NCYL’s Summer Law Clerks and Interns, from left: Rachael Gardiner, Caitlin Krutsinger, Shilpa Ram, Demoya Gordon, Jesse Hahnel, Haley Upshaw, Linnea Forsythe, and Meghan Corman. |
Meghan Corman volunteered at NCYL during the winter and spring of 2005-06, working with Pat Arthur on juvenile justice advocacy. She returns as a summer clerk this year, fresh from her second year at Boalt Hall. At Boalt, Meghan was Activism Chair for the Boalt Hall Women’s Association and a board member of the Youth and Education Law Society (YELS) during the 2006-2007 school year. Next year, she will serve as co-director of the YELS Expulsion Clinic, and director of the Appellate Advocacy Program.
While at Boalt, Meghan taught civil rights to youth in Alameda County’s Juvenile Hall, and represented a high school student in his expulsion hearing and subsequent appeal in Alameda County. She has clerked at the Office of the California Attorney General, and at Public Advocates Inc., both in San Francisco. She will clerk at Legal Services for Children, also in San Francisco this fall. Meghan earned her BA in English from the University of New Hampshire. Between university and law school, she worked at a literacy council through Americorps*VISTA in San Diego, and taught third grade as a Teach for America teacher in Los Angeles for three years. She does the NY Times crossword daily and loves cooking/baking, hiking, and reading. Here at NCYL, she is working with Bryn Martyna on foster care cases.
Linnea Forsythe comes to the Center as a summer clerk after her second year at Hastings College of the Law. She is co-chair of the Hastings Human Rights Project for Haiti, co-chair of the Native American Law Student Association there, and an organizer for the Hastings Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Linnea has represented clients in the Hastings Civil Justice Clinic, served as a legal intern at Survivors International (which serves asylum seekers and torture victims) in San Francisco, and as a volunteer at San Francisco Superior Court’s ACCESS Program. She also clerked at Bay Area Legal Aid’s Oakland office. She has a Master of Social Work, with a health specialization, from UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, and a BS in community and regional development from UC Davis. Before entering law school, she held a variety of advocate or social worker positions in health care, including at the Perinatal Council in Oakland, San Francisco Women Against Rape, and Children’s Hospital Oakland’s Center for Child Protection. Linnea is working with Rebecca Gudeman, conducting research on the health access rights of teens who are part of multiple systems of care such as the child welfare, juvenile justice, and special education systems.
Rachael Gardiner has finished her first year at the University of Washington School of Law, and this fall will be transferring to Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley. At UW, she was a board member and volunteer for Street Youth Legal Advocates of Washington. She has a BA in biopsychology from Oberlin College. Before law school, Rachael worked for two years as a legal assistant at San Francisco law firm (and NCYL donor) Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale, assisting with immigration cases, including helping prepare clients for naturalization interviews with Homeland Security. During that same time, Rachael was also a CASA for two teenage sisters in foster care in San Francisco, as well as a river rafting guide in a program for low-income teenagers. She has worked on reproductive health care as an intern at Mass NARAL in Boston, and the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies program, where she wrote the protocol for a clinical experiment in Zimbabwe and South Africa that promoted sexual health among young women. Rachael has also worked as a student researcher for the Jamaica Cancer Society in Kingston and volunteered at JFLAG (Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays) working with their HIV-positive children. Rachael also spent a summer in Ghana volunteering at a village government hospital where she helped nurses in their family planning programs. This summer, Rachael will be working with Laura Townsend on NCYL’s Juvenile Mental Health Court Initiative, assisting with our efforts to link mentally ill court-involved youth with civil legal advocates.
Demoya Gordon has completed her first year at Boalt Hall, where she is on the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, and a member of Law Students of African Descent. She is a volunteer with the California Asylum Representation Clinic in Berkeley, working with a partner to help a young woman from Central America file an asylum application with the INS. In the coming year, she will be the events editor for the Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice, as well as the co-symposium editor for the Berkeley Journal of African American Law and Policy. Demoya earned her BA in sociology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. While at Macalester, she interned at the Children’s Law Center of Minnesota, assisting attorneys there with foster care and juvenile justice cases. She is a native of Jamaica and enjoys singing, reading, and road trips to a friend’s small cabin in northern Minnesota. This summer, she is working with Patrick Gardner on issues surrounding the mental health needs of children in the child welfare system, and particularly on NCYL’s Katie A. litigation aimed at increasing home and community-based care of these children.
