The National Lawyers Guild Foundation and NLG National Office are excited to announce the recipient of the 2023 Leonard I. Weinglass Memorial Fellowship, Suad Abdel aziz!
Suad received her J.D. from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2023. She works to advocate for the rights of increasingly criminalized activists, human rights defenders and community organizers. While at Loyola, she served as the president of the National Lawyers Guild and provided direct representation of clients as a student practitioner within the Criminal Defense Clinic. She has worked with Palestine Legal to support activists for Palestinian liberation and with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Project South on issues surrounding surveillance, mass incarceration and corporate obligations under international human rights law. She devoted much of her time in law school to provide volunteer support for political prisoners unjustly targeted in the ongoing and nebulous “war on terror” as a legal researcher for the Coalition for Civil Freedoms.
As NLG Weinglass Fellow, Suad will be joining the Mass Defense Committee and Community Movement Builders to support community organizers and Forest Defenders facing state suppression for protesting the “Cop City” police militarization facility in Atlanta. Through supporting direct representation of activists, conducting research and open records requests as well as carrying out policy and advocacy initiatives, she hopes to the challenge the criminalization of protest and social movements.
Thanks to a generous bequest from the Weinglass estate, the NLG Foundation established a fellowship for recent law graduates. Each year, one fellow receives a stipend to work for the NLG on a specific civil rights or civil liberties project. Previous fellows have developed projects to assist with parole and sponsorship for LGBTQ+ migrants, reunite American citizen-children with undocumented parents who have been deported to their country of origin, support community bond funds, fight a new maximum security prison planned for construction on a former coal mining site, develop an environmental justice legal defense and action plan, create a Federal Repression Toolkit for NLG Chapters, and offer abolitionist legal support to jailhouse lawyers.
