NLG Leonard I. Weinglass Memorial Fellowship
Application Instructions
Leonard I. Weinglass
(1933-2011) was a criminal defense attorney and constitutional law advocate. Over the course of his career, he represented political activists, government opponents, and criminal defendants— including Angela Davis, the Cuban Five, the Chicago Seven, the Pentagon Papers defendants, and the death row appeals of Mumia Abu-Jamal—in a half century of politically significant cases. He was a longtime Guild member and served as Chair of the NLG International Committee.
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, support imprisoned jailhouse lawyers, create a Federal Repression Toolkit, and supporting defendants in the movement to Stop Cop City.
Eligibility
The Weinglass Fellowship is open to all NLG members who have graduated from law school in the past five years. Applicants must be current in their NLG dues.* Applicants must develop a project with the sponsorship of an NLG entity, which includes NLG Chapters/Regions, Committees/Projects,** and the NLG National Office. The sponsoring entity agrees to collaborate with the fellow to create a project and to offer (or assist to help locate) a working space for the Fellow over the course of their project.
Award
One Fellow is chosen annually and receives a $4,250 award to work on a 10-week project that is in line with the mission of the NLG and the career of Leonard Weinglass. The Fellow will also receive free registration for one year to the NLG Law4thePeople Convention and will be highlighted on the Guild website, social media sites, and Guild Notes.
Application
To apply for the NLG Leonard I. Weinglass Memorial Fellowship, email the following materials to Director of Research and Education Traci Yoder at traci@nlg.org by Monday May 4, 2026:
- Cover letter describing your previous experience and reasons you are applying
- Current resume (no more than 3 pages)
- Essay between 1,000-1,500 words describing your proposed project
- Contact information for two references
- Letter from the NLG entity who will be sponsoring your project
Selection and Notification
The selection committee will review the applications with an eye toward projects that meet the fellowship criteria, address a relevant and timely issue, and further the NLG’s mission of people’s lawyering and placing human rights and ecosystems over property interests. The fellowship recipient will be notified in May.
*To join or renew, go to nlg.org/join. If you are unsure of your membership status, please email NLG Director of Membership Lisa Drapkin at membership@nlg.org.
**NLG Projects include the National Police Accountability Project, the National Immigration Project, and the Sugar Law Center.
2026 Weinglass Fellow: Coya Leopold
Coya Leopold received their JD from DePaul Law School in 2024. After becoming barred in Illinois in 2025, Coya relocated to northern Wisconsin where they do environmental justice work and is hoping to be admitted to the bar in the state of Wisconsin in summer of 2026.
Sponsored by the NLG Environmental Justice Committee, Coya will be helping build out a Line 5 legal support collective. The objective of the collective is two fold: 1) to provide legal support for criminal defendants whose arrests are related to resisting the Line 5 re-route pipeline and other environmental extraction industry in the Chequamegon Bay Area, and 2) to build a team of environmental and public trust doctrine attorneys to file a variety of civil suits that will make it harder for oil to ever flow through the Line 5 re-route pipeline.
2025 Weinglass Fellow: Youssef Aziz
Youssef Aziz is a graduating law student at NYU School of Law, where he focused on international law, movement lawyering, and legal resistance to state and corporate violence. Born and raised in Egypt, he came to the U.S. after the Arab Spring, an experience that shaped his commitment to legal struggles grounded in community power, decoloniality, and internationalist solidarity. He has worked with the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, the African Society of International Law, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. As a student in NYU’s Constitutional Litigation Clinic, Youssef supported direct examination and legal research in Al Shimari v. CACI, where Iraqi plaintiffs held a U.S. military contractor accountable for torture at Abu Ghraib. He has also contributed to legal advocacy at CCR, challenging U.S. complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As a Weinglass Fellow, Youssef will partner with the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to support activists facing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) brought by multinational mining companies. His work will combine litigation support, comparative legal research, and political education in collaboration with the NLG’s Mass Defense and International Committees. Drawing on South Africa’s recent Constitutional Court rulings on SLAPPs, the project aims to strengthen legal and organizing tools against corporate retaliation, while building cross-border solidarity between movements in Southern Africa and the U.S. This work reflects Youssef’s long-term commitment to supporting Third World legal struggles, resisting legal repression, and building people-centered legal infrastructure across borders.2024 Weinglass Fellow: 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 front-line 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.
2023 Weinglass Fellow: 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 joined 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.
