Greg O’Connell – Podcast Transcript

Megan Wachspress – Transcript

Louis Goodman 00:03
Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with practicing attorneys about their lives and careers. I’m Louis Goodman. Based in Berkeley, California, Megan Wachspress serves as a staff attorney for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Cold Campaign, where she uses litigation and policy strategies to advance clean energy.

She’s earned both a Bachelor of Science, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, a master’s degree from Cambridge, a JD from Yale, and a PhD from Cal Berkeley. She has numerous scholarly publications and has clerked for both the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit. Most impressive to me, however, is she is a multi-day jeopardy champion.

Megan Wachspress, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer.

Megan Wachspress 01:00
Thank you so much for having me.

Louis Goodman 01:03
Well, it really is a privilege to have you. I first saw you on television and it’s so much fun to be sitting here and talking to you in person.

Megan Wachspress 01:12
It’s really fun to be talking to you as well. Honestly, reading through all of those degrees, I was like, wow, I really didn’t want a full-time job in my twenties.

Louis Goodman 01:21
Where are you talking to us from right now?

Megan Wachspress 01:24
I’m actually in the Sierra Club’s national headquarters, the offices here in Oakland, California. Beautiful downtown Oakland, California, as Rowan Mars likes to say.

Louis Goodman 01:33
So you are an Alameda County lawyer.

Megan Wachspress 01:36
I am. That is where I reside.

Louis Goodman 01:39
Can you tell us a little bit about what type of practice you have now?

Megan Wachspress 01:43
It’s really varied, which is one of the most fun things about it. The Sierra Club very much is a mission-driven organization, and specifically that mission is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and co-pollutants that are put out into the Earth’s atmosphere through the generation of electricity in the United States.

We have other missions too, the protection of lands, the preservation of species, but the part of the organization that I work in is focused on grid decarbonization, and one of the great things about working for a mission-driven organization is it doesn’t necessarily privilege one type of lawyering or one type of legal strategy over the goal of the group as a whole, which is shutting down coal plants, stopping new gas plants, and to a lesser extent, but still promoting the development and installation of solar and wind, and increasingly batteries.

Louis Goodman 02:35
Where are you from originally?

Megan Wachspress 02:37
I was born in Washington, DC. My family moved to Oak Park, which is a suburb of Chicago when I was three, and then we moved into Chicago proper when I was 10, and that’s where I stayed all the way through graduating college.

Louis Goodman 02:49
So, where’d you go to high school?

Megan Wachspress 02:50
I went to Whitney Young, which is actually the alma mater of Michelle Obama, a proud … and both Wachowski sisters. So, you know, we have some famous alums, but it’s a public magnet school in very near to downtown Chicago.

Louis Goodman 03:03
And then when you graduated from high school, you went to the University of Chicago, so you stayed kind of close to home, at least for college.

Megan Wachspress 03:10
Yeah, I did. I ended up moving down to Hyde Park, so it was a chance to live in the city in a different way and in a different part of it than I had grown up in.

Louis Goodman 03:19
After you graduated from college, you went on to some additional academic schooling. What was the next degree that you got after college?

Megan Wachspress 03:34
So, I then went to do a master’s at Cambridge, which took a year. They do their degrees quick over on the other side of the pond. And then I had previously applied for various PhD programs and kind of knew that when I was done with that master’s degree I’d be coming back to the states to attend the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at UC Berkeley.

Louis Goodman 03:53
So you went from Chicago to Cambridge to Cal. And did you take any time off or did it just go straight through?

Megan Wachspress 04:02
Pretty much went straight through. I do think it is a funny expression when people talk about taking time off to like go out into the working world in between degrees. I’m like, shouldn’t it be the other way around? But no, I was really committed to the idea of becoming a professor. It was a, you know, the PhD was at the time, very much a professional degree for me. I wanted to teach, I wanted the right scholarship. And so I didn’t see much reason to wait. It was where I thought I was headed, so I started right away at Cal.

Louis Goodman 04:31
You ultimately went to law school.

