NEWS
News New Friedman Fellows Join Clinics
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n 2015-16, the Jacob Burns Community Legal Clinics welcomed a new class of Friedman Fellows. The Friedman Fellowships, endowed by a generous gift from Philip Friedman, Esq., bring to the clinics experienced attorneys who obtain an LLM degree while they assist in teaching and supervising clinic students. In the course of their two-year fellowships, Friedman Fellows are provided the opportunity to learn about clinical teaching and public interest lawyering through the practice of engaging in it, studying it, and receiving mentorship and support. Among the benefits that the fellows contribute to the clinics are the capacity to undertake more cases and projects, serve more students, and produce more scholarship. Upon completion of their fellowships, a number of Friedman Fellows have gone on to clinical teaching positions at other law schools, helping to extend the reach of the GW Law clinical program. Brief biographies of the 2015-17 Friedman Fellows are provided below: Katy Ramsey just completed her first fellowship year in the Neighborhood Law and Policy Clinic, directed by Professor Jessica Steinberg. Previously, she was an Equal Justice Works/AmeriCorps Legal Fellow and a housing attorney at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House in New York City, where she represented low-income residents of East Harlem in housing and public benefits matters and served as a supervisor and trainer of law student interns. She also served as a volunteer attorney for New York’s Safe Passage Project, representing an unaccompanied child migrant from Central America. At the University of Wisconsin Law School, she was a student-attorney in both the Neighborhood Law Clinic, where she worked for two years with low-income clients on housing and workers’ rights
issues, and in the Domestic Violence and Immigration Clinic, where she sought immigration relief for domestic violence survivors. She was Senior Managing Editor of the Wisconsin International Law Journal, President of the Public Interest Law Foundation, and the recipient of both the 2009 Public Interest Law Foundation Scholar Award and the 2009 Strasser Award for her “demonstrated concern for the needy and work to benefit society.” In addition to receiving a JD in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin Law School, she received a BA in history and Spanish in 2005 from Middlebury College, where she was on the varsity swim team, and an MA in Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies from the University of Wisconsin. She is fluent in Spanish and has hiked the Camino de Santiago, the 500-mile medieval pilgrimage route through northern Spain. Erin Scheick has joined the Family Justice Litigation Clinic, directed by Professor Laurie Kohn, after several years of representing survivors of domestic and sexual violence. She has a background in international health, with a focus on the social determinants of health, international human rights, and community- and gender-based violence. Most recently, she was a National Training and Policy Attorney with the American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence, where she developed multi-day trainings for civil legal services attorneys on best practices in representing survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. In addition, she drafted policy related to sexual and domestic violence, provided technical assistance to civil legal services attorneys throughout the country, and edited litigation-related publications on domestic violence. As a Supervising Attorney and Skadden Fellow with the former D.C.-based nonprofit WEAVE, she represented domestic and sexual violence survivors in civil protection order, family law, and immigration matters and initiated a health law partnership with a local community health center that trained community leaders to recognize these survivors of violence and
4 THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL
Friedman Fellows (left to right) Etienne Toussaint, Erin Scheick, and Katy Ramsey
refer them to legal services. Previously, she was an Asylum Officer in Arlington, Virginia, worked on nationwide class action lawsuits at a plaintiff-side law firm and Baltimore-based nonprofit, and served in the Peace Corps in rural Honduras. She has lectured nationally and internationally on gender-based violence and the U.S. justice system and serves on the Board of Directors of the community-based health care clinic La Clínica del Pueblo. She received a BA in neuroscience from the Johns Hopkins University in 2000; an MS from Harvard School of Public Health in 2005; and a JD summa cum laude from American University Washington College of Law in 2008, where she participated in the International Human Rights Law Clinic and served on the American University Law Review. Etienne Toussaint joined the Small Business and Community Economic Development Clinic, directed by Professor Susan Jones. Previously, he worked as a Project Finance Associate with Norton Rose Fulbright U.S. LLP and subsequently as a Law and Policy Fellow with the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington, continued on page 13