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2022 Weinglass Fellow: Maggie Bott
Maggie graduated from the IU Maurer School of Law in May 2022. During her time at Maurer, she served as the Student Director of the Incarcerated Individuals Legal Assistance Project, the president of the Public Interest Law Foundation, and the Access to Justice Pro Bono Fellow. Maggie was involved in reviving the school’s NLG student chapter her 2L year, then she served as the Committee Chair for the Mass Incarceration Committee her 3L year. As Committee Chair, she worked closely with the Prison Legal Support Network to organize a speaker series with Indiana prisoners. After she passes the bar, Maggie will work as a public defender in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As a Weinglass Fellow, Maggie collaborated with the Prison Legal Support Network (PLSN), an initiative created by the Indiana Department of Corrections Watch (IDOC Watch), a grassroots abolitionist group in Indiana, and the NLG Indiana chapter. PLSN supports, trains, and coordinates imprisoned jailhouse lawyers and pro se litigants in their legal struggles for freedom. PLSN employs a two-pronged, inside/outside model that involves people in the legal community on both sides of the prison walls to effectively support and advocate for pro se litigants pursuing sentence modifications, clemency, parole, and post-conviction relief. The mission of PLSN goes further than supporting prisoners with the legal work; PLSN centers community outreach and advocacy to dismantle the prison industrial complex. The work extends beyond the individual and seeks to create a future without prisons.
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2021 Weinglass Fellow: Z Williams
Z (they/them) is a recent graduate of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Prior to law school, Z spent 20 years as a grassroots organizer working at the intersection of racial, gender, disability, and economic justice. They have operated legal hotlines, done solidarity work with political prisoners, and supported activists facing criminal charges for their resistance efforts.They are an active organizer with the Colorado chapter of the NLG and served as Southwest Regional Representative on the NLG National Executive Committee. Z is a working parent to four small children. As a Weinglass Fellow, Z collaborated with the NLG Federal Repression Task Force to develop a Federal Repression Toolkit for NLG Chapters. The toolkit will be a resource for Guild members and will include popular education-based content on the history and threat of federal repression, frameworks for Guild chapters to disseminate information about federal repression including know your rights and movement security, and tools for lawyers and legal workers to identify, track, and challenge repression efforts.
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2020 Weinglass Fellow: Zsea Bowmani
Zsea is a civil rights attorney and legal scholar with a focus on race, gender, human rights, environmental justice. He received his B.A. in History from Stanford University and his J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law with certificates in Public Interest and Social Justice Law and Public International Law. While at Santa Clara Law, Zsea was very active in street law programs and progressive lawyering, serving as Co-Vice President of the school’s NLG chapter, teaching underserved students through the Marshall Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, and hosting a multi-day symposium on environmental law and human rights as Senior Symposium Editor of the Journal of International Law. After graduation, Zsea worked as a Policy Fellow at the National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington DC on campaigns to stop anti-transgender legislation and expand access to health care. The following year he fought against the policing, criminalization, and discrimination of transgender people at the ACLU of Illinois. Zsea’s most recent research, sponsored in part by a Hackworth Grant from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, explores the distinct approaches of the US and Cuba towards the climate crisis and the impact the decades-old embargo has had on progress and meaningful change. Zsea has been honored with multiple awards for his activism, including the Charles Houston Bar Association Scholarship, Asian Pacific American Bar Association-Silicon Valley and Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom Scholarship, and Pro Bono Recognition Award for over 50 hours of community service each year. He is also an award-winning scholar and has published in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. Zsea currently serves on the Board of the National Trans Bar Association and is a member of the Environmental Justice and Common Good Initiative at Santa Clara University. As a Weinglass Fellow, Zsea developed an environmental justice legal defense and action plan with the NLG San Francisco/Bay Area Chapter and the community group Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice.
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2019 Weinglass Fellow: Michael Galvan
Michael received his JD from Lewis & Clark Law School in 2017 and currently serves as co-chair of the NLG Queer Caucus. After passing the CA Bar exam in November 2017, Michael relocated to Tijuana, B.C., where he currently lives, works, and volunteers with Al Otro Lado connecting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to legal services and humanitarian aid. As the recipient of the 2019 Fellowship, Michael will be establishing an important part of a comprehensive LGBTQ+ Border Rights Project, working on parole and sponsorship for LGBTQ+ migrants. With the support of the NLG International Committee, he relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work with the Santa Fe Dreamer’s Project to provide post prison release support for transgender women seeking asylum as well as to their sponsors. The goal will be to build off of the work started by SFDP to expand its training of volunteers, to vet potential parole sponsors, enlarge the pool of trans competent and trauma informed sponsors who can then be matched to the right woman seeking asylum. This project will be undertaken with best practices in mind while improving coordination with both legal and nonlegal nonprofits and grassroots organizers nationwide, so that others can build in-house networks and streamline the vetting of sponsors for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, all with the aim of shortening the duration of detention for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers.
