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Hello friends,
Thank you for being a part of Berkeley Law's Public Interest Scholars community. Launched in 2021 as Berkeley Law's full tuition scholarship for dedicated public interest students, we're now in our fourth year and supporting more scholars than ever. In May, our five original Public Interest Scholars graduated and are all heading off to impactful public interest jobs. Here at the law school, the program supports eleven incoming 1Ls, nine rising 2Ls, and ten rising 3Ls.
Our program continues to grow with your support and participation, and this past year was our biggest yet. We gained our first faculty mentor, Professor Jonathan Simon, who graciously befriended and mentored our students. We facilitated networking and community-building via monthly lunches and mixers, a happy hour with Berkeley Law's public interest staff and faculty, and a local attorney roundtable.
In March, we held our first Scholars Welcome Day for admitted BLOS (Berkeley Law Opportunity Scholars) and PI Scholars, capped off with a reception at the Bancroft Hotel. In April, two of our 3L scholars hosted a wildly successful symposium, Struggles Against Empire, co-sponsored by our program. And following the Public Interest and Pro Bono Graduation in May, we celebrated our graduating scholars and their families at East Bay Spice Co.
I invite you to continue reading below to learn about our talented and passionate scholars. Your continued support for these students and our program helps make public interest careers more accessible and attainable.
With gratitude,
Amanda Prasuhn
Director of Public Interest Financial Support
Berkeley Law
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Admitted BLOS and PI Scholars attend a Q&A with the Career Development Office. | |
Public Interest Scholars welcome the incoming 1Ls at a picnic in Willard Park. | |
Public Interest Scholars enjoy drinks and conversation with faculty mentor, Professor Simon. | |
Public Interest Scholars Amanda, Kevin, Jamilah, Nora, and Taylor celebrate their graduation. | |
Jamilah McMillan
Jamilah is heading to the Family Justice Law Center in New York with a Public Interest Fellowship. Of her 3L year, Jamilah most enjoyed her field placement in Cape Town, South Africa doing public interest legal work and hosting the Struggles Against Empire symposium with Taylor.
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Nora Ellmann
Nora is joining the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project in New York as an Equal Justice Works Fellow. She'll be doing abortion impact litigation.
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Kevin Steen
After taking the California Bar, Kevin will start as a Graduate Law Clerk at the Solano County Public Defender. Participating in and then leading PalTrek was one of Kevin's Berkeley Law highlights. He also cherishes his time participating in the California Asylum Representation Clinic and praised criminal law Professors Roth ("an incredible and dedicated instructor") and Simon ("an inspiring theorizer and thinker"). Kevin says, "by far the best part of school was forming tight bonds with my fellow PI law students. Such talented, compassionate, and driven people."
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Taylor Fox
Taylor will be working as a Law and Organizing Fellow with the Law and Political Economy Project, splitting time between New Haven and New York. They'll be working on creating a space for grassroots organizing as a practice and theory of transformative change within the legal academy. Taylor organized the Struggles Against Empire symposium with Jamilah.
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Amanda Young
Amanda is heading to the ACLU of Northern California in San Francisco as a Law-Policy Department Fellow. In her first year, she'll be working primarily with the Director of Appellate Advocacy on appellate litigation across ACLU. In her second year, she'll be placed on a specific issue team and focus on law and policy work.
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Public Interest Scholar Julianna Gay (top, second from left) poses with the La Alianza executive team. | |
Ayeza Bajwa
Ayeza is spending her 2L summer at the Santa Clara County Counsel on their Social Justice and Impact Litigation & Community Protection Teams supporting their policy and litigation efforts. The Social Justice and Impact Litigation team brings affirmative cases to advance social justice at the local, state, and national levels, focusing on wrongdoing that disproportionately impacts communities of color. The team’s current focuses are housing, mental health, and reproductive justice. The Community Protection team focuses on workers’ rights.
