Indian American Shobha Mahadev is American Bar Association’s ‘Fearless Children’s Lawyer of the Month’
- Currently a clinical professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, she has been a major force in getting incarcerated individuals support in filing post-conviction relief in Illinois.
Law professor Shobha Mahadev didn’t originally set out to be a lawyer. She wanted to be a scientist and spent her time as an environmental science major at Berkeley researching native grasses. But when a friend took the LSAT, she was intrigued by the idea of a career in law. So she moved to Chicago and enrolled in Northwestern’s J.D. program, focusing on public interest law.
This month, the American Bar Association (ABA) recognized the Indian American as “Fearless Children’s Lawyer of the Month.” She is currently a clinical professor of law at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; assistant dean of the Bluhm Legal Clinic; and project director for the Illinois Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Children at the school.
According to the ABA, Mahadev has been a major force in getting incarcerated individuals support in filing post-conviction relief in Illinois, resulting in many of those individuals coming home.
Her interest in juvenile defense began when she volunteered for a satellite juvenile justice clinic office run during her first year as a law student, ABA said in her profile. That clinic was run by Angela Vigil, a current member of the Children’s Rights Litigation Committee (CRLC) Working Group.
In her third year, she joined the juvenile justice clinic supervised by Vigil “and it formed the basis for her future legal career,” ABA said. She spent her first three years after graduation at a law firm “seizing every opportunity to engage in pro bono criminal representation.”
She then spent five years at the Office of the State Appellate Defender (OSAD). She also worked with the Children and Family Justice Center (CFJC) on authoring a handbook for attorneys representing children in juvenile court. She eventually was named head of the coalition, “where she was charged with expanding the coalition to work with partners in the state and nationally to end juvenile life without parole,” ABA said. She worked to grow the coalition, which came to include faith-based organizations, families, advocates, and pro bono attorneys.
“She was determined to include the voices of families and people serving juvenile life without parole sentences in the state and helped the CFJC strategize on how to couple policy advocacy with litigation to bring the 103 individuals home,” according to her ABA profile. Over time, these partners established their own advocacy organizations, like Communities and Relatives of Illinois Incarcerated Children and Restore Justice.
Mahadev told ABA that she “hopes to continue this forward momentum by harnessing the power of the Illinois constitution and trying to dismantle the laws that put us into this position in the first place—laws that require the transfer of young people to adult criminal court and mandatory sentencing laws.”