American justice is meant to be swift and even-handed, but it runs on words, and the words are in English. In the most linguistically diverse city on earth, what happens when the defendant, the witness, or the parent in family court cannot understand what is being said — and cannot make themselves understood to their own lawyer?
In this TalksOnLaw interview, recorded in a New York City courthouse, Joel Cohen sits down with Judge Raja Rajeswari, a sixteen-year prosecutor in Staten Island before her appointment to the bench, an immigrant from Chennai, and a speaker of Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, and Sinhala, for a conversation about what meaningful access to justice requires when the parties do not share a language.
Judge Rajeswari tells the story of her own path from Chennai to the New York bench in the companion conversation A Different Path to the Bench.
Nodding Yes
Judge Rajeswari starts with the moment that worries her most: the plea allocution. A defendant giving up the right to trial, to silence, and to confront witnesses must actually understand what is being surrendered, and the consequences — for employment, and for non-citizens deportation, denial of naturalization, or exclusion from re-entry — can follow even a misdemeanor. The same is true, she notes, of a parent ceding custody in family court or a litigant signing a civil judgment. A client whose lawyer has told him to "say yes to whatever the judge asks" is not exercising rights; he is nodding. The right to counsel means little, she argues, without the ability to communicate confidentially with that counsel, which is why the right to an interpreter has grown up alongside it — in New York by executive order and court rule, in the federal system through civil rights law.
Two Hundred Languages, Two Full-Time Interpreters
The judge describes the scale of the challenge. The New York courts had fielded requests in nearly two hundred languages, and "Chinese" or "Indian" is not an answer, because the request must specify the dialect. Spanish interpreters are on staff in every courthouse; almost everything else runs on a per diem network that competes with federal courts and private industry paying far more. A Telugu or Sinhala speaker whose interpreter is on vacation may sit in a cell waiting. The courts, she explains, have redoubled recruitment through ethnic and cultural institutions and are looking at ways to recognize credentials earned abroad. Interpreters themselves are certified, tested, and bound by canons of neutrality and confidentiality — which is why a bilingual lawyer, a prosecutor with an ear for languages, or a judge who speaks five of them may not substitute for one, and why a frightened defendant's instinct to ask the interpreter whether to plead guilty is one the interpreter is trained to refuse.
Jumping Without a Parachute
Some of the most affecting passages come from the judge's own conversations with immigrant defendants and complainants, one of whom described entering an American courtroom as jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Many come from systems that afford no rights at all, and arrive with low expectations and high fear. She describes the practical responses — signage, training, adjournments and second calls so a defendant can step out of the chaos and actually confer — and her own practice, when she hears an interpretation that is "exactly not what I said," of slowing down rather than pressing on. As a prosecutor, she says, she corrected interpretations against her own interest more than once, because a conviction built on a misunderstanding is not justice.
Cross-Examination Through an Interpreter
The conversation turns to trial craft. Cross-examination depends on pace, tone, and the trap door within a trap door; an interpreter removes the rapid fire, gives the witness time to think, and hands him a way out — "I don't understand the question." The judge recounts a narcotics trial in which her chain-of-custody witnesses were chemists from India, Russia, and Africa, whose accents she found herself repeating for the jury, and a case in which two interpreters for two parties disputed the nuance of a single phrase. Every such moment, she says, is a reminder that the proceeding must remain in English, on a level playing field, because appellate judges must be able to review it.
The Cost of Waiting, and the Promise of Technology
Delay has a price that does not show up in a budget: days off work, jobs lost, and, most corrosively, the defendant who gives up and takes a plea he does not understand just to stop coming back. The judge closes with cautious optimism about simultaneous translation technology, which she expects will eventually meet the court's standard and speed justice for limited-English speakers — with growing pains, and appeals over software errors, along the way — and with an invitation to young people from immigrant communities to see the law, or interpreting, as a place to make a difference.
What to Know Now
Judge Rajeswari has since been designated an Acting Justice of the New York State Supreme Court in Richmond County, presiding over felony cases. The system she describes has grown in the direction she hoped. Under Part 217 of the Uniform Rules for the trial courts, New York provides interpreters free of charge in both criminal and civil matters to any party or witness with limited English proficiency, and the Unified Court System's Office of Language Access reported serving more than 400,000 court users in 2025, in well over a hundred languages, with staff interpreters supplemented by a statewide per diem roster and, since 2020, routine use of remote interpreting by video and phone for rare languages and short appearances — the model she anticipated for the Telugu speaker waiting in a cell. Recruitment continues through annual examinations and internships. The federal picture has shifted. In March 2025, Executive Order 14224 designated English the official language of the United States and revoked the 2000 executive order that had directed federal agencies and funding recipients to improve access for limited-English speakers, and in July 2025 the Department of Justice formally rescinded its Title VI guidance on language access, including its 2010 letter to state court systems. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act itself, and the Supreme Court's decision in Lau v. Nichols reading it to reach language-based national-origin discrimination, remain in force, and constitutional due process and confrontation rights are unaffected; New York's interpreter guarantee rests on state law and court rule and is untouched. The technology she foresaw has arrived in pilot form, with courts around the country testing AI-assisted interpretation for scheduling and administrative interactions while continuing to require certified human interpreters for substantive proceedings — the growing pains, and the standard, she predicted.
