Schell Center Announces 2025-26 Postgraduate Fellows in Human Rights

The Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights⁴ has announced that five Yale Law students will receive Robert L. Bernstein Fellowships in International Human Rights and Robina International Human Rights Fellowships for the 2025–26 academic year.

Both fellowships fund full-time human rights work for recent graduates of Yale Law School. The Bernstein Fellowship supports a year of full-time work in human rights advocacy. The Robina Fellowship also funds full-time human rights work, particularly at international or foreign courts and tribunals and intergovernmental human rights agencies.

Read about this cohort of fellows and their projects.

Ebelechukwu “Ebele” Eseka ’25

Ebele Eseka will spend her Robina Fellowship year at the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa. She will clerk for Justice Steven Majiedt. Eseka’s primary responsibility as a foreign law clerk will be to assist her judge with research, writing, and all preparation necessary for hearings and court opinions. This clerkship will deepen her understanding of human rights advocacy through active engagement with constitutional challenges and invaluable insights into the functioning of the nation’s apex court. Eseka said she is particularly excited to witness how constitutional jurisprudence can advance human rights domestically and shape state accountability. Overall, she said, this experience would also enhance her ability to analyze and apply the law from a broader, comparative perspective, enriching her professional practice upon returning to the United States, where she hopes to pursue a career at the intersection of migration, postcoloniality, and international law.

The prospect of spending a year in South Africa — immersing herself in its rich culture and engaging with diverse legal systems and judicial approaches — holds profound significance to Eseka as a Ghanaian-Nigerian immigrant, according to Eseka. The work represents a unique opportunity to reconnect with the continent’s legacy of resilience and justice.

At Yale Law School, Eseka has dedicated her coursework and extracurricular engagements to advancing international law, immigration, and international human rights. She was a member of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, the Immigrant Justice Project, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. Eseka was also the Schell Center for International Human Rights Student Director, a Submissions and Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law, and a Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Oralist. Eseka has spent her summers engaging with public and private international law and human rights pro bono work. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara

Dylan Farrell-Bryan ’25 

Dylan Farrell-Bryan will spend her Bernstein Fellowship year working with Human Rights First’s Refugee Protection program, where she will conduct research on the consequences of the rapidly evolving immigration law and policy and represent asylum-seekers in their legal claims. Human Rights First advances the rights of asylum-seekers through research, policy advocacy, direct representation, and impact litigation.  
At Yale Law School, Farrell-Bryan has been a member of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC), where she represented clients in labor and immigration matters in federal court, and the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New Haven Legal Assistance, where she advocated for detained clients in immigration court. She has also worked with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project (IRP), the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and Justice at Work, supporting litigation and advocacy on behalf of immigrant workers. 

Before law school, Farrell-Bryan earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she focused on the immigration enforcement bureaucracy in the United States. Her dissertation, “Bureaucracies of Removal: The Labor and Logics of Immigration Courts,” draws on in-depth interviews with immigration judges, ICE prosecutors, and removal defense attorneys to better understand the relationship between federal employee working conditions and the substantive outcomes of removal adjudication. Farrell-Bryan’s prior work has been published in Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Health Affairs, and Socius.

Philsan “Philly” Isaak ’25

Philly Isaak will spend her Bernstein fellowship at the Center for Justice and Accountability supporting investigations and domestic litigations that seek to advance accountability for victims of torture and extrajudicial killing globally. There, she will assist with legal research, motion drafting, evidence analysis, witness preparation, interviews, and other pre-trial, trial, and investigative work. With this fellowship, Isaak hopes to gain greater insight into the inner workings of domestic human rights litigation, and how it can support global movements, regime changes, and justice efforts. Additionally, working on both investigation and litigation matters will help Isaak understand how the various building blocks of human rights advocacy complement one another.

While at the Law School, Isaak’s work has been dedicated to understanding, leveraging, and improving the international human rights framework. As a member of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, she supported the mandate of the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls. In this role, she assisted in drafting reports and policy papers and communicating with member states to intervene in human rights violations. She has also worked with civil society organizations and activists on projects related to women and girls’ rights, state accountability, treaty drafting, free expression, and other issues. Isaak was also a member of the International Refugee Assistance Clinic, where she was able to assist in representing Afghan and Iraqi nationals seeking Special Immigrant Visas. 

Also at Yale Law School, Isaak has acted as the managing editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, and as a student director of the Schell Center for International Human Rights and Lowenstein Human Rights Project.

Isaak is interested in exploring how domestic legal and policy tools may be used to advance and protect the human rights of people globally, especially in a time when international law is being constantly questioned and undermined. She is particularly interested in questions of state sovereignty and transitional justice, and how they impact the realization of individual rights. Isaak holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, with minors in Business Law and the Sociology of Law, Criminology, and Justice.

Samira Mathias ’25 LLM

Samira Mathias will spend her Robina Fellowship year in Strasbourg, France, clerking at the European Court of Human Rights and working with the Directorate of the Jurisconsult. Mathias’s interests lie in international law, human rights law, and moral, legal, and political philosophy. At Yale, she has focused her research and classes on topics in these areas. She is also a student member of Yale’s International Refugee Assistance Project clinic, has served as an Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law, and the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and has represented Yale at the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program. 

Mathias earned her previous law degrees at the University of Oxford (BCL, 2021), and Gujarat National Law University (BA LLB, 2020). Before coming to Yale, she lectured in international law, international relations, and domestic legal subjects at Jindal Global Law School, and has previously worked at a full-service Indian law firm. In 2021, she was a Bonavero Human Rights Fellow at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. While in law school, Mathias interned at the United Nations International Law Commission and the Asian African Legal Consultative Organization. She also mooted extensively, winning prizes at the Oxford Price Media Law Moot, the Jessup International Law Moot, the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law Moot, and the Henry Dunant International Humanitarian Law Moot Court competitions.

Emma Schroer ’25

Emma Schroer will spend her Bernstein Fellowship year with Corporate Accountability Lab, a nonprofit committed to identifying creative legal mechanisms to provide accountability to victims of corporate abuse. Schroer will work to redress the harms that West African cocoa farmers have faced as a result of climate change driven by major corporate climate contributors.

At Yale, Schroer was a member of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Right Clinic and the Veterans Legal Services Clinic. She was also an Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law and an Academic Chair for Outlaws. Schroer is committed to holding powerful actors accountable through both direct services and impact litigation, and she spent her summers at the Office of the Federal Defenders for the District of Connecticut and the ACLU National Security Project. Prior to law school, Schroer worked in the finance department at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes data on global political violence and protest.