This past year, Ayeza worked part-time at Altshuler Berzon. She was also a Legal Research and Writing Tutor and the inaugural Public Interest Chair for WOCC+. Next year, Ayeza looks forward to joining the 9th Circuit Practicum.
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Julianna Gay
Julianna has been working at Goodwin's SF office with the litigation group. She's worked on a variety of corporate litigation projects and multiple pro bono assignments, including drafting an asylum brief and criminal defense work.
One of the highlights of her 2L year was interning with the East Bay Community Law Center's Youth Defender Clinic. There, she helped represent minors in delinquency and school expulsion matters. Julianna also served as Co-Chair of La Alianza Law Students of Latin American Descent. Next semester, she's looking forward to participating in Berkeley Law's UCDC program, interning with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
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Tiffaney Boyd
In her 2L year, Tiffaney was elected California Law Review Senior Online Editor. She also served as a Getting into Graduate School mentor with the Office for Graduate Diversity to encourage and prepare undergraduate students to select, apply, and enroll in law school. With the Berkeley Center for Consumer Protection and Economic Justice, she led a group of JD and LLM students to the State Capitol to build momentum for a fall course offering and expose students to legislative advocacy as a potent tool for advancing and safeguarding economic justice.
This summer, Tiffaney attended the American Constitution Society convention in Atlanta. The Convention brought together lawyers, law students, judges, scholars, activists, and policymakers to address urgent and challenging questions, like how the legal profession can advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. This fall, she'll extern with the US DOJ, Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Unit to protect civil rights in many areas, including for people with disabilities and youth in juvenile detention facilities.
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Peter Mason
Peter is spending his summer as a law clerk at Feinberg, Jackson, Worthman & Wasow LLP, a public interest employment and civil rights firm in Berkeley. He'll be supporting the firm's various work representing workers and labor unions.
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Leily Arzy
Leily is spending her summer as a Legal Intern at the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section. There, she's contributing to pattern or practice investigations into correctional and law enforcement agencies that violate civil rights.
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Public Interest Scholars Léo (left), and Samahria (right) celebrating their win at the Bales Mock Trial Competition. | |
Scholars Lande (left), Léo (second from R), and Samahria (R) at the Bales Mock Trial Competition, where Lande was a finalist. | |
Léo Mandani
Léo is a Legal Intern at the Federal Trade Commission, Western Region in Los Angeles. A highlight of their year was competing in and winning the Bales Trial Competition with fellow scholar Samahria.
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Lande Watson
Lande is spending this summer as a Certified Law Student Intern at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office. This past year, she was a finalist in the 1L Bales Mock Trial Competition.
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Ianna Zhu
Ianna is interning at the California Attorney General's Office in Oakland in the Healthcare Rights & Access Division. Of her 1L year, she treasures the impactful work she got to do right from the very beginning through the International Refugee Assistance Project, where she did intakes with refugees seeking family reunification. Ianna also participated in Congressional Advocacy Week and enjoyed partaking in trial advocacy through WOA oral argument.
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Samahria Alpern
Samahria is working as a Law Clerk at the Orleans Public Defenders in New Orleans. She's spending time in the Criminal Defense unit and the Child in Need of Care unit, where she advocates for parents at risk of losing their children in the dependency system.
A highlight of Samahria's 1L year was trying mock trial for the first time and winning the 1L Bales Mock Trial competition with fellow scholar Léo. Next year, she's looking forward to co-leading the Family Defense Project and externing at the Federal Public Defender in Oakland.
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Nick Delehanty
Nick is an Appellate Intern at the Office of the State Public Defender in Oakland. There, he's assisting in the direct appeals of people sentenced to death in California by doing legal research and reviewing trial transcripts.
Nick is a member of a three-person law student team as part of the Post-Conviction Advocacy Project. In this role, Nick represents someone serving a life sentence at San Quentin State Prison and meets with his client each month to discuss strategy for his upcoming parole hearing.
This fall, he's doing a field placement at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to combine his interests in criminal defense and emerging technology issues.