Megan Wachspress 04:36
Yeah. So, my ending up at law school was possibly the most predictable turn of events ever and one that I weirdly avoided for a very long time. I can remember my senior year of college when my best friend roommate for three years was like reviewing for the LSAT, and I was like, I’m never gonna do this. I’m never gonna take a standardized test again. So for a long time, I really resisted it.

Louis Goodman 05:01
So when you finished your PhD program, did you immediately then apply for law school?

Megan Wachspress 05:07
Oh, no. It’s more complicated than that.

Louis Goodman 05:09
Yeah, that’s what I, well, that’s my question, which is, it’s kind of a sort of a twofold question, probably objectionable as compound, but here’s the question. When did you first start thinking about being a lawyer, that that’s something that you really did wanna do? And then when did you actually apply to law school?

Megan Wachspress 05:34
Pretty much simultaneously. Midway through my PhD program when I decided I definitely did not wanna be an academic and I was spending all of my time volunteering with like asylum applications or teaching fourth amendment stuff to kids in San Leandro in the juvenile facility in San Leandro and doing union organizing basically for the graduate student union, teaching assistants’ union at Cal.

Louis Goodman 05:59
So essentially you were really doing legal work, or legal-adjacent work and realized, hey, if I really wanna do this, I should be a lawyer. Is that fair to say?

Megan Wachspress 06:09
Yeah, basically, yeah.

Louis Goodman 06:11
Okay, cool. How did you end up all the way on the East Coast from being at Berkeley?

Megan Wachspress 06:17
Well, all my professors and my colleagues were like, you should apply to Yale, Yale’s the best. And they still thought I was gonna be an academic. So like, if you wanna go into legal academia, you gotta apply to Yale. So I’m like, all right, I’ll apply to Yale. So I applied to Yale and I applied to Berkeley, and then I applied to any law school that waived my application fee. So I never ended up applying to Stanford. People were like, how did you not? I’m like, they didn’t waive my application fee. So I applied to those two places and then got into some places, didn’t get into other places, and Yale was one of the places I got into. And then everyone says, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. And I’m like, okay. All right. So then I moved across the country.

Louis Goodman 07:01
And how was that experience? How was being in law school at Yale?

Megan Wachspress 07:05
Well, I literally drove across the whole country to get there, which was really amazing. And then I drove all the way to get back, which was kind of fun. So I’ve crossed the country twice by car.

New Haven’s a very different place than Berkeley. Yale is a very different school than Berkeley. I had, I think, overall a very positive experience there. They have very strong clinical offerings, which I spent most of my time on, and you know, my colleagues and peers there were, and many of my professors were just absolutely fantastic.

It was the first time in my life I had really, which is ironic given all the places I’ve been, but it was the first time I saw the reproduction of like US elite political hierarchy in a really concrete way. I’m a privileged, you know, I was a privileged kid, I’ve been in privileged places, but this was like the children of cabinet-level positions or senators or the grandchildren of federal judges, like basically slotting into those roles. You know, I think there was a row of students in my civil procedure class who all attended the same private high school in New York City.

And so it was frustrating in a political sense. It was, I felt politically activated by seeing the degree to which elite reproduction happened. Even almost at like the intergenerational level and how tightly knit that world was. And that even breaking into a place like University of Chicago, which by any account is like way too exclusive and way too expensive, wasn’t the same thing as breaking into like really having power in US society and being adjacent to that and able to even participate in that a little was a oddly radicalizing experience for someone who had been in what most people would consider, pretty elite spaces up until that point.

Louis Goodman 09:02
Now, when you graduated from Yale, did you come back and take the bar in California?

Megan Wachspress 09:07
Yeah, I applied for clerkships. I got two in California. My then boyfriend, then fiance, now husband didn’t really wanna stay on the East Coast. And so I knew that we were moving back to either California or the Midwest, and California was where we ended up.

Louis Goodman 09:22
Can you just very briefly walk us through getting out of Yale, getting a job, doing some of the clerking, and then how that led you to your current position with the Sierra Club?

Megan Wachspress 09:35
Yeah, so the clerking thing is, is a peculiarity of, of these T-14 law schools. It is something that gets really inflated in importance among law school graduates who I think often are very focused on like the next five years of their career and don’t really see the arc, and also very much like myself, I’m very implicated in this, have done nothing but go from like fancy institution to fancy institution to fancy institution.

