The 2018 class of Skadden Fellows includes five NYU Law students: Mason Pesek ’18, Samantha Reiser ’18, Lindsey Smith ’18, Audrey-Marie Winn ’18, and Victoria Yee ’18. The two-year fellowship, established by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in 1988, provides a salary and benefits to graduating students who wish to pursue projects at public interest organizations. This year’s class includes 29 graduating law students and judicial clerks from 17 law schools. Quoted text below is from the Skadden Foundation website.
Mason Pesek, an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow, will use his fellowship to work at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, where he will establish workers’ rights clinics in two low-income Cleveland neighborhoods. At these clinics, he plans to represent clients on wage theft, overtime violations, and workplace safety issues, while also educating workers on “how to identify violations and how to speak to employers about working conditions.” Pesek has previously served as a Peggy Browning Fellow with the United Steelworkers and a Leadership for Educational Equity Fellow at the Ohio Department of Education.
Samantha Reiser, who is also an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow, will serve her fellowship at the Legal Action Center in New York, where she plans to represent clients and engage in policy advocacy to “combat the employment barriers and socioeconomic consequences facing low-income New Yorkers” with criminal records. She has previously interned at the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project and the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans. Prior to entering law school, she served as an associate in Human Rights Watch’s US Program.
Lindsey Smith, a Filomen M. D'Agostino Scholar for Women and Children within the Root-Tilden-Kern (RTK) program, will work at Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS). She previously worked at BDS as an Equal Justice America Fellow, learning how debt resulting from fees and fines in the criminal justice system can lead to arrest warrants or credit-destroying civil judgements. As a Skadden Fellow, Smith will represent indigent Brooklyn youth who are facing “economic instability and arrest due to criminal justice debt.”
Audrey-Marie Winn, a Filomen M. D'Agostino Scholar for Civil Rights, Civil Liberties, and Criminal Justice within the RTK program and executive editor of the NYU Law Review, will use her fellowship to work at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where she will represent workers in the New York City “app economy.” Winn is a two-time recipient of Peggy Browning Fellowships, first in 2016 with the United Steel Workers, and again in 2017 with the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Victoria Yee, a Sinsheimer Service Scholar within the RTK program, will work at the Wage Justice Center in Los Angeles. There, she will provide “legal services and community education to low-wage immigrant Chinese workers in the San Gabriel Valley, to recover their unpaid wages” and combat retaliation. Yee has previously interned with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles, Legal Aid at Work, and the ACLU of Orange County. While at NYU Law, Yee has served as a member of the Advanced Immigrant Rights Clinic.
Posted November 22, 2017