Summer of 2011
Briana Abrams
Briana Abrams worked as a law clerk at Legal Advocates for Children and Youth, an office at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. Briana advocated for the rights of children in guardianship, dependency, and teen parenting proceedings. Briana drafted briefs to the court, researched novel legal issues, participated in court hearings, interviewed clients, made home visits, and collaborated with other individuals and offices working to help children in Silicon Valley.
Michelle Baik
At the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Michelle Baik worked as the sole intern for the immigration unit. She did a variety of work that included both legal research and writing, as well as policy work. She wrote numerous letters of opposition or support for Federal and State programs and bills on behalf of APALC, did outreach to other organizations in California and nationwide to gain support for APALC’s work, worked on individual client’s cases by doing legal research and writing up memorandums to her supervising attorney, went to immigration clinics to help people fill out their naturalization forms, and in the last few weeks of her internship, she worked on a series of policy briefs on current issues in immigration, such as the DREAM Act.
Audrey Barron
Audrey Barron worked for Advocates for Children of New York. She spent her summer advocating for low-income children with disabilities in the New York City public school system. She helped several child clients win desperately needed services and proper school placements.
Colleen Bazdarich
Colleen Bazdarich worked for the California Appellate Project, a non-profit established by the State Bar to assist counsel of indigent persons facing the death penalty. Working within CAP’s UCIP (Unrepresented Condemned Inmate Project) team, she collected records and researched the cases of two condemned inmates who have yet to receive Habeas counsel. Her assignment also included a number of visits to San Quentin Prison and the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla to interview the clients.
Hilda Chan
Hilda Chan worked at the Supportive Parents Information Network (SPIN), an all-volunteer grassroots organization of very low-income families on public assistance. SPIN fights for pathways to self-sufficiency by combining direct legal services, policy advocacy, and organizing to bring community voices to the public dialogue. Hilda focused on cases in which domestic violence impeded families’ efforts to escape poverty.
Margaret Chen
Margaret Chen worked with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project in New York. As a summer fellow, she worked on litigation challenging the detention and deportation of a Hispanic U.S. citizen with mental disabilities. She also analyzed potential Fourth Amendment violations in an immigration home raid.
Rachel DiNardo
Rachel DiNardo worked at the National Center for Youth Law.
Erin Everett
Erin Everett served as a Legal Intern for the Housing Unit of Bay Area Legal Aid in Richmond, California. As a 2011 summer intern, she spent time researching and drafting legal memorandum on various housing law issues. In addition, she worked directly with clients to help fight unlawful evictions.
Michael Fairhurst
Michael Fairhurst was a legal intern at the ACLU of Northern California this summer, and wrote memos on subjects ranging from the Establishment Clause to the rights of immigrants in immigration court to California drug policy. In addition, he participated in a limited amount of individual complaint resolution and fact investigation.
Jolene Forman
Jolene Forman interned as a policy intern in the Police Practices group at the ACLU of Northern California. She advocated for counties across California to implement alternatives to incarceration in response to the prison overcrowding Supreme Court decision and state prisoner realignment legislation. She also conducted legal and policy research on front-end sentencing reform, drug policy, and pre-booking diversion programs.
Jonathan Guss
As a Summer Law Clerk at DNA-People’s Legal Services, Inc., Jon Guss did client intakes, drafted complaints, motions, and briefs, and even represented clients when he was allowed to do so. DNA is the only organization providing free legal services to low-income clients on the Navajo Nation. DNA is dedicated to helping families break the cycle of poverty, preventing domestic abuse, protecting the rights of particularly vulnerable populations, and promoting tribal sovereignty.
Coreen Kopper
Coreen Kopper worked as a law clerk at the Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center in San Francisco helping low-wage workers with employment claims. She worked with the Community Legal Services program, representing workers in a wide variety of contexts, including at unemployment insurance hearings and at hearings before the Labor Commissioner.
Peggy Li
Peggy Li worked at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, where she provided direct legal representation and culturally competent legal services to marginalized members of the San Francisco Bay Area community, specifically, the API community. She worked primarily in Elder Law, and Wills and Estates. She also worked in Trafficking Law and Immigration Law.
Christopher Lau
Christopher Lau interned at the Texas Defender Service (TDS). TDS works to improve the quality of representation afforded to those facing a death sentence and to expose and eradicate the systemic flaws plaguing the Texas death penalty. As an intern, he helped draft motions on intellectual disability, investigated ineffectiveness claims, and conducted mitigation interviews.
