By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Even though it happened when she was a second grader, Insia Zaidi ’24 tells the story like it occurred a couple of hours ago — in strikingly vivid details and with considerable emotion.
It was awards day at her New Jersey Catholic school and Sister Henry was reading out the names of the students being recognized for a perfect attendance record. Zaidi, the child of Muslim Indian immigrants, knew she was eligible, but the nun never called her up.
With a stern whisper and a barely noticeable physical nudge, Zaidi’s mother pushed her forward to claim what was rightfully hers. The incident turned out to be an honest mistake, but the little girl took away from it a powerful lesson: Speak up.
“I worked as a middle school math teacher in Compton, I worked as a volunteer on Rikers Island, I worked as part of the state public defender’s office in Mississippi advocating for people on death row, I broke into white, male-dominated spaces like Wall Street,” Zaidi says. “And all of that was informed by my parents telling me to use my voice to demand the very best for myself, and then apply that intensity to serve other people.”
Now, as she prepares to graduate from Berkeley Law, Zaidi is ready for the next target for that intensity — and reflecting on what she’s already accomplished. It’s an impressive list that balances with pinpoint precision her professional ambitions and advocacy, with a deep passion for music, particularly by Indian artists.
“I try to find ways to incorporate creativity,” she says. “That’s definitely been informed by my parents making it clear that you don’t have to choose one or the other, you can do both.”
Opening doors
After earning her B.A. from New York University, Zaidi joined Teach for America, landing in a Compton middle school. While there, she earned a master’s degree in urban education policy from Loyola Marymount University, writing her thesis on the school to prison pipeline.
Zaidi then pivoted to Wall Street, spending three years at UBS before deciding to go to law school. Initially, she planned to be a public defender: Both in her classroom and during a part-time job working with incarcerated people at New York City’s infamous Rikers Island jail, she’d seen the need and understood the issues.
After her early law school experience, including working in the Mississippi State Public Defender’s capital case division during her 1L summer, Zaidi began to reconsider.
“I have the utmost respect for public defenders, especially those who work on death penalty cases,” she says. “But I realized in order to be an effective lawyer, I personally needed to be in a field where I could sustain my mental health.”
She wanted to stay in the criminal law sector, with room for pro bono work. So Zaidi spent her 2L summer in the litigation department at Ropes & Gray in New York City and will join the firm after graduation.
“Because I love legal research and writing so much I’ve chosen to be in the litigation group, where I’ll be doing investigations, and maybe some white collar criminal law cases,” she says. “Even as a summer associate at Ropes & Gray, I got to be on so many pro bono matters. So that’s how I’m going to continue my advocacy work.”
Over the past decade, including while a student at Berkeley Law, Zaidi has spent many hours mentoring others with Muslim Indian backgrounds, often encouraging them to enter law school. Most of the connections have come through her parents, and she guesses that the number of contacts runs to 30 or more.
“Oftentimes when I meet lawyers, they’re either Hindu Indian or Pakistani Muslim. But I rarely will find the intersection of Muslim and Indian,” Zaidi says. “Which makes sense because typically, those immigrants were marginalized in India, they’re oppressed, and they’re poor. And we know there are so many barriers to law school.”
Over the past year, Zaidi has tried to formalize the loose network she’s constructed. Working with two other Muslim Indian students — a computer scientist and a journalist by background — she’s created a nonprofit, called ILM (which stands for International Learning and Mentorship and is the Urdu and Arabic word for knowledge). The organization will run what’s essentially a boot camp for high school students to help them navigate the college and graduate and professional school application process, from tackling standardized tests to securing recommendation letters and financial aid.
“In India, an education in the U.S. is your ticket to stability,” she says. “It’s targeted toward Muslim Indian students, but we want to ultimately broaden our scope towards other minority communities across the globe, too.”
Finding the beat
Berkeley Law students are known for their overflowing academic and philanthropic plates, and Zaidi is no exception: She was the 1L representative for the Womxn of Color Collective, worked on the Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy, and is part of the American Muslim Bar Association. She’s graduating with Pro Bono Honors With Highest Distinction, meaning she logged more than 200 hours as a student, and has written articles on topics like affirmative action and the need to require warrants for school searches of students’ mobile phones for the Daily Californian and various law journals.
Zaidi has found another outlet as a DJ. A couple of years ago, her boyfriend taught her what to do after she asked him if he played any Indian music. She took to it immediately and has played sets in the East Bay as well as New York, Atlanta, and Bombay, including this spring’s Bearrister’s Ball, the “law school prom” hosted by the Student Association at Berkeley Law.
She calls music “radical self-care” and loves blending the beats of rap and hip-hop with the rhythms of Indian music.
“I want to DJ music that reflects my Indian heritage because it’s meaningful to me,” she says. “I also enjoy playing for a woman audience because I know so many Black and Brown women who, like myself, want to hear more of the music I play — namely, music by women artists and rappers, as well as Indian music.”
Zaidi sees her long-term future in the law as a similar kind of mashup: A mix of the formal framework of the legal system with the fine-tuning of the voice her mother encouraged her to raise all those years ago.
“There are themes of injustice, and advocacy, and resistance in my family — it runs in their blood, it runs in my veins,” she says.
Berkeley Law was a great fit for that evolution, Zaidi adds.
“A lot of it has to do with the political and social justice underpinning of Berkeley,” she says. “If our professors can continue to mold, in a positive way, the way that we think and question ideas and the law, I think that means a lot of good things to come for people who have been historically oppressed.”