Ask most Americans to picture a judge and they will describe an older white man, and for most of American history they would have been right. The woman on the other side of this conversation grew up in a one-room apartment in Madras, toured the world as a classical Indian dancer, arrived in New York at sixteen on a performance visa, lost her mother at eighteen, and stayed. In 2015 she became the first South Asian woman appointed to the bench in New York.
In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Judge Raja Rajeswari of the New York City Criminal Court — a sixteen-year prosecutor in Staten Island before her appointment — for a conversation about an immigrant's path to the judiciary, what it took, and why it matters who sits on the bench. Their discussion of language access in the courts continues in The Language Conundrum.
A Dancer's Daughter
Rajeswari begins in Chennai, where girls her age were pulled from school to save for dowries and where she won a research scholarship at twelve to bring dance to communities across India. A 1988 cultural tour with India's vice president ended in New York, and a teenager who had seen much of the world saw the Statue of Liberty and told her mother they had to stay. She describes the lawyers who told two women with no money and no connections that nothing could be done, the community leaders who found a way through a work visa, her mother teaching dance to stay, and a seat at Susan Wagner High School for twelfth grade. Eighteen months later her mother died in a car accident on the way to a charity performance. Her father asked her to come home. She answered that if it were easy, everyone would do it, and enrolled in community college.
The Salvation Army Suit
Some of the most affecting passages concern what access actually requires: the Staten Island families who housed a teenager in exchange for tutoring their children, the thrift-store suit for a scholarship interview because "people judge you before they speak to you," the bar association photographs of three hundred men and one woman, and the compliment she still hears — "you speak English so well" — from people unaware that India was a British colony for two centuries. There was no South Asian bar association when she was in law school; she joined the Asian American and African American associations because they were the ones that welcomed her.
Prosecuting the Cases Nobody Wants
Rajeswari spent sixteen and a half years in the Richmond County District Attorney's Office, gravitating to sex crimes and domestic violence — the cases, she says, that stay with you. She describes cataloguing 137 counts against a neighborhood "uncle" who had raped and videotaped two dozen children of immigrant single mothers, and the task of telling those mothers, and of understanding them. She describes the Pakistani woman who wept on discovering that someone in a Staten Island prosecutor's office spoke her language, and why so many domestic violence cases in immigrant communities never go forward. And she credits District Attorney William Murphy's first-day instruction — it is never about winning, it is about doing justice — as the ethic she taught younger prosecutors: a wrongful conviction is the worst outcome the system can produce.
A Father's Promise
Her path to the bench began with a dying wish. Her father, who had stayed in New York after her mother's death, asked her from his hospital bed to promise she would submit her application to become a judge; she did so expecting nothing, and was appointed by Mayor de Blasio in April 2015. She recounts the double takes from litigants in Manhattan, the death threats she received as a prosecutor and the defendant who promised to "come and get" her in forty-five years, and her theory of the gavel: if you have to use it, you have lost the room. The judge, she argues, is the gatekeeper for rights that do not exist in much of the world, and restoring public confidence requires vigilance in every case. She closes on dance as the counterweight to the work, and on the hope that a child in a one-room apartment somewhere will see her and try.
What to Know Now
Judge Rajeswari's path has continued upward: she was designated an Acting Justice of the New York State Supreme Court in Richmond County, where she presides over felony trials, and her Criminal Court appointment was renewed through 2028. The bench she joined has changed around her. New York's courts now include a growing number of South Asian judges at the city, state, and federal levels, and the South Asian Bar Association of New York, which did not exist when she was a law student, is among the city's most active affinity bars. The broader question she raises — whether the judiciary reflects the public it serves — became a focus of the state court system after a 2020 review by former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson found persistent racial disparities and prompted reforms in hiring, training, and court operations; the New York City Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which recommended her appointment, has continued to diversify the Criminal, Family, and Civil Court benches. The language-access work she describes as her priority has grown into a statewide program serving more than 400,000 court users a year, discussed in the companion conversation. And the immigrant success story she tells has taken on new resonance in a period of tightened immigration enforcement and rhetoric, making her account of what a sixteen-year-old with a performance visa and no money was able to become a pointed argument for the system that let her try.