Jesse Hahnel completed his second year of law school at Stanford this spring. He is committed to increasing educational justice, a commitment stemming from his years teaching, first at a middle school in inner-city Washington DC, then at L.D. Brandeis High School in New York City. After teaching, Jesse joined the KIPP Foundation as Senior Analyst, supporting a network of 45 charter schools, each providing a high quality college-preparatory education to students in our nation’s neediest communities. He earned his BA in theoretical mathematics from Harvard, where, as an undergrad, he was active in organizations focusing on economic and educational fairness. Jesse spent his first year of law school at Harvard, but after working with Professor William Koski at Stanford’s Youth and Education Advocacy Clinic, he transferred to Stanford to better facilitate their collaboration. Together with Professor Koski , he is the co-author of The Past, Present, and Possible Futures of “Education Finance Reform” Litigation, to be published by the American Education Finance Association. This past spring, Jesse interned for Public Advocates, where he assisted with various legal projects aimed at increasing educational opportunities for low-income minority children. Jesse is working with Leecia Welch on foster youth education issues and foster care system reform litigation.
Shilpa Ram has completed her second year of law school at American University in Washington, DC. During the school year there, she interned at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, and volunteered at the D.C. Employment Justice Center’s Workers’ Rights Clinic. Last summer, Shilpa served as an intern at the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children at Boston Medical Center in Boston, MA, where she worked with low-income families whose children had significant health concerns. She earned her BA in Spanish at Columbia University and after that taught bilingual fourth and fifth grade for two years as a Teach For America Corps Member in South Central Los Angeles. From that post, she went on to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education for a Master’s in International Education Policy. Following her graduate work at Harvard, and prior to entering law school, Shilpa worked as an Education Specialist at the Massachusetts Department of Education, and focused on an assessment designed to better students’ English proficiency. She plays the violin, sings, and is proficient in French, Spanish, and Italian. This summer, Shilpa is working on the Braam and Clark K foster care reform litigation cases with Bill Grimm.
Hayley Upshaw comes to the Center after her second year at Northwestern University School of Law, where she has been co-president of the Public Interest Law Group and a member of the Journal of Law and Social Policy. Her volunteer activity at Northwestern includes work with the ACLU, interviewing detainees at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. Hayley has clerked at the Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, where she represented clients in juvenile delinquency and school expulsion proceedings. She has also served as an extern at the Legal Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, representing wards of the Department of Children and Family Services whose special education needs were not being met by the public schools, or who were facing expulsion. As an intern at New York City’s Legal Aid Society, Juvenile Rights Division, last summer, Hayley represented children in foster care who had special education needs. She has a BA in comparative literature from the University of Chicago, and spent her junior year studying abroad in Seville, Spain. For three years between college and law school, she taught first grade in San Jose with Teach for America. She is working with Pat Arthur on a project to evaluate how alternative schools in California help -- or hinder -- youth exiting the juvenile justice system. Hayley will also be supporting Pat’s juvenile justice work in Arkansas with legal research and writing.
Caitlin Krutsinger, an undergraduate intern at NCYL this summer, is a student at the University of Oregon, where she is studying for a BA in English with a minor in communications. Caitlin spent the last school year as an exchange student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. While there, she mentored local high school students, worked on the student newspaper, and spent school breaks traveling Europe and Northern Africa. During her first two years at Oregon, Caitlin rowed Crew and worked as a legislative intern for the Associated Students of the University of Oregon. Upon graduation in 2008, she hopes to enter the Peace Corps as a Youth Development Volunteer, and eventually go on to law school. She is working with Communications Director Tracy Schroth on press and media relations, Youth Law News, and website development.
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