Some of the most important lessons in law school never appear on a syllabus. For Veena Dubal J.D. ’06 Ph.D. ‘14, many came through years of mentorship from Berkeley Law Professor Catherine “KT” Albiston J.D. ’93 Ph.D. ’01 — in seminar conversations, overnight dissertation feedback, career pivots, personal struggles, and a model of scholarship rooted in evidence, diligence, and care.
Albiston, faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS) and a co-faculty director of its Center for Law and Work, has taught at the school since 2003 and received the Carol D. Soc Award for distinguished graduate mentoring in 2016. Dubal studied under Albiston in the school’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program and is now a professor at UC Irvine School of Law and general counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
In the first installment of a new Berkeley Law series on mentorship and intellectual formation, Albiston and Dubal sat down at the Center for the Study of Law and Society to talk about the “unwritten curriculum” of becoming a scholar and how guidance can become a lifelong intellectual kinship. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
An early start
Tell us about your relationship.
Dubal: I first took a seminar with Professor Albiston when I was in graduate school. I knew I wanted her to be my advisor, not just because she was brilliant, but because she really embodied all of the things I wanted to be as an academic and a professor. She is an incredible mentor and a really critical thinker. She inspires learning, has produced impactful scholarship … just all the things I admire.
And she’s fun and nice! I’m really blessed to have been her student and lifelong mentee.
Albiston: Veena was the perfect student for me. When she entered the JSP Program, she was already at Berkeley Law: an amazing, motivated, interesting student with public interest values, which is also who I was. I had practiced for a while before JSP. And she had that combination of intellectual and advocate. It’s not just about the ideas, but how the ideas can make the world a better place. We hit it off immediately and had so many great conversations.
Sometimes you have students where you feel like you’re bringing them along. And sometimes you have students where you’re basically a cheerleader and a fundraiser. But Veena’s just a powerhouse on her own. She does so many interesting things and has so many interesting ideas. Students like Veena are the best thing about teaching at Berkeley.
Dubal: I have three memories that come to mind.
The first: I was having a really hard time, dealing with a personal struggle, as we all do. KT asked me after class if everything was OK. I had no idea that this sadness was emanating from me or that I didn’t look OK. But that she stopped to ask actually switched something in my mind. It was so touching to be cared for by someone you admire, and it gave me the courage to face my problem.
“Well, I am always going to be here.”
— Catherine “KT” Albiston
The second memory: I think about this all the time, because now that I’m a professor, I give a lot of feedback, and I get really annoyed when my students send me their paper the night before we’re supposed to meet. I am fairly sure I did this regularly with KT, where I would send her something the night before, like a whole chapter. The next day, she had synthesized not just the chapter but where I needed to go with it. She had written a memo — her critiques, things that were good, the changes I needed to make. I always left thinking, “Wow, this is going to be much better than I thought,” because she made me feel that way.
When I advanced to candidacy, I remember at the end of it thinking, what now? Once I graduate with my Ph.D., there’s not going to be anyone to give me this amazing feedback, to help me think through methods and analyze my data. And she said to me, “Well, I am always going to be here.” And she has been.
The third memory: When I gave birth to my first child while I was a Ph.D. student, she sent me all of the books she had for her own son. It was a little library that we had at home for James. I loved reading those books to him, in large part because I felt like I was giving him knowledge that came from my mentor. There was some kind of kinship relationship that emerged through that. It was really beautiful, and I cherished it.
Albiston: We forget that being a graduate student is really hard, academically difficult, but also really ambiguous. It is hard to know if you are doing well, if you are going to make it, whether your work is good. A lot of the feedback is organized around criticism. I think it is important to tell students that is normal. I hope I did that for you.
Dubal: Absolutely, 100%. I struggled in graduate school. I left to practice law in large part because I was not sure I wanted to be an academic. And then I came back, and it was really KT who encouraged me to come back and made it possible. My life trajectory would be completely different if you had not been such a central part of my learning.
Permission to pivot
Albiston: It is funny you say that about leaving and coming back, because I had a similar experience in graduate school. One of the things you learn as a mentor from your own experiences is that there are many paths to get places. That is not always communicated to students.
