Lily Braunstein
Lily Braunstein (she/her) was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2020 with majors in History and Government. During college, she interned with the ACLU of Southern California’s Jails Project, the Center for Prison Education, and the Los Angeles Department on Disability. After graduation, Lily moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where she worked with the Alaska Public Defender Agency’s Holistic Defense Project. There, she supported pre-trial indigent clients in accessing critical services, including substance use disorder treatment, housing, education, medical care, behavioral health counseling, and public benefits. While attending Berkeley Law, Lily interned with Bay Area Legal Aid, the East Bay Community Law Center, and The Legal Aid Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Project. She graduated in 2025 with Pro Bono Honors and earned certificates in Public Interest & Social Justice and Race and Law. Lily is committed to using her J.D. to support marginalized communities and to challenge systems of oppression. In her free time, she enjoys playing pickleball, trying new restaurants, and spending time with her cat, Fletcher.
Fellowship Organization: Solano County Public Defender’s Office
Work Area: Lily will be working with the Post-Conviction Unit, which assists incarcerated clients in petitioning for release or sentence reductions under recently enacted ameliorative statutes that include provisions for youthful offender consideration, felony murder resentencing, and other forms of relief.
Zoë Fisher
Zoë graduated from Berkeley Law in 2025 with pro bono honors and certificates in Race & Law and Public Interest & Social Justice. They also hold a bachelor’s degree in history with honors from Williams College. After serving with City Year AmeriCorps in East Harlem, New York, Zoë came to law school eager to defend youth and families from racist and classist government intervention. As a law student, they led the Family Defense Project, participated in the East Bay Community Law Center’s Education, Defense & Justice for Youth Clinic, and interned with Contra Costa Public Defender and Brooklyn Defender Services. Outside of work, Zoë loves drawing and painting, live music, and wandering around outdoors.
Fellowship Organization: Contra Costa Public Defender
Work Area: Zoë will be working in the Juvenile Unit, with a particular focus on detention hearings, holistic representation, and statewide policy efforts.
Taylor Fox
Taylor Fox is a lawyer working with the American Association of University Professors. Most recently, she worked as the Law and Organizing Fellow with the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale Law School. She graduated from UC Berkeley Law in 2024 with Pro Bono Honors. At Berkeley, her legal studies focused on providing movement and community lawyering support to groups challenging systems of policing and surveillance. She interned with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Center for Constitutional Rights, in addition to representing low-income consumers with the Consumer Justice Clinic of the East Bay Community Law Center.
Fellowship Organization: The American Association of University Professors
Work Area: Taylor’s project aims to expand the capacity of AAUP’s Legal Department to respond to the criminalization and surveillance of higher education. She will develop an intake hotline for educators with criminal and/or immigration law concerns related to the exercise of their First Amendment rights, while also assisting with AAUP’s affirmative litigation in these areas.
Steven Hensley
Incarcerated at 17 for five years, Steven Hensley emerged determined to reform the justice system. He embraced education, graduating at the top of his class from Fresno State and earning a Berkeley Law J.D. in 2025 with certificates in Race & Law and Public Interest & Social Justice. He received Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Award for Public Service and Pro Bono Honors with Highest Distinction (200+ pro bono hours). He mentored justice-involved youth through AmeriCorps and, as a certified law clerk in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, questioned officers on the stand, argued motions, and co-authored briefs that influenced charging policy. He also served a three-year term on the ACLU of Northern California’s Board of Directors, championing civil liberties. His journey from cellblock to courtroom ignites a rallying proof that reclaimed purpose can pry apart iron bars, inviting every silenced voice to step through and rebuild justice.
Work Area: As a Larsen Justice Fellow, he will partner with the Prosecutors Alliance of California to bring legal education into prisons, guide Proposition 36 implementation, convene a prosecutorial misconduct summit, and bolster prosecutorial accountability statewide.
Fellowship Organization: Prosecutors Alliance of California
Alyssa Meurer
Alyssa Meurer is a passionate prisoners’ rights attorney. She started her civil rights work in Wisconsin, working as a research intern at the FREE Campaign and a research assistant for a pilot study into family video visitation at Dane County Jail. Alyssa got her J.D. at Berkeley Law in 2024. While in law school, Alyssa advocated for the rights of system-impacted people through policy, organizing, and litigation at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Alyssa also supported impact litigation enforcing the rights of unhoused people and victims of discriminatory police brutality at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. She continued engaging in decriminalization and decarceration work at UnCommon Law.
After graduation, Alyssa got her license to practice law in Illinois. She joined Uptown People’s Law Center (UPLC) as a Larsen Justice Fellow in 2024. Since then, she’s created several self-help legal resources for incarcerated people and their families, updated UPLC’s guide for recruited attorneys to federal prisoners’ rights cases, and served as co-counsel in class action and individual lawsuits challenging unconstitutional conditions in the Illinois Department of Corrections. In the second year of her fellowship, Alyssa will be continuing her civil rights work at UPLC. Alyssa is excited to co-counsel on her first jury trial in January 2026 in a case challenging the deplorable conditions and lack of mental health treatment that a client faced at Stateville Correctional Center. Alyssa will continue as co-counsel in other individual cases challenging wrongful discipline, excessive force, retaliation, and other unconstitutional prison conditions. She will also continue her monitoring and enforcement work in Lippert v. Hughes, a statewide class action case challenging the unconstitutional medical and dental care in the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Sandhya Nadadur
Sandhya spent the first year of her Larsen fellowship representing detained and non-detained immigrants in deportation proceedings. Prior to law school, she worked as an immigrants’ rights organizer and immigration policy analyst. She is most interested in working with detained individuals and those caught at the intersection of the criminal and immigration systems.
