Liman Program Awards Nine New Fellowships and Four Fellowship Extensions

The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program has awarded nine new fellowships and four fellowship extensions for 2012-2013, for a total of thirteen Fellows, the largest group of Yale Law graduates the program has supported since its inception in 1997.

The four current Liman Fellows who have received funding to extend their fellowships are as follows. The extensions are possible because each of the Fellows' host programs has provided matching funds.

Isabel Bussarakum works at The Defender Association in Seattle, Washington. She represents people in a special pilot program, diverting low-level drug and prostitution offenders to enable them to receive community-based services. In addition, she addresses their related civil problems, such as keeping their driver’s licenses and responding to requests for child support.

Daniel Mullkoff is at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he joins a group addressing the New York City Police Department’s “stop-and-frisk” practices. Dan is involved in representing class action plaintiffs challenging police stops near private apartment buildings. This project, aiming to reform profiling practices, has received a great deal of media attention.

Lindsay Nash, currently clerking for the Honorable Ellen Segal Huvelle of the District Court for the District of Columbia, will return to New York for a second fellowship year at the Cardozo Immigration Justice Clinic. During her first year, Lindsay helped to produce a report documenting immigrants’ need for lawyers. This year, she will represent noncitizens with criminal convictions and work to implement a pilot program assigning counsel to individuals facing deportation.

Diala Shamas continues her fellowship at Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), a project based at CUNY School of Law. Diala serves Muslim, Arab, South-Asian, and other communities in New York City that are affected by national security and counterterrorism law enforcement policies and practices. Diala joins a coalition to document the surveillance of Muslim communities and to respond to problems of profiling.

The four continuing Fellows join nine incoming Liman Fellows who, working in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, and New York, will deal with a range of problems, such as representing non-citizen defendants in criminal and immigration proceedings, enforcing state housing laws that protect low-income renters, and safeguarding the subsistence rights of indigenous Alaskans.

The nine new Fellows are Chesa Boudin, Forrest Dunbar, Romy Ganschow, Edward McCarthy, Yaman Salahi, Rebecca Scholtz, Sirine Shebaya, Olivia Sinaiko, and Jenny Zhao. Read more about them here.

Since its inception in 1997 and including the incoming group, the Liman Fellowship has appointed 86 Yale Law School graduates as Fellows and awarded summer fellowship to students at Barnard, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Spelman, and Yale.