And Veena is being modest. She is not talking about all the civil rights work she did with the Asian Law Caucus during that time she was practicing. That work also informed everything she did later.
Dubal: I still do that work. And that research turned into my studying technology and law and society in ways I could never have imagined at the time.
“Do not choose something that is making you miserable. It is not too late to pivot.”
— Albiston’s advice to Dubal
Albiston: Academic careers are serendipitous, and it can be disabling to feel like you have to follow the straight and narrow conventional path. One of the things mentors can do is say, “Yeah, it is OK to try new stuff.” If you hit a dead end, that happens. It happens when you are a professor too. You back out, you do something else.
One of my mentors was Herma Hill Kay. One of the great things about her was she was never going to tell you do this, do not do that. Whenever you said, “Oh, I think I might do this,” she would say, “Well, of course you can. Let us figure out how.” There was no “I do not know if you could do that.” It was always: what can I do to help you move forward?
Dubal: The other thing is that I came back from India. I was doing a Fulbright there. My dissertation topic was on human rights after a moment of massive communal violence, and it was so debilitating to study. It was awful. I came back, and KT said, “You do not have to do this. This does not have to be your dissertation topic. You could change it.” And I was like, “Really?”
Just that possibility. I would not have continued if that is what I was studying. It was just too much. She opened up this world for me to do something that felt better, something I could be excited about. That was another moment in those many years when, if not for you, things would have gone in a very different direction. I am quite happy with the direction they went!
Albiston: That is an important part of mentorship. When we had that conversation, one of the things I said was, if this is your dissertation, this is also your life for a fair chunk of your academic career going forward. Do not choose something that is making you miserable. It is not too late to pivot.
The ‘unwritten curriculum’
Dubal: The other thing I think about mentorship in our relationship is that, with the rise of austerity in the neoliberal university, a lot of Ph.D. students face the uncertainty of not being professors. And some people come in wanting to go into government or into policy work. That’s not why they’re here. But a lot of people who want to be academics face a lot of uncertainty. And what KT has done for me and for a lot of her students, when what they want is to be a professor of law or sociology, is to make sure that happens. And a lot of that is about shaping not just your work, but you as a candidate.
Albiston: There is also a huge unwritten curriculum about how you approach being a professor, how you fit yourself into different academic fields in ways that just are not taught in class. It is not always obvious, and it is sometimes easier for certain candidates to figure out because they are doing recognized, standardized work. But that is not what we do in JSP. We do really interesting, novel, interdisciplinary work. So it is a little harder to figure out how to structure yourself as a candidate and convey what you do.
“Living at that intersection as a graduate student is hard. But hard things make you a smart, critical thinker.”
— Veena Dubal
I firmly believe, and say this all the time, that JSP has a lot more to offer because our students are trained about empirical methods and have deep theory from the social sciences and the humanities. But they sometimes look around and think, “The sociology students know what they are doing. The political science Ph.D. students know what they are doing. What am I doing?”
Teaching how to navigate being interdisciplinary is an important part of mentorship here. And it is also really rewarding, because truly original ideas come from our students. Part of what we do as mentors is enable that flourishing and get those ideas out there.
Dubal: That is such an excellent point. In graduate school, you think you want structure and order. You look at the sociology students; they have a canon they are supposed to know. The economists have a canon. In JSP, there is a law and society canon, but it pulls from other disciplines and challenges them all. Living at that intersection as a graduate student is hard. But hard things make you a smart, critical thinker.
I remember saying to KT, “I am just going to go take the anthropology theory course.” So I took the graduate-level anthropology course, and she encouraged it and facilitated it. And during that whole time, she kept telling me, “You do know a lot. We have taught you a lot.” It was not until maybe two years into being a professor that I realized I was in conversation with scholars across so many disciplines, because I could be. That kind of effective interdisciplinary training is so rare.
Scholarship, evidence, and public duty
Albiston: There is something else in that unwritten curriculum that sometimes does not get conveyed: an ethical and normative commitment to the principles of the profession, but also to this idea of giving back, making your ideas relevant to the world, changing things.
“When you have knowledge, when you have evidence and people are ignoring it or getting it wrong, you have an obligation as a scholar to say, ‘Actually, that is not accurate, and here is the evidence.’”