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2018 Weinglass Fellow: Micheli Quadros
Micheli is a motivated litigator with tenacious commitment to achieving justice and the best possible solution for her clients. Her practice areas include immigration, personal injury, employment law and criminal defense. A native of Brazil, Micheli is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Micheli earned her Bachelors Degree in Political Science with an emphasis on law and society at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). After earning her Bachelors Degree, she pursued a Master’s of Public Administration (MPA) – Public Sector Management and Leadership. At CSUN, she was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jenniellen Ferguson Award for outstanding achievement in Political Science, the Lonnie S. Turner award, and the Department Award for Academic Excellence. At Loyola Law School, Micheli served as staff editor of the International and Comparative Law Review. She was also an oral advocate in the Inter-American Human Rights Moot Court Competition, a trilingual (English, Portuguese, and Spanish) competition where she received the award for best English brief. Additionally, she was chosen as one of three best advocates from all participating American law schools. Micheli is recognized as a published author and was most recently published in the Santa Clara Journal of International Law for “Secession: The Contradicting Provisions of the United Nations Charter – A Direct Threat to the Current World Order.” As the 2018 NLG Weinglass Fellow, Micheli worked with Angelenos Reunited, a project dedicated to reuniting American citizen-children from Los Angeles County with undocumented parents who have been deported to their country of origin. Additionally, Micheli will be conducting free weekly seminars to immigrants as well as low-cost legal assistance to deported parents seeking to reunite with their children.
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2017 Weinglass Fellow: Emily Posner
Emily received her J.D. from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2013. While at Loyola, she was awarded the 2013 Public Service Award from the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center and the 2010 Roger Baldwin Award from the Maine Civil Liberties Union. For two years, she worked as the Policy and Legislative Counsel for the Recirculating Farms Coalition in New Orleans. At RFC, Emily coordinated various policy initiatives related to agriculture and fishery issues. Her current practice provides high-level criminal defense, civil rights, and environmental justice services. As a NLG Weinglass Fellow, Emily joined the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons and the Abolitionist Law Center to work on a strategic campaign to exhaust federal inmate’s administrative remedies in an effort to challenge the Bureau of Prison’s proposal to build a new maximum security prison on a former coal mining site in Letcher County, Kentucky. Emily will coordinate an effort to engage federal inmates in opposing this prison, and provide tools and resources so they can file complaints about the project through BOP’s administrative remedies program. She will be drafting a model administrative complaint, creating an online database of complaints, and tracking them through the administrative process.
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2016 Weinglass Fellow: Max Suchan
Chicago NLG member Max Suchan received the first annual NLG Weinglass Fellowship to work full time for the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF). This grant, named after renowned criminal defense attorney and constitutional law advocate Leonard Weinglass and made possible from a generous bequest from his estate, allowed CCBF to triple its volunteer capacity during that period in order to pursue the organization’s goal to eliminate monetary bond in Illinois and challenge pretrial detention more broadly. CCBF also maintains a revolving fund to post bond for people locked in Cook County Jail while awaiting trial. To date, the organization has freed 41 people from jail or house arrest, posting more than $200,000 in funds the group has received almost exclusively from grassroots donors. Until Max became a Weinglass Fellow, CCBF remained an all-volunteer collective since it was founded in August 2015. The Fellowship enabled Max to spearhead efforts to organize a mass volunteer orientation training in September where 44 people were trained to work in CCBF’s post-bond support, fundraising, and education and advocacy committees. This new influx of energy has allowed the organization to triple its capacity at a critical juncture when work to end the use of monetary bond in Chicago is at an all-time high. On October 14, a group of law firms, including Chicago’s MacArthur Justice Center, filed a lawsuit against municipal and criminal division judges making local bond decisions as well as the Cook County Sherriff. The lawsuit challenges the detention of people due to their inability to afford bond as a violation of Equal Protection under the US Constitution. CCBF referred plaintiffs to the lawyers and posted bond for one plaintiff this week after the lawsuit was filed. Additionally, CCBF helped spearhead efforts to bring the lawsuit attorneys, policymakers, and community organizations and activists together in coalition to pursue a myriad of legal, legislative, and grassroots organizing strategies to end money bond and challenge pretrial detention.
Through this coalition work, Max utilized the Weinglass Fellowship to conduct press trainings with people CCBF bonded out, ensuring that those most directly impacted by pretrial detention are centered whenever possible at a time when local and national media coverage of bond funds has greatly increased. Using his knowledge of criminal law, Max’s trainings included information on how to conduct media interviews without compromising legal rights, as many of the cases against people CCBF has posted bond for are still pending. The ability to connect new volunteers to all of these efforts has allowed CCBF to sustain its work and expand its efforts. The Fellowship allowed Max to devote full-time energy to other crucial aspects of CCBF’s work-including implementing plans to post bond for individuals in jail and activists arrested at political actions on an almost weekly basis, fundraising, and providing individualized support to people once the organization freed them from jail. CCBF is currently on the brink of organizing a concerted fundraising drive to replenish general funds to post more bond. Since felony charges in Cook County often take at least a year or two to go to trial or otherwise resolve, many of the bonds CCBF has paid out will not return to the organization for some time. Currently six bonds have returned to CCBF over the last year, and no bonds have yet been forfeited
