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NCYL is delighted to welcome Molly Dunn and Bryn Leland Martyna to our attorney staff.
For the past two and a half years, Molly has been the Youth Advocacy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Youth and Education Law Clinic, where she has represented clients, supervised law students on special education and school discipline cases, and taught.
Molly’s advocacy experience has included representing individual youth in dependency, mental health, special education, and juvenile justice.
Before her tenure at the Stanford clinic, Molly worked at Legal Services for Children in San Francisco on an Equal Justice Works Fellowship, in which LSC partnered with the San Francisco Public Defender’s office. As a fellow, Molly designed and implemented a project providing educational advocacy for at-risk and delinquent youth. After her fellowship, she became an LSC staff attorney.
Molly is a graduate of Stanford Law School, where, as a student, she represented youth in special education and school discipline cases with the East Palo Alto Community Law Project. Molly comments, “I went to law school not to become a lawyer, but to become a youth advocate.”
Bryn Leland Martyna, a Skadden Fellow at NCYL since Fall 2005, will continue her work with NCYL as a staff attorney after her fellowship ends in September.
Bryn plays a key role in two of NCYL’s major foster care reform lawsuits. In Braam v. State of Washington, Bryn has worked on settlement implementation, and developing the website, www.braamkids.org, to provide information on the reform process. Bryn is also involved in all aspects of NCYL’s Nevada litigation, Clark K. v. Willden, including keeping our clients apprised of and engaged in the lawsuit’s progress. That case is scheduled to go to trial in February 2008. At the local level, she represents individual youth in school expulsion hearings in Alameda County.
Bryn earned her B.A., Magna Cum Laude, in human development from UC San Diego in 2001. In addition to displaying outstanding scholarship, she captained the UCSD Ultimate Frisbee team for two years. She also studied in Argentina and Chile on a Chancellor’s Summer Research Scholarship.
Bryn earned her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2005. While at Stanford, she was a Public Interest Fellow for two years and participated in the Education Advocacy Clinic.
She was also on the board of Street Law and Shaking the Foundations, and was a lead teacher with Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), providing law-related education to youth in Santa Clara County and East Palo Alto.
During law school, Bryn clerked at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Santa Cruz Office of the Public Defender, the Juvenile Division of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, and Legal Services for Children in San Francisco.
Bryn’s Ultimate Frisbee career has continued at the club level, on the San Francisco Bay Area team, Fury. During her time with Fury, the team has won the Ultimate Players Association women’s national championship twice, both last year and in 2003. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Bryn was married to Matt Bruss, at a park in Santa Cruz. The couple will vacation in Patagonia this winter.
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