— Albiston
One of the pleasures of mentoring Veena is that she was already there. We would talk about how do you frame your article so it does not get misused, but people will still listen to what you are saying? And she already had the instinct.
She is fearless. She will speak up. And when someone is making an argument, she can see all of the strengths and the weaknesses of it, and respond in the way we try to teach people to do professionally: acknowledge what is right, then show where the flaws are, and do so by asking a question. She is a master at that.
I should say: My late colleague Laurie Edelman was a tremendous mentor to me in learning how to do this. So I am just passing that along, generations of wisdom.
Dubal: I just came from the Geography Department, and I was telling an assistant professor there that I was coming to talk to my mentor. She said, “Oh, who is that?” I said, “KT Albiston.” She said, “I know exactly who that is. She responds to all the difficult threads on the list. I just sit behind my computer thinking, ‘Yeah, someone has to say it.’”
That kind of wisdom and bravery, the ability to articulate what is right and wrong, is a learned skill that came from you. It is so easy to step back and say, “This is bad, but my life is OK, so I will not trouble myself.” KT has never done that. Where she sees injustice, even small injustices, she speaks her mind. I have tried to be that person as well.
Albiston: When you have knowledge, when you have evidence that speaks to these questions and people are ignoring it or getting it wrong, you have an obligation as a scholar to say, “Actually, that is not accurate, and here is the evidence.” That is part of our purpose. It is our public duty.
Finding a mentor
What would you tell an incoming law student to look for in a mentor?
Dubal: Do not be scared of your professors. Recognize them as humans and try to get to know them. Go to their office hours. Engage with their work, not just what they teach, but actually engage with their scholarship. If something interests or intrigues you, or if you have questions, try to form that relationship. Mentorship starts at the intersection of real curiosity and a desire to have conversations, whether they are difficult or easy or fun.
People look to people they want to be. I wanted to be KT. So here I am.
Albiston: So much of education has become transactional. You are more likely to find a mentor if you go talk to someone about something that happened in class, or something you have read, or an area you want to know more about. Sometimes they will say, “I don’t know, but I know someone who does,” and that might be a way to find a mentor too.
And I will add something: I have had several mentors in my career who I was politically very different from, and who thought about things very differently from me. But they were great mentors because they were willing to have that civil conversation and engage with me. It sharpened my thinking, helped me understand where they were coming from, and helped me find common ground. Sometimes a mentor can be someone where you think, “I do not agree with how you interpret all of this, but I want to learn from our differences.” That can be a very enabling thing.
Dubal: I 100% agree. Some of my own students have said that to me, and I think: wonderful. This is a productive space for a hard and critical conversation. It is good for me and good for them.
Albiston: And it moves the ball forward intellectually. If people are sincere, you can find common ground.
A lasting relationship
What have you meant in each other’s lives and careers?
Albiston: Are you trying to make us cry on camera? All right. Veena and I have an ongoing text thread, and about six to eight months ago, I texted her: “You are my hero.”
Because she has been out there as general counsel for the AAUP, defending the research lives of professors across the country as their funding was canceled, saying, “This is wrong. This is undercutting the production of knowledge. This is undercutting professors who have worked their whole lives to mentor students.” And then actually doing something about it, building a coalition of professors who are saying, “This is meaningful and we are going to stand up and fight for it.”
I am so proud of her. Every time I read a new article from her, I think: What a brilliant idea. She comes up with novel ideas one after another. Speaking from the perspective of someone who is deep into her career, it is not so easy to keep coming up with novel ideas after graduate school. A big part of that has got to be the fact that Veena is not just in her office. She is out there talking to workers, engaged as an advocate. That informs her work intellectually in a way that makes it very rich. She is the whole package.
Dubal: It is very hard to sit here and listen to all of that. If I could say one thing to you now: KT, you have been a constant in my adult life. I really mean it when I say I would not be where I am without you. At the most critical and most painful moments, you have put me on the right path. I have texted you about things that were hurting my heart for some small reason, and you scoop me up off the ground and hold me up, over and over again.
More than all the knowledge you have imparted, more than the professional mentorship you have provided, your deep love and care has defined who I am and will define who I am until I die. I am so grateful for that.
Albiston: Now I am crying. Love you. Thank you.