Whitney Braunstein ’20, Gabriella Larios ’20, Clarence Okoh ’20, Renee Schenkman ’20, and Sam Tañafranca Osaki ’20 will receive 2020 Equal Justice Works fellowships. They are part of a class of 78 fellows who were selected from 432 applications.
Equal Justice Works helps to match lawyers interested in working full-time in public interest law with legal service organizations. Fellows can either work within an organization's existing programming or design and implement their own service project. The two-year fellowship provides a competitive salary, loan repayment assistance, and leadership training, among other benefits.
Whitney Braunstein, a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, will work with the Bronx Defenders to represent LGBTQ+ immigrants in New York City, advocating particularly for the rights of LGBTQ+ immigrants in immigration detention.
Gabriella Larios will work with the New York Civil Liberties Union to advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and for individuals seeking reproductive health care in New York, challenging ways in which religious interpretations may be used to discriminate against these populations. Larios was a former co-chair of the Women of Color Collective at NYU Law.
Clarence Okoh, former co-chair of the Black Allied Law Students Association at NYU Law, will partner with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to challenge discriminatory uses and impacts of artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies on communities of color and low-income communities.
Renee Schenkman will work with Lawyers for Children, an interdisciplinary advocacy organization that represents children in New York's foster care system. Schenkman will provide legal representation to address the needs of youth in residential treatment centers and the Administration for Children's Service's Children's Center.
Sam Tañafranca Osaki, a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar, will work with the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project to challenge practices known as "prison gerrymandering," in which incarcerations may be used to boost a region's federal representation and appropriations.
Posted May 21, 2020