The NLG National Office is thrilled to introduce our 2022 Haywood Burns Fellowship recipients! The Fellowships sponsor law students and legal workers to spend the summer working for public interest organizations across the country in order to build their legal skills, strengthen their long-term commitment to social justice, and provide much-needed legal support to under-served communities. This initial exposure to movement lawyering is often the single most significant event that influences a person’s decision to become a people’s lawyer.
This year we will send five fellows to work on projects focusing on environmental struggles, immigrant justice, food justice, representing social movements, and abolitionist criminal defense. Our fellows will be working at the law firms of movement lawyers and with social justice organizations including Honor the Earth, the Public Justice Food Project, and the Staten Island Legal Services Immigration Unit.
Your contribution to this important fellowship will make all the difference for new legal practitioners to engage in movement lawyering this summer and throughout their careers. Your financial support—which provides 100% of the project income—is essential to the program. Please make a donation today!
2022 Haywood Burns Fellows
Arabella Colombier is a student at Columbia Law School and a member of NLG’s CLS chapter, NLG-LA, and NLG-International Committee. Before law school, Arabella studied philosophy at McGill University, where she served as a board member of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group and worked as a program coordinator for public education and community engagement event series. At Columbia, Arabella has explored her interests in justice, care, and liberation as a student attorney in the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and Abolition Practicum, an intern at Movement Law Lab and the COVID-19 Eviction Moratorium and Housing Policy Project, and a staff editor for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (HRLR) and A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual. As a research assistant for the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Arabella worked on Thunderhawk v. County of Morton, a class action about constitutional violations by law enforcement during the NoDAPL movement. She currently interns at the Center for Constitutional Rights, volunteers as an articles editor for HRLR, and organizes support in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders resisting the Coastal GasLink pipeline. She is grateful to receive the Haywood Burns Fellowship to support her internship at Honor the Earth, where she will assist with its Water Is Life campaigns.
Jamie Marsicano is a 1L at University of North Carolina School of Law. Jamie is a queer and trans organizer from Charlotte, NC. Before coming to law school, Jamie worked with mutual aid collective Charlotte Uprising to start a grassroots community bail fund that raises money to bail people out of jail and support them through court, regardless of charge. Jamie believes that no one should be in a cage, and dreams of a world where we can prevent and respond to harm in our communities without relying on prisons or police. Jamie plans to use a law degree to do criminal defense in NC. As a Haywood Burns fellow, Jamie will be working at the Law Office of Habekah B. Cannon, an explicitly abolitionist, public interest criminal defense firm. The goal is to be a movement lawyer, and this summer Jamie is lucky enough to support and learn from one of the best.
Eli Massey is a 1L at DePaul University. He sits on the board of the Chicago National Lawyers Guild chapter and is also involved with the DePaul NLG. Before beginning law school, Eli worked as a freelance journalist, researcher, and editor at the socialist magazine Current Affairs. Much of his work focused on the Middle East, terrorism, and the criminal punishment system. As a Haywood Burns fellow, Eli will spend his summer working for radical criminal defense attorney Stanley Cohen, whose past clients include Occupy Wall Street protesters, members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, East Village squatters, the Mohawk Warrior Society, ACT UP, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRA.
Jessica Olave is a first generation college student, the daughter of Colombian immigrants, and a 2L at Lewis & Clark Law School. During her undergraduate studies, Jessica worked on mayoral and congressional campaigns for Latinx candidates throughout Southern California. Before starting law school, Jessica volunteered on organic farms in New Zealand through WWOOF and as a site gardener at the Center for Environmental Research and Strategies in Melbourne, Australia. She then served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, collaborating with local farmers on developing sustainable agriculture practices. During law school, Jessica has been active in the Latinx Law Society, the Immigration Student Group, Women in Criminal Law, the Public Interest Law Project, the NLG expungement project, and the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic. Jessica is a former fellow with Equal Justice Works Rural Summer Legal Corps, where she worked as the law clerk for Legal Aid of Oregon’s Farmworker Program. In this role, she worked extensively with migrant and seasonal farmworkers challenging discrimination in the workplace and advocating for their communities. Jessica is passionate about climate justice and amplifying the voices of the Latinx community. She is focusing on environmental law and immigration in order to advocate for climate migrants throughout her legal career. As a Haywood Burns Fellow, Jessica will be working with the Public Justice Food Project, using targeted litigation to support the larger “good food” movement and redress the structural and institutional inequities upon which the current food system is built.
Noor Zara Sheikh is a 2L student and graduate fellow at the City University of New York School of Law (CUNY Law). Noor is passionate about immigration law reform and aspires to be a movement and social justice lawyer for her community. At CUNY Law, Noor is a volunteer student attorney with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Clinic. She is also an active member of her law school, serving as a Student Government representative, Law Review staff editor, Race and Social Justice Orientation e-board member, South Asian Law Students Association e-board member, and Research Assistant for Professor Ramzi Kassem. Currently, Noor is a legal intern with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project. Last summer, Noor worked as a legal intern with the Vera Detained Minors program at The Door’s Legal Services Center, serving minors seeking asylum in the United States. Before law school, Noor worked as a case manager for survivors of intimate partner violence with the Arab American Family Support Center and Family Justice Centers. Noor completed her undergraduate studies in Psychology and Human Rights at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College. At the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, Noor completed her Human Rights honors thesis on the “Foreign Aid Industrial Complex.” Noor was born in Lahore, Pakistan and raised on Staten Island, New York. As a Haywood Burns Fellow, Noor will intern on Staten Island, New York with the Staten Island Legal Services’ (SILS) Immigration Unit to serve immigrant communities on the island and support SILS’s impact litigation work.