Fellowship Organization: During the first year of her fellowship, Sandhya worked at Mission Action in San Francisco. She is grateful to now be able to extend her fellowship working for Berkeley Law’s Immigration Liberation Project.
Work Area: In the next part of her fellowship, Sandhya has the opportunity to help individuals in immigration detention challenge the constitutionality of their ongoing confinement through habeas petitions. Fighting one’s immigration case while detained is incredibly difficult: the conditions of confinement are cruel and inhumane; detention centers are deliberately located in remote, hard-to-access areas; and it is much harder for detained individuals to obtain representation. Moreover, Immigration Judges in detained courts have significantly lower grant rates than those in non-detained courts. Fighting deportation from the comfort and safety of one’s home and community can be the difference between removal to a country where one fears for their life and the ability to remain in the United States. She is grateful to be able to do this work at this moment, as the Trump administration rapidly expands its capacity to detain noncitizens in removal proceedings and attempts to remove people with little to no due process.
Sayaka Reed
Sayaka Reed (she/her) grew up in South Carolina. She graduated from Clemson University in 2020 with a major in BioElectrical Engineering before graduating from Berkeley Law in 2025. While in college, she worked at a patent law firm and initially came to law school resigned to continue on a corporate trajectory. While at Berkeley Law, Sayaka realized her STEM background could be used in many other areas outside of the patent sphere. After deeply contemplating her own values and the power accompanying a JD, she dedicated herself to using the rest of her time in law school to figure out how she could instead advocate for people harmed by corporations and the government. After participating for a year in the environmental law clinic, Sayaka spent a summer at a consumer protection class action plaintiff-side firm before working a judicial externship at the Northern District of California in San Francisco. There, she was confronted with the magnitude of injustices of the criminal system and the valiant work of the public defenders who advocated on their clients’ behalf. Sayaka spent the rest of her time in law school interning at the San Francisco Federal Public Defender’s Office and the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office and is excited to spend her career providing legal services to our nation’s most vulnerable and underserved people. In her free time, Sayaka enjoys embroidering, reading, hiking, and spending time with animals.
Fellowship Organization: Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office
Work Area: Sayaka will be working as a forensic specialist in the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office to focus on challenging the use of junk science in courtrooms.
Hadley Rood
Hadley is originally from the Sacramento area with an undergraduate degree in history from UC Davis. She graduated from UC Berkeley School of Law in 2022, with a Public Interest and Social Justice Certificate and pro bono honors with highest distinction. During and after law school, Hadley has worked for various organizations focused on housing justice and the decriminalization of poverty, specifically the decriminalization of homelessness. Hadley was a Berkeley Law Public Interest Fellow at Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she helped develop and litigate the Coalition on Homelessness v. San Francisco case challenging San Francisco’s practices during encampment sweeps. Most recently, she has worked as a staff attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid, practicing eviction defense and serving as co-chair of BayLegal’s Homelessness Task Force. Outside of lawyering, Hadley enjoys making art and music and visiting every independent bookstore she can.
Fellowship Organization: BraunHagey & Borden, LLP
Work Area/Project: Impact litigation in various issue areas, including prisoners’ rights and criminal legal reform.
Issac Price-Slade
Isaac received his J.D. from Berkeley Law in 2025. He also holds a B.A. in music with departmental honors from Wesleyan University and is a graduate of Deep Springs College. Before law school, Isaac served with the AmeriCorps Legal Advocates of Massachusetts, spending his service year working with Community Legal Aid’s eviction defense unit. During law school, Isaac completed internships with the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office and the East Bay Community Law Center. He also spent a transformative year as a student in Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic. Outside of work, Isaac enjoys playing music with friends and thrifting for old electronics.
Fellowship Organization: Phillips Black
Work Area: At Phillips Black, Isaac will join teams representing clients in state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus proceedings. His work will support Phillips Black’s mission to provide the strongest possible representation to individuals sentenced to death and other extreme punishments.
Ben Wise
Ben grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and was inspired to pursue public service by his parents, both Atlanta area school teachers. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Dallas with dual degrees in public affairs and visual and performing arts. At Berkeley Law he graduated with pro bono honors with highest distinction, leading the Kentucky BLAST and participating in the Queer Justice Project. Ben served as Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law and Executive Editor for the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. Their legal experience includes advocating for students facing school discipline with the Education Justice Clinic and researching educator certification with Columbia Law School’s Center for Public Research and Leadership. In law school, Ben also sang in the UC Berkeley and Columbia chamber choirs and performed principal roles in two operas. For fun, he enjoys playing in his local queer volleyball league.
Fellowship Organization: Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office
Work Area: Criminal trials and probable cause hearings, with a focus on juvenile justice reform.