The National Lawyers Guild Foundation and NLG National Office are excited to announce the recipient of the 2024 Leonard I. Weinglass Memorial Fellowship, Rachel Marandett!
A 2024 J.D. graduate from NYU School of Law and former NYU-NLG Board Member, Rachel is committed to advocating for peoples self-determination, supporting global liberation movements, dismantling Western imperialism, and fighting for Indigenous rights. Rachel has been involved in Palestine solidarity organizing and legal advocacy for many years, working with grassroots, Palestinian-led organizations to build mass support and pursue international legal strategies for Palestinian liberation.
During her time at NYU Law, Rachel conducted extensive research on the self-determination of Indigenous juridical systems with Professor Margaret Satterthwaite, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. She held internships at the ACLU of Southern California, working on issues of abusive government policing and national security tactics; the Center for Constitutional Rights, focusing on litigation strategies for war crime accountability and Palestine solidarity; and the Global Climate Legal Defense Network, defending frontline environmental and human rights defenders.
Through her NYU Law coursework, research and teaching assistant positions, and a fellowship with the Institute for International Law and Justice, Rachel has developed an international law research agenda focused on peoples movements for self-determination and collective liberation from the imperial structures that define the global legal regime. She intends to continue developing this work in pursuit of a career in international legal academia.
As the 2024 Weinglass Fellow, Rachel will work with the NLG International Committee to build out the work begun at the 2023 International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism. Through its hearings and testimony gathering, the People’s Tribunal was a critical first step toward building legal, political, and movement-driven advocacy that centers and amplifies the voices of peoples across the globe harmed by U.S. sanctions, coercive measures, and other forms of contemporary imperial violence. In collaboration with the International Committee, Rachel will develop and implement a post-Tribunal campaign and movement strategy along three axes: legal action, political education, and mass organizing. By utilizing this trifold approach, Rachel hopes to help actualize the People’s Tribunal’s objectives of creating living testimony that serves as a concrete, public-facing platform for further action toward building a world without imperialism.