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Cindy Nguyen
Cindy is spending the summer as a Legal Intern at Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. She's working on environmental litigation with a focus on environmental justice projects in California.
Highlights of her 1L year include being selected as 1 of 10 Fellows for the California Lawyer's Association Environmental Law Section's Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship, and joining the Environmental Law Clinic, where she'll continue her work in the fall. She also worked with the Legal Aid Society of Hawai'i to provide pro bono immigration services as part of the Berkeley Law Alternative Service Trip to Hawai'i.
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Renee Hernandez Rodriguez
Renee was raised in the border cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, México. In 2020, she graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Humanities.
After graduating, Renee discovered her passion for advocacy at the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center where she helped defend immigrant survivors of domestic violence in El Paso. She later transitioned to working as a legal assistant at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona. For nearly four years, Renee helped advocate and provide legal representation for immigrant unaccompanied children seeking safety in the United States.
Renee is excited to use her law degree to continue defending and empowering immigrant children and engender broad change in immigration policies through impact litigation.
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Andrew Boardman
Andrew Boardman grew up in Rhode Island and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Rhode Island, where he immersed himself in research and policy advocacy.
Andrew’s work before law school focused on actualizing the potential of the U.S. tax system to deliver shared prosperity and economic security. As a Policy Analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington, D.C., Andrew published research and advised lawmakers and advocates. He previously served as a Research Assistant at the Urban Institute, a volunteer tax preparer for low-income families, and a fellow and American Rescue Plan Act policy consultant to the City of Providence, R.I.
At Berkeley Law, Andrew intends to deepen his understanding of legal and public policy pathways to a just economy.
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Alice Cheng
Alice Cheng grew up in the Bay Area, and graduated from Harvard College in 2020. For the past seven years, she has had the honor of working with brilliant, brave, compassionate, and hilarious young people in various capacities—as an afterschool counselor, summer program director and teacher, community advocate, and classroom teacher.
She brings prior experience as an educator, teaching 10th grade Humanities in Oakland and 8th grade Social Studies in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Additionally, she has been involved in uplifting the voices of multilingual learners and their families in SF Chinatown and doing education equity work with the Chinatown community in solidarity with other communities of color.
Alice hopes to continue to work towards education equity and racial justice. At Berkeley Law, she hopes to learn more about community and movement lawyering.
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Lauren Meadows
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lauren graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Indiana University in 2020.
After graduation, Lauren worked as a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. There, Lauren conducted research to inform international and domestic policymaking on democracy, conflict, and governance issues. She is especially proud of her work supporting the National Task Force on Election Crises during the 2020 election season. In 2021, Lauren joined the States United Democracy Center: a nonpartisan organization providing pro bono legal, communications, and research support to statewide election officials.
At Berkeley Law, Lauren hopes to continue her work at the nexus of law and political economy. She aims to use her degree to defend human rights and democratic norms in the face of ascendant authoritarianism, reform broken political institutions and processes, and strengthen the social contract by advancing ethical, transparent, and responsive government at all levels.
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Mahima Chaudhary
Mahima was born and raised in the D.C. metro area. She graduated from Georgetown University with a major in economics and minor in public health and discovered her interest in a legal career while studying abroad at the London School of Economics.
After graduating college, Mahima worked as a paralegal for two different law firms before landing her pre law school dream job at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado in Denver. There, she assisted attorneys in investigating and litigating constitutional rights violations across the state.
Mahima hopes to leverage her education at Berkeley Law to pursue a career in either international human rights or civil rights. She views a law degree as an invaluable tool to expand access to justice and shape a more equitable society.
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Apoorva Verghese
Apoorva was born in the UK before moving to the United States and growing up in Houston, Texas. She graduated summa cum laude from Tulane University in 2023 with a BS in Psychology and Linguistics and a minor in Spanish.
