Two of NCYL’s fellows have passed the California Bar!

Zahra Hayat, a Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Yale Law School with an LL.M. degree, is an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at NCYL. She is working to secure mental health services for children placed in foster care outside their home county. Zahra is also assisting on NCYL’s Katie A. case to establish community-based mental health services for California foster youth. Zahra earned her undergraduate degree at Lahore University of Management Sciences in her native Pakistan. As part of her course work in human rights law, she undertook a study of Pakistan’s juvenile justice system, documenting the conditions of the juvenile ward at one of Pakistan’s largest prisons. She found that all 273 juveniles imprisoned there belonged to economically disadvantaged families, and that only four of them had been convicted. Many had been incarcerated longer than the sentences they would have received had they been convicted. That experience, coupled with a broader interest in law as an academic discipline, motivated Zahra to apply to study Jurisprudence at Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar.

Skadden Fellow Jesse Hahnel, who graduated from Stanford Law School, is working at NCYL to advance the educational rights of foster youth in group homes through individual representation and local and statewide policy changes. He will also train agencies and youth advocates about the laws impacting educational outcomes for group home youth. Jesse spent his first year of law school at Harvard, but after working with Professor William Koski at Stanford’s Youth and Education Law Project, Jesse transferred to Stanford to better facilitate their collaboration. The two co-authored The Past, Present, and Possible Futures of “Education Finance Reform” Litigation, published by the American Education Finance Association. Before attending Law School, Jesse worked as a teacher in San Francisco, New York City, and Washington DC.