NLG National Office Announces 2018 Haywood Burns Fellows

The NLG National Office is pleased to introduce our 2018 Haywood Burns Fellowship recipients! The Fellowship sponsors law students and legal workers spending the summer working for public interest organizations across the country in order to build their legal skills and strengthen their long-term commitment to social justice. This initial exposure to progressive 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 aspiring people’s lawyers to work on projects focusing on racial justice, immigrant justice, housing rights, economic justice, and prison law reform. Your contribution to this important fellowship will make all the difference for new legal practitioners to engage in social justice lawyering this summer and throughout their careers. Your financial support—which provided 100% of the project income in 2017—is essential to the program. Please make a donation today!

The 2018 Fellows:

Tyler Crawford is a Stein Public Interest Scholar at Fordham Law School. He will be a Haywood Burns fellow at Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, a civil legal aid organization based in Eastern Kentucky, where he will be defending the welfare rights of vulnerable clients and conducting legal clinics and outreach to rural communities.

Walter Anthony Jean-Jacques is a first-year law student at Notre Dame Law School. As a Haywood Burns Fellow, he will be a summer legal intern for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. in New York City working on Juvenile Justice and School Segregation issues.

Jilisa Milton is a JD/MSW candidate at the University of Alabama. She will be working at Equal Justice Initiative on appellate representation of indigent women and men on death row, advocacy on behalf of those sentenced to life without parole as juveniles, investigation of inhumane and abusive conditions in prisons, and research aimed at developing connections between America’s racist history and current issues in mass incarceration.

Anita Miralle De Asis aka Needa Bee is a long time businesswoman, artist, organizer, advocate, activist and educator. She will work with Meikeljohn Civil Liberties Institute to support and expand the institute’s work and the work of her organization The Village of ensuring landless people’s human and constitutional rights to adequate housing and the decriminalization of homelessness.

Denali Wilson is a first-year law student at the University of New Mexico. With the support of the fellowship, she will spend the summer providing legal support to immigrants detained at the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the Haywood Burns Fellowships for Social and Economic Justice. With your help, we will continue to honor and celebrate the life and work of renowned social justice lawyer and former NLG president Haywood Burns by supporting a new generation of people’s lawyers.

Support the next generation of people’s lawyers by donating now! www.nlg.org/donate/haywoodburns

Pictured (from left to right): 2018 Fellows Walter Anthony Jean-Jacques, Denali Wilson, Anita Mitalle De Asis, Tyler Crawford, and Jilisa Milton. 

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