And so they’re like, Ooh, what’s the next fancy institution? And the next fancy institution is the federal judiciary. And there have been a lot of toxic dynamics that have developed around that, and there’s been press coverage of some of that. For my part, I was really fortunate in that through no fault, like through no skill on my own I locked into just two fantastic human beings as judges. So I knew, I only applied for clerkships in New York and Chicago and the Bay Area. I got to in the Bay Area, I came out here, I got to learn some state law, which is great. I got to learn some federal law, also great. And then I actually had my first kid about three weeks before my second clerkship was scheduled to end. So I had to leave a little, I mean, I knew it was coming, but I had to leave a little early. And that was also when I finally finished my dissertation.

But having my kid, which sort of happened in between my time committing to labor and employment work and actually starting that job was a, it forced me to think about time, I think in a different way and, and project further forward into what was an emergency and what was most urgent and what needed doing in a different way than I think I had previously.

And it was also around the time that I think there were a lot of stories about like, no, this is not a 50 years in the future problem anymore. This is a next-decade problem. It was climate change. Yeah. Yeah.

Louis Goodman 11:19
The climate change issue is what led you to the Sierra Club?

Megan Wachspress 11:23
Yeah. Yeah. And so I just wanted to do climate work and I applied to a bunch of places and this was the group that would have me. So there you go, to make of that what you will.

Louis Goodman 11:31
Obviously you are someone who is super bright, you have lots of skills, you could do anything that you want. What is it about practicing law that you liked and that has kept you in the legal world?

Megan Wachspress 11:48
I’m not sure that’s true. Can I reject the premise? I mean, I actually have been really specialized, like all of my work has been about closely reading texts and analyzing them and writing about texts, right? Whether those texts are like 17th century pamphlets or 21st century cases from a public utility commission. Like the honing the skill of writing about texts and teaching the skill of writing about text has really been what I’ve done. And so I…

Louis Goodman 12:22
Well, practicing law is to some extent the reading of texts, the writing about texts and the analysis of text, isn’t it?

Megan Wachspress 12:30
Yeah, no, that’s what I’m saying, is that, I don’t know. I’ve been incredibly specialized in my life, actually. I don’t know that there is something else that like I could just pop into and do well. But what has kept me practicing law? I mean, for me it’s a way to fight for the world to be a better place, but to fight in a really nerdy way.

And it is, like I said, that’s the skills I’ve been honing since I was a kid. And so if I wanna be fighting, why not fight with the skills I’m actually decently good at as opposed to, I don’t know, trying to go out. I have scientists friends who are like trying to develop carbon capture technology and I’m like, I don’t know how to do that, so, you know.

Louis Goodman 13:15
Speaking of scholarly work, you wrote a really fascinating piece about piracy in the, what is it? 16th century, 17th century?

Megan Wachspress 13:26
16th and 17th, yeah.

Louis Goodman 13:28
Yeah. And I’m, you know, so I mean, that touches on criminal law and when I was in college, I studied a lot of American colonial history and there was a big piracy component of that.

So I was really interested when I took a look at that article. And I’m wondering If you could just briefly explain what that article was about and why that subject was interesting to you, and I would just indicate to anybody who’s listening, it’s easy enough to Google it and find it.

Megan Wachspress 14:01
The big thing that got me politically activated was Guantanamo and the disappearance of Muslim American men shortly after September 11th, like that was the first protest I attended.

And I was very upset. You know, I was like a little high school civil libertarian. This is outrageous, blah, blah, blah. I don’t mean to minimize it, sorry. I’m just, yeah. It was outrageous. It was horrible. The legacy in US history is atrocious. Guantanamo is still open. Like, it’s not in the past it’s happening.

But at the time a lot of the rhetoric in left of center circles was, oh, this is exceptional. What we’re doing to these people is exceptional, right? The solution is to treat folks who we think have done these horrible things like regular criminals. And then as I got a little older and I got, you know, got to see what a regular criminal proceeding looked like and go inside a regular prison, it became clear to me that like regular prison isn’t actually, I mean, it’s different and there are different horrors, but regular prison isn’t great either.

