By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Three members of the Class of 2024 have been selected for the Skadden Fellowship, a prestigious two-year program granted to outstanding young attorneys to fund public interest work.
Mariam Elbakr, Sophia Fenn, and Mia Stange are among 28 students and recent graduates to join the fellowship program, which was founded by the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom firm and is celebrating its 35th anniversary. More than 90% of the nearly 1,000 fellows are still working in the public interest sphere, including 20 judges and more than 100 legal academics.
In the public interest arena, a Skadden Fellowship carries the cachet of a Supreme Court clerkship or a Rhodes Scholarship. Applicants propose a project and need the support of a host organization to be considered.
Berkeley Law had the second-highest number of fellows in this class, coming in behind only Yale Law School. It’s another example of the school’s robust and growing pipeline for students interested in serving the public: Seven members of the 2023 graduating class landed coveted Equal Justice Works fellowships — a school record — and many other alumni work in the sector, from public defenders’ offices to legal aid to government and the military.
“I am delighted that three of our students have received prestigious Skadden Fellowships,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “This reflects the deep commitment to public interest by Berkeley Law and its students. Skadden Fellowships are a terrific way of launching students into careers of public service.”
The awards also highlight the efforts of the school’s Career Development Office (CDO), which offers wraparound support to students pursuing public interest work from the moment they enter the building as 1Ls.
“Mariam, Mia, and Sophia’s projects reflect Berkeley Law’s commitment to public service and social justice,” Assistant Dean of Career Development Eric Stern says. “It is inspiring to be able to already see how these three students will imminently use their degrees to do impactful work in the community using the legal tools they developed throughout their time in law school.
“We are so thrilled for them — and for all of our students who will be entering the legal community and applying their skills, knowledge, and experiences toward advancing the public interest.”
Mariam Elbakr
Elbakr will work with the Public Justice Foundation’s Debtors’ Prison Project to provide direct representation and impact litigation on behalf of indigent defendants and families harmed by the assessment of excessive public defender fees in Tennessee. She says she was shocked and outraged to hear about these fees during her first Policy Advocacy Clinic (PAC) seminar in her 2L year.
“I was just like, ‘What? What about the Sixth Amendment?’” she says. “It made absolutely no sense.”
PAC has made huge strides, in California and around the country, with campaigns to end such fees, particularly in the juvenile system. Elbakr says her PAC work was a formative part of her law school experience and credits the clinic’s faculty with “teaching me how to lawyer with intentionality and kindness.”
“I heard many stories of strained family relationships, grandparents giving up custody of their grandchildren to avoid debt, and youth being jailed for failure to pay,” she says. “My mentors at PAC taught me how to prioritize the needs of the people I am serving, how to build real and long lasting relationships with organizations and clients in the community I am serving, and how to have difficult conversations when needed.”
Elbakr’s undergraduate focus was psychology and women’s and gender studies, and she worked a variety of retail jobs to fund her studies. That time spent trying to talk to and understand other people served her well as a law student, she says, and informs her notion of what it means to be a good lawyer — caring for clients and standing by them through some of the most traumatic moments of their lives.
Public Justice is a “dream organization for me,” Elbakr adds, and the Debtors’ Prison Project is a perfect fit.
“As someone whose family has been in contact with the legal system at a time where we couldn’t afford to pay for counsel, I chose this project to try and even the playing field — because everyone deserves a zealous advocate, whether or not they can afford to pay,” she says. “I came to law school to improve access to justice. By working to eliminate public defender fees, I hope to make counsel more accessible and eliminate some of the debt that keeps families tethered to the criminal legal system.”
Sophia Fenn
Fenn will work with the New York Legal Assistance Group to represent underserved New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) tenants who face severe habitability issues caused by the agency’s systemic divestment and neglect. She came to Berkeley Law primarily for its clinics, particularly the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC).
“Berkeley has a rich history of radical and influential scholars and activists, and I found EBCLC to be a clear continuation of this legacy,” she says.
