – I think a lot of people kind of just assume that you need that. And there’s a lot of people who went to law school to do policy, so it’s not like you can’t do it. It’s just that law school is three years, it’s not very fun. It’s very intense and you need a lot of those skills in law school in order to be a litigator, but you don’t need them necessarily to do the policy work. And so figuring out what are you actually interested in? Like, do you need that degree in order to get there is something to critically think about?
Ava
Okay. Interesting. I appreciate you saying that. I hope that students out there are able to hear that bit, too. And it sounds like your passion within sexuality, women’s and gender studies with the policy side and then adding in the law degree is what was the combination of law first and then your passions second. So I’m interested to hear a little bit more about, obviously, what your day-to-day looks like specifically at the ACLU, and then current challenges that you’re working through or looking into.
Chelsea
Yeah! So, my day-to-day as an impact litigator, what my work boils down to, is legal research and legal writing that takes many different forms depending on where I’m at in different cases. But really, it is legal research and legal writing. So if that is not something that you like more generally, let’s say in research and writing, you’re not really going to know about the legal research and writing piece of it until you’re in law school. For the most part, maybe with the exception if you have some experience with that at another paralegal beforehand. But like, I love it! I really like doing deep dives on law being like, ‘this is what we can do’, and ‘this is not very strong’, ‘This is a great argument’ and that kind of stuff – thinking. There’s really a creative aspect to it, to be like, okay, this is how we can tackle this, this new argument, where if we try it out in this place, that might be a good idea. So it boils down to legal research and writing.
And then you want to add in: there’s a lot of strategizing of ‘should we do this?’, ‘Should we do this now?’, ‘Should we do this here?’, that kind of thing. But the actual practice of that legal research and what form it takes, it just happens. So if we’re doing a case development, maybe I am trying to figure out whether there’s a way to challenge an old law that’s on the books, then I’m going to take some time and I’m going to dig into legal research and I’m going to write up a whole memo on it, and it’s going to be really objective. I was going to say, ‘This is what the law is’, ‘This is what we could argue under it’, ‘This is what’s strong about it’, ‘what isn’t?’ ‘Who are the plaintiffs, this could be those who are defendants’. It would be all of that kind of stuff, and not just an internally focused thing in terms of when we’ve already brought litigation.
Ava
Right.
Chelsea
So that’s going to be, maybe you’re drafting a complaint to a file, you’re going to potentially be putting together papers to ask for a preliminary injunction, and the reason that you deserve the preliminary injunction is to stop the law from going into effect. And that’s going to be, you know, these are going to be externally facing documents that are going to try to be persuasive to the court. So it’s different from an internal facing, an objective piece, and so it’s different kinds of legal writing, but it’s still a legal writing aspect. It could be working with an expert to put together a declaration about the socioeconomic impacts of abortion bans. It could be doing depositions because they’re in discovery. So the day-to-day varies, but the core of it, it kind of stays the same.
Ava
Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. And then going into the day-to-day and the core obviously being the same, how have you seen your role evolve over the last two years, specifically in terms of the US being in a post-Dobbs world? How have you seen that, you know, change your role?
Chelsea
Yeah, I think there’s several ways that have and have not changed. So before Dobbs when we were under the Roe and Casey framework, for the most part, we were litigating in federal court under federal law – not exclusively, we had state court, state constitution challenges at the time, including in Ohio, for example. But for the most part, that was the practice. After the Dobbs decision, where the court took away for the first time, a substantive right that had been recognized (and really, in doing so, foreclosed many paths, since it isn’t implied anywhere in the Constitution) it took off the table arguing under the equal protection clause, for example, in the federal Constitution and even if we had argued about that, the court that made that decision would have struck it down anyway – they’re not open to it. We have to think about the long-term of what’s next and think about what’s possible. And in some ways it’s an exciting place to be – you know, the Roman Casey framework was not ideal, there were a lot of abortion restrictions that were allowed to go into effect, including, for example, waiting periods during that regime – and so in some ways it’s like, okay, now we can imagine and potentially in the future create this reality that is different and that is exciting. But one of the fundamental shifts for us for the most part has been going from federal courts under federal law to state courts under state law. And some of that has been litigated under old standards – arguing that an explicit right to privacy in a state constitution encompasses the right to abortion, for example. And then, there’s also a lot of ballot initiatives that are taking place right now, and those are in many places adding an explicit right to reproductive rights, including abortion, into their state constitution, and that opens up the door for arguments to get rid of stuff that we couldn’t even get rid of under the Roe and Casey framework – and so that’s some of the biggest fundamental shifts. And then there is this looming threat of the fact that, you know, now there’s this patchwork access space and we’re litigating under these state constitutions, but because there’s no recognized federal constitutional right to abortion at the moment, it opens up the door for a federal ban and so there’s that looming threat, and a potential huge shift in the landscape again. So that’s some of the differences and some similarities.
Ava
Sure, I appreciate you spelling that out, I’m sure they obviously go much beyond that as well in terms of all the things that you consider in your day-to-day. But it’s exciting to hear that you’re so passionate about what you do, and you know that what you’re doing is making such a profound impact on so many people’s lives. So I want to be mindful of time, I just have one more question to ask you: You know, knowing what you know now, doing what you do now, what is one thing that you wish you could have told your college self?
Chelsea
Relax!
Ava
That’s a good one!
Chelsea
It’s easy for me now, you know, you listen to my path to law school and to my role at the ACLU, and I’m sure it sounds like in some ways, just like a straight line, right? This is like “of course, that’s where you ended up,” but that’s just not how it works, right? There are so many moments of unknowing, and that’s going to cause anxiety, but it’s fine. It’s okay to not do immediately what you want to do forever. It’s okay to do things that you find out are not actually what you want to do. It’s okay to start on something and shift over to something else. There’s like a whole world out there of possibilities–in the law, outside of the law–and reproductive rights and reproductive justice. And so just being open to all of those things and knowing that the journey is genuinely important means it’s going to be okay.
Ava
That’s good to hear, That’s good – That’s good to hear! And I know that’s what a lot of us need to hear, too.
Chelsea
Yes.
Ava
I appreciate that. All right, awesome! Thank you for your time.