And that distinction, that idea that there are like special criminals and regular criminals, and the legal frameworks we have for thinking about them are very different things, got me interested in the origins of that distinction. And what I discovered in looking into those origins is, one, the idea of the criminal law as a coherent body of law that is enforced through public mechanisms like prosecutors is actually quite new. You know, you don’t see it as a coherent body of law until the 19th century. Public prosecutors, as in people employed by the state to pursue legal consequences for individuals accused of wrongdoing, really, you don’t get until very late 19th century, early 20th century in the US and Britain. And I’m talking here about the Anglo-American legal tradition, the common law tradition.

And the counterintuitive thing I discovered, and which is the subject of the paper, is that when in the early years of the development of criminal procedure and within political thought of the idea of law-breaking as a basis or justification for state violence, the figure that was focused on, the idea that people had in their heads was not like the person who steals their neighbors chickens or the person that commits an assault, but the pirate, the highwayman, who were in international law, you know, the enemy of all who were outside any kind of norms of what you can do to a person.

They were outside of even the barest minimal of social contract in the anti-international sphere. And a lot of the legal, this isn’t part of that paper, it is part of my dissertation, and the legal protections we think of is so fundamental to defendant’s rights in the US actually have their origins in a 1696 bill that was relating to treason. So traders had more legal protections from a procedural standpoint than “ordinary criminals” did for a decent several decades in the early 18th century.

The point of the paper and the point of the dissertation is to posit that in fact, if you look at the intellectual history of the idea of criminality in the Anglo-American tradition, rather than having regular criminals and extraordinary criminals, the idea that criminals are outside of social bounds and subject to pretty limitless violence, is really deeply embedded in that intellectual tradition. And what I wanted to do, but what my advisors are like, now, Megan, this is a historical dissertation, like let’s not get ahead of ourselves, is then try to pull that forward and say, well, you know, let’s go over to Pelican Bay, up and down Norte and look at Pelican Bay and look at Guantanamo and you try to tell me which you’d rather be in.

The answer of course is none of the above, but just to point out that we do some extraordinarily cruel things to “ordinary criminals”.

Louis Goodman 17:52
As I mentioned in the introduction, you are a multi-day jeopardy champion. What got you interested in going on Jeopardy, and can you tell us a little bit about that process?

Megan Wachspress 18:07
Yes. So when I was in middle school, it might not shock you to learn that I was not the most popular of kids, but I did have one really good friend. Every day we’d get home from school, we’d go to our respective, I would go in the kitchen because you could still pull the phone cord over to the tv, they were corded phones and turn on the tv, and we would play Jeopardy against each other with score keeping every afternoon after school for at least a year and a half.

She always won, like every time she was a year older than me, but she always won. And I mean, I think I’ve, you know, I haven’t consistently watched Jeopardy all my life since then, but I’m a big trivia fan. I’m in an online trivia league. I like, was always trying to get people to go to pub quiz with, I mean, before I had kids, I was always trying to get people to go pub quiz with me.

And they recently, jeopardy recently changed its format, so now you can like take the test to be on the show anytime. You don’t have to do it at certain times. And my husband did it fairly early in the pandemic and was like, Megan, you should do this. Of course you should do this. I’m like, right, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. And like that was it. Like I got enough right, I went through the whole audition process. So, much like becoming a lawyer, it was the product of like longstanding childhood structural factors and a real like, I don’t know, spontaneous decision decades later that was not necessarily well thought out.

Louis Goodman 19:36
What did you think of the experience of being on the show?

Megan Wachspress 19:39
It was fantastic. It was so much fun. The contestant producers are amazing. They’ve got, you know, they’ve got it down. Everything’s very efficient. Everyone’s very warm and friendly, and enthusiastic, and all the other contestants are always really nice to each other.

It’s like a very good vibe. It is. You realize like this is a big thing they’re doing. They’re just pulling people, not off the street, but with like not a ton of vetting and like putting them on television and like kind of hoping it works. And the fact that it does, I think is a credit to all of the producers involved in the show. And just the, you know, the fact that I think there is a correlation between being good at trivia, which requires a certain amount of curiosity, a certain kind of amount of diversity of interest, right? You can’t just know about one thing. You’ve gotta be interested in lots of things that invites people who are open to an experience and and likely to be you know, have fun with it and, and show courtesy to their fellow contestants.