Her three semesters in the center’s Housing Law Clinic “has been one of the most profound learning experiences of my life,” she adds, and spurred her to apply for the Skadden Fellowship.
“I have worked with many clients who are navigating the public housing system and have learned from exceptional attorneys like Linda Yu, my long-term supervisor, how to push on these institutions to get real results for our clients,” Fenn says. “The entire team at EBCLC has taught me so much about what it means to be an effective and responsible advocate, and I hope to model my future work on the values and lessons they have instilled in me.”
Fenn’s experience showed her there’s not much legal aid capacity for housing litigation outside eviction defense. So while many tenants have landlords who are flouting the law, they have no support to challenge them and secure safe housing.
She says this is especially true for tenants in New York City public housing, because NYCHA tenants are specifically excluded from public funding that allows legal aid organizations to provide habitability-based legal services to low-income tenants. This reflects a continuation of the profound systemic racism in U.S. housing policy, Fenn adds, particularly in NYCHA buildings, where 90% of tenants are Black and Latinx.
Her project will leverage private funding to fill the gap in services and provide legal support to NYCHA tenants.
“I am excited to be able to continue working with clients on addressing community needs,” she says. “For me, advocacy is about ensuring my clients have the agency they deserve over their lives and homes, and I try to do that by taking over some of the work involved in pushing against these massive institutions, so my clients have more time and energy to devote to their own lives.”
Mia Stange
Stange’s host organization is the Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS), where she’ll offer direct representation in employment law and immigration matters with a focus on identifying and representing clients eligible for Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement (DALE), which offers protection from deportation and a work permit for certain noncitizen workers.
Stange, who earned a master’s degree in public health before going to law school, has seen in both sectors how immigration law embeds itself into every other system — regulating employment and access to benefits, multiplying the harms of criminalization, and justifying surveillance of families and communities.
Policy shifts in one system can expand access in another, and her multidisciplinary fellowship project aims to take advantage of one such shift. Stange’s project focuses on DALE, a new streamlined federal process which expands immigration protections for people facing unsafe or exploitative workplace conditions.
The need for expanded workplace and immigration protection is particularly acute in New York City, which has seen more than 100,000 asylum seekers arrive since spring 2022 — the vast majority of whom are not yet eligible for work authorization. Stange, who worked with asylum seekers in NYC for several years before law school, developed her project proposal through conversations with BDS lawyers, who had identified several potentially eligible clients in their immigration practice and anticipate seeing many more.
“For workers without employment authorization or who are in other precarious circumstances, a job is necessary for stability but can also be an avenue for discrimination, exploitation, and countless other risks,” she says. “For those who are further entangled in the criminal, family, and immigration legal systems, the stakes are even higher. Certain criminal convictions can bar people from accessing immigration relief and can put them at risk of deportation or removal.
“This fellowship will be a chance to work with coalitions, workers, and organizers to harness this new policy guidance at an immensely challenging time for the city’s new arrivals.”
As a law student, Stange has worked with clients through two of Berkeley Law’s 40 Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects — the Berkeley Immigration Group and California Asylum Representation Clinic — and the Ninth Circuit Practicum. She’s also interned with immigration legal service organizations and public defenders’ offices and studied with Professor Leti Volpp, who helped her better understand the complex linkage between immigration law and criminal law.
“I’m excited to work on this project, and look forward to learning from other fellows who are working across related topics and fields,” she says.
CDO Public Interest Attorney-Counselors Lucy Benz-Rogers and Deep Kaur Jodhka present programs for 1Ls in their first semester of law school to introduce them the full spectrum of public interest career opportunities, including project-based fellowships like Skadden.
Once the fellowship cycle is underway, Benz-Rogers and Jodhka work tirelessly to provide customized support and guidance to students and alumni pursuing a wide variety of public interest fellowships — advising them on finding the right fellowship host, providing feedback on their project proposals, connecting them to alumni who are former fellows for mentorship, and preparing them for their interviews.
“We are very proud that these three students will join the public interest legal community through their work as Skadden Fellows, and that they’ll continue to make a difference in the legal field, and in communities around the country,” Stern says.