Molly Leiwant
Molly Leiwant worked at the ACLU ReproductiveFreedom Project in New York. As a legalintern, she worked on impact litigation related to constitutional challenges tostate laws restricting reproductive rights. RFP’s work includes advocacy and legal challenges on issues of limits onabortion, shackling of pregnant women in prison, parental notification andconsent, and crisis pregnancy centers.
Shevon Lewis
Shevon Lewis worked at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid- El Paso Office giving direct client services in the areas of housing, employment and labor, immigration, human trafficking, family, and property law. The most memorable event was when she successfully represented a client in an eviction hearing.
Anne Mooney
Anne Mooney worked last summer at Disability Rights Advocates, a nonprofit legal center dedicated to securing the civil rights of people with disabilities. Anne assisted attorneys in advocating for disability rights through high impact litigation.
Francis Nugent
Francis Nugent worked on class action impact litigation and policy research with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the lives of people with mental illnesses. He worked primarily on a class action suit brought against a school district for a failure to provide a free and appropriate education to students with emotional disturbances.
Casey Schutte
Casey Schutte interned at Legal Services for Children (LSC) in San Francisco, California. LSC provides free legal representation and social work services to children and youth in the Bay Area. As a legal intern, Casey worked on legal guardianship, immigration, and foster care cases.
Gina Szeto
As a law clerk at the Asian Law Caucus I counseled low-wage workers on a broad range of employment problems, including employment discrimination, harassment, retaliation, workplace safety, unemployment and wage and hour issues. I also represented individual workers though the administrative wage claim process before the California Labor Commissioner, wrote demand letters, negotiated settlements with employers, represented workers at unemployment benefit appeal hearings, and participated in community hearings and meetings.
Eve Weissman
Eve Weissman worked at the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic and Family Security (CHEFS) towards the development of a national policy proposal for Paid Family Leave Insurance. Similar to paid family leave programs in California and New Jersey, this federal program would provide partial wage replacement to individuals across the country who take time off from work to bond with a newborn or newly adopted child or to provide needed care to an ill family member. Eve interviewed policymakers and advocates in New Jersey, California, and Washington, DC and helped identify and address key issues in forthcoming legislation through legal research and policy analysis.
Summer of 2010
Ary Amerikaner
Ary Amerikaner worked on a brand new suit against the State of California for its failures to transform the inequitable, ineffective, and insufficient public education system – particularly its school financing scheme. She interviewed plaintiffs, drafted declarations, and helped with other education related policy advocacy.
Erin Armstrong
Erin Armstrong worked with the SW Women’s Law Center (SWLC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a summer fellow, Erin divided her time between research relating to reproductive health benefits under the state Medicaid program and the effects of federal health reform and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on access to reproductive health care for women in New Mexico.
Jonathan Baum
Jonathan Baum worked on impact litigation, advocacy, and public outreach to protect the constitutional rights of immigrants at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project in San Francisco. He focused on cases ensuring judicial review of administrative decisions, challenging prolonged detention of immigrants during removal proceedings, and combating local enforcement of immigration laws.
Carmen Comsti
As a legal intern at the Legal Aid Association of California (“LAAC”), Carmen Comsti advocated for legal services to the California legislature and courts, where she was building her legal research and advocacy skills when working on state legal service budgeting issues and amicus curiae briefs. LAAC was founded by California legal services programs as a statewide legal services organization to help programs collaborate on issues of mutual concern. LAAC provides training for legal services advocates for over 75 member organizations.
Michael Fairhurst
Michael Fairhurst was an Intern at the First Amendment Foundation in Tallahassee, Florida. The First Amendment Foundation seeks to protect and advance the public’s constitutional right to open government by providing education and training, legal aid and information services. As an aspiring constitutional lawyer, Michael benefited from the wide-ranging research and outreach opportunities his internship provided.
Jolene Forman
Jolene Forman was working at Drug Policy Alliance Network’s Office of Legal Affairs, located in Berkeley, CA. Her internship focused on legislative and initiative drafting at the state level on a range of drug policy reform issues; litigation and legal consulting to protect rights threatened by the drug war; and legal training at the local, state, national, and international levels.