Louis Goodman 20:35
Now, you did well enough that you were invited to the Tournament of Champions. Has that taping taken place yet?

Megan Wachspress 20:43
It has, and that is all I can say about it.

Louis Goodman 20:45
Oh, I know. It’s revealing state security secrets to say anything beyond that. So anyway, and so I assume that that taping experience was also good.

Megan Wachspress 20:54
Check your local listings. Yeah, no, that bad experience was really good and normally when you film, you’re like, everyone’s in and out for a day, right? Like, except for the person who wins on the last show of the day. Because they film five shows a day. So only the person who’s the winner on the last day comes back and it’s all new people, but the tournament is they have everybody out. And they like, let everyone stay even after they lose, like, you know, to watch the subsequent rounds.

And so it was a very, it was an incredible bonding experience actually with the other contestant participants. You get to spend several days in a row with them and it’s just, they’re incredible people and it was incredible to get to know them a little bit.

Louis Goodman 21:32
Megan, I have a two parted question for you. What do you think’s the best advice you’ve ever received and what advice would you give someone who is just coming out of law school and starting a career?

Megan Wachspress 21:48
So the best advice I ever received was from a friend, and it was in the context of dating. She’s very successful at dating, someone’s always in love with her.

I am not so successful, I was not, obviously I’m married now, but I was not, and the advice she gave to me is, Megan, you can’t approach this thinking about scarcity. And I know that that’s a privileged perspective across the board, right? Like there are situations where things genuinely are scarce. Like there are people in this world that do not have enough money, do not have enough food. That is real. But I think there are a lot of situations where we invent scarcity or we clinging to things or get emotionally attached to things because, or even worse, hold on to things or fight other people for things because we think of things that are scarce that are actually in abundance, right? And so that advice really resonated with me because it’s like, oh yeah, I get so upset every time, you know, something doesn’t work out because I’m subconsciously thinking like, oh, maybe there’s no one out there in the world for me.

And so once you say, you know what, there are plenty of people out there in the world who I could have a wonderful dating experience. So bizarre to talk about when I’ve been married for seven years, but it opens you up to experiences and just makes you, helps you to make better choices too. To say, you know what, this person isn’t for me, right? I don’t have to clinging to this person because there is more stuff out there.

And the kind of related advice I would give, professional advice I would give to someone starting out their career is to not let your idea of who you are or what your life is supposed to look like keep you in a situation or keep you around people or keep you doing work that for whatever reason, doesn’t make sense for you. Either you’re not sleeping, you’re not happy with it, you don’t feel good about it at the end of the day, that I think clinging to an idea of how things should be, which is something I do all the time can really lead you into unhappiness and trying to like, take a step back and let go of that narrative for yourself as much as possible.

Louis Goodman 24:01
I’m wondering how practicing law and your family life have fit together.

Megan Wachspress 24:08
I have a five-year-old and a toddler. It’s not an easy fit. It really isn’t. I mean basically we work between eight and 10 every, right? Like there’s just this second shift after the kids are in bed where you, where you do all the work that you couldn’t get done during the limited hours of childcare that you have every day.

You know, there’s been so much written, so much inks spilled on like this, can you have it all? And blah, blah, blah. And I, you know, I, I have my opinions on that and, you know, the gender dynamics of all of that. But I think it is hard, but I think it’s a privilege to get the chance to do both. Not everyone does.

And so I am grateful to be in a job that is hard, but with kind people who show me grace and flexibility when I need it. And I am grateful to have kids who are an absolute joy to be around and who will, you know, hopefully. I don’t even know. Hopefully they’re just gonna be part of my life forever. It’s amazing.

Louis Goodman 25:04
What sort of recreational activities do you like to do to kind of get your mind off of work?