During her undergraduate years, Apoorva interned with the Orleans Public Defenders, the ACLU’s National Prison Project, and the Innocence Project New Orleans. After graduation, Apoorva volunteered as a naturalization tutor and worked with InReach, a tech nonprofit that compiles safe and affirming resources for queer individuals across North America.
Apoorva hopes to use her time at Berkeley Law to further her understanding of criminal systems, abolition, and the uses and limits of the law as a tool.
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Meghan Riddlespurger
Raised in Amarillo, Texas, Meghan attended Amarillo College and graduated summa cum laude from West Texas A&M University with a B.A. in Political Science. After earning her Master’s in City and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Arlington, Meghan’s focus shifted toward housing justice during her tenure as a city planner in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Relocating to the Bay Area in 2020, Meghan continued her advocacy as a city planner in San Carlos. There, she drafted a new Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) ordinance, helped reform development standards for multifamily projects, and improved building permit processes, making housing development more accessible. In 2023, she transitioned to a role with the State of California as a housing policy analyst with the Department of Housing and Community Development’s ADU Team, where she helped applicants navigate obstacles to building ADUs and collaborated with local jurisdictions to align their regulations with state housing laws.
Meghan intends to use her law degree to advance housing opportunities, especially in response to regulatory challenges and climate migration.
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Rose Strauss
Rose is a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Public Policy candidate at Berkeley Law and Goldman School of Public Policy. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a BA in Environmental Studies and a minor in Poverty, Inequality, and Social Justice in 2021.
Rose started 350 Bay Area’s youth chapter at 15 and later spearheaded initiatives with the Sunrise Movement, Future Coalition, and Project Super Bloom. Rose has worked as an analyst for the California Energy Commission, a graduate student researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Electricity Markets and Policy Group, and an intern at the White House Infrastructure Implementation Team focused on energy policy.
As a public policy and law student, Rose hopes to work at the intersection between policy and politics by making climate policy accessible to those who are not professionals and politicians.
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Ben Regas
Ben was born and raised in Berkeley, CA. He graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in Political Science and East Asian Studies
After college, Ben taught English in Yilan, Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar. He then returned to New York City and direct services, working in eviction defense and tenant organizing for three years as a paralegal in the Tenants’ Rights Unit of the New York Legal Assistance Group. Most recently, he served as the Community Organizer at the Waterfront Alliance, working to create accessible resources integrating climate change education with emergency preparedness.
Ben’s intersecting interests in urban policy, housing and environmental justice, city government, and direct services bring him to Berkeley Law.
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Perpetua Hilton
Perpetua (“Petra”) was born and spent her childhood in Kansas City, Kansas. She received a B.A. in Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, and moved to the Bay Area in 2011 to pursue an M.A. in Ethics and Social Theory at the Graduate Theological Union.
After Petra’s Master’s Degree, she began working at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco. Over her eight year tenure there, she rose from Clerical Assistant to Senior Paralegal. There, she worked on habeas corpus litigation for indigent clients imprisoned on California’s death row, most of whom were convicted multiple decades prior, and whose claims ranged from juror misconduct and intellectual disability to actual innocence.
Petra is primarily interested in criminal law, specifically trial and post-conviction advocacy. She is also interested in public advocacy for LGBTQ people, and criminal legal reform (especially on the topic of sex work decriminalization).
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Anna Tropiano
Anna is originally from Katonah, New York. In 2021, she graduated with highest distinction from the University of Michigan and the Residential College with a major in Political Science and minor in Writing.
After graduation, Anna moved to San Diego to work as a legal assistant at Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, a national employment discrimination and civil rights law firm. During her two years at the firm, Anna supported clients bringing claims of race, gender and pregnancy discrimination on pre-suit matters as well as several matters in litigation; most recently, Anna assisted the legal team during the Mattson v. Milliman, Inc. trial in the Western District of Washington which brought claims of fiduciary abuse against a consulting firm.
Anna plans to use her time at Berkeley Law to learn how to combat the criminalization of pregnancy and other reproductive injustices in the legal system.
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