Lily Harvey
Lily Harvey worked at Public Advocates. She conducted legal and policy research to assist in drafting federal legislation to address transportation equity. She developed materials to support legislative advocacy efforts and collaborated with researchers to strengthen the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Bill’s research and data collection provisions relating to Title VI and Environmental Justice. She also supported local efforts to organize transit riders in Oakland, CA.
Katie Henderson
Katie Henderson worked at the International Institute of the Bay Area. She worked on Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) visa and U-visa petitions, which permit undocumented victims of violent crimes and domestic violence to gain lawful status, employment authorization, and access to social services in the United States.
Rachel Johnson
Rachel Johnson worked with Justice Now in order to end violence against women and stop their imprisonment. This is a reproductive justice organization. As a 2010 summer intern, Rachel worked with incarcerated women (mostly women of color) to mitigate their sentences, obtain access to healthcare, secure compassionate release, and defend their parental rights.
Coreen Kopper
Coreen Kopper worked at the East Bay Community Law Center, the largest provider of legal services in the East Bay. She was excited to have the opportunity to intern in the housing unit, where she worked to provide direct legal services to tenants facing eviction and help to preserve housing subsidies for low income tenants at risk of losing their benefits.
Judith Le
Judith Le served as a Policy and Advocacy Intern for The Opportunity Agenda based in New York City. The Opportunity Agenda works to build public support and public policy for greater and more equal opportunity in the United States. As a 2010 summer intern, she assisted in drafting a policy brief on domestic human rights indicators and conducted research on labor and housing rights.
Erin Liotta
Erin Liotta was thrilled to spend her summer at the National Center for Youth Law, based in Oakland. NCYL is a national leader in the fight for justice for impoverished children and youth. At NCYL, Erin divided her time between research related to teen dating violence and litigation of a civil rights class action lawsuit filed on behalf of abused and neglected children in Las Vegas’s foster care system.
Tony LoPresti
Tony LoPresti worked with the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, a community-driven environmental justice organization that works in the Central Valley of California and throughout the country. He spent his time on clean air issues relating to mega-dairies, and working on several civil rights claims.
Jessica Mar
Jessica Mar worked as a legal intern with an international civil party lawyer with Access to Justice Asia to provide pro bono legal representation to ethnic minority civil parties before the ECCC, the hybrid UN/Cambodian Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Jessica worked directly with survivors of the genocide to support the prosecution of senior Khmer Rouge leaders for mass human rights violations.
Kei Nishimura
Kei Nishimura was interning at the East Bay Children’s Law Office in Oakland/Hayward, CA. EBCLO is a nonprofit organization that provides free legal representation to children and youth who are the subject of abuse and neglect proceedings in Alameda County Juvenile Dependency Court. Kei was excited to spend the summer learning more about youth law and advocating on behalf of their many clients.
Julia Parish
Julia Parish worked at the Employment Law Center – Legal Aid Society in San Francisco, representing low-wage workers in employment claims. She was part of the Gender Equity Group, working on cases ranging from pregnancy disability discrimination to gender identity harassment.
Gina Saeto
Gina Saeto interned at the Asian American Legal Defense Education Fund (AALDEF) in the Economic Justice Program Area. AALDEF is an Asian American civil rights organization that combines legal advocacy and community organizing to fight for the rights of low-income immigrants.
Rebecca Schonberg
Rebecca Schonberg interned at the National Center for Law & Economic Justice (www.nclej.org) in New York City. Founded in 1965, NCLEJ uses a combination impact litigation, policy analysis, and advocacy to protect the civil rights of low-income individuals. In particular, NCLEJ fights to ensure that vital federal statutes like the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Food Stamp Act, and the Medicaid Act are fully and fairly enforced. This summer, Rebecca worked on court filings in benefits delay and deterrence cases, researched the due process rights of food stamp applicants, and conducted plaintiff outreach and local public benefits offices.
Karina Smith
Karina Smith worked with low-income HIV positive clients and patients at the Oakland Children’s Hospital through her internship at the East Bay Community Law Center. She enjoyed helping clients straighten out their legal issues so that they could deal with their more important health issues.
Whitney Tipton
Whitney Tipton spent this summer with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project in Durham, NC. The goal of the ACLU-CPP is abolition of capital punishment, which it pursues mainly via strategic individual representation at all procedural levels, including trial, direct appeal, and state post-conviction. Though the project is national, its clients are currently concentrated in the southern states, where there is the greatest need for assistance of qualified counsel.