Megan Wachspress 25:10
My husband and I love outdoors stuff, especially with the pandemic. The last three years we’ve been very much on the conservative side of things and so we have covered a really incredible amount of California. The Sierras up to Lassen, up to, you know, Mendocino County down to LA. We took a boat ride to the Channel Islands cause we wanted to hit as many national parks as possible, so a lot of, you know, trying to cajole the four, then five year old to walk. It’s like just another half mile kiddo. And so that’s a lot of recreational activities.

Louis Goodman 25:45
How do you define success?

Megan Wachspress 25:47
Oh, I don’t know if I’ve left the world better off for having me in it.

Louis Goodman 25:51
What keeps you up at night?

Megan Wachspress 25:52
The inevitability of death. Like seriously, I mean, climate change is the obvious one, but yeah. And all the stupid things I’ve said at various points in my life, including on national television. But yeah, those three things.

Louis Goodman 26:05
Is there someone living or dead who you’d really like to meet? And if so, what would you ask them or talk to them about?

Megan Wachspress 26:14
I mean, it’s hard because I think anyone who I really admired, I’d just get really tongue tied around. My younger child, their middle name is after Pauline Murray, who is one of the most influential legal thinkers in US history. They conceived of the legal theory behind Brown versus the Board of Ed. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited them with a lot of the legal inspiration and thinking and, and work behind the early women’s rights cases and gender equity cases in the 1970s. They were the first black, I think they were the first black woman episcopal ordained minister at the end of their life.

I’m being a little bit weird with the pronouns because there’s historical debate about, Pauli identified as male at points in their life, never fully socially transitioned because that wasn’t really an option for them. And so there’s historical debate over which pronouns are most appropriate to use.

However that comes out, they’re just an incredible human being. And I think in terms of, you know, what is the dream of having your ideas make the world a better place. I just can’t think of anyone whose ideas made the world a better place in such a concrete, wide ranging way.

Louis Goodman 27:31
And can you slowly say that name one more time?

Megan Wachspress 27:34
Pauli Murray. P A U L I M U R R A Y.

Louis Goodman 27:41
Thank you. Let’s say you and your husband came into some real money, not jeopardy winnings, but 3 or 4 billion dollars. What, if anything, in your life would you do differently?

Megan Wachspress 27:55
What would I do differently? Oh, this is so pathetic, but I’d probably just keep working at my job. I mean, I, you know, I know that there are these billionaire philanthropists that go around and I think, yeah, I think giving money away smartly and ethically involves work. And so I think to the extent that I did things differently, it would be about figuring out how to give the money away as ethically and carefully and productively as possible, which would be a lot of work and required talking to a lot of people. You know, you hear these stories of these people parachuting in and then doing these programs and then like it doesn’t grow out of local people’s needs and it doesn’t grow out of local knowledge, and so you end up doing more harm than good. And so, trying not to do that with the money would, I think be my, become my full-time job.

Louis Goodman 28:52
Yeah, I think having a lot of money creates a lot of problems in a way.

Megan Wachspress 28:56
Yeah, well, it gives you power and really disproportionate power, and so I’m uncomfortable with the idea of having that much power. I’m tempted by it too, I guess.

Louis Goodman 29:07
Let’s say you had a magic wand. There was one thing in the world that you could change the legal world or otherwise, what would that be?

Megan Wachspress 29:12
I mean, besides shutting down every coal plant and spontaneously replacing it with a combination of battery, solar panels and wind generators? I mean, I’m really concerned about, this is getting very political, but I’m really concerned about the current makeup of the federal judiciary.

I think it’s gonna be very hard to do good policy going forward and to protect folks’ rights going forward with the current state of things. So, do something about that and yeah, just spontaneously get rid of fossil fuels. All gone. We’re decarbonized the grid. Boom.

Louis Goodman 29:44
Is there anything you wanna talk about that we haven’t discussed, that we haven’t touched on?

Megan Wachspress 29:48
You’ve asked some good questions. I’ve said my piece.

Louis Goodman 29:53
Megan Wachspress, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer Podcast. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you.

Megan Wachspress 30:00
Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to talk with you as well.

Louis Goodman 30:05
That’s it for today’s episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests and to Joel Katz from music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I’m Louis Goodman.

Megan Wachspress 30:48
So, what got me interested in the top, answer the questions in the reverse order.