The City University of New York Law Review (CUNYLR) strives to provide a forum for community advocates, organizers, and allies, to influence and radicalize legal practice. We publish work by cutting-edge social justice scholars and public interest practitioners. Our mission is to address the consequences of structural oppression and to challenge these structures themselves.
This year, our goal was to create two scholarships for CUNY Law students working at the front lines of public interest law. We originally planned to award these scholarships as part of our 25 Anniversary Symposium on voting rights. Our symposium was postponed to the fall of 2020 as a result of the pandemic, but our community rallied together. We are grateful to our donors who helped us raise more than $4,300 to support CUNY Law students’ pursuit of summer work alongside and for the marginalized members of our community.
CUNYLR awarded two students scholarships to support their unpaid public interest summer internships. Applicants were asked to submit a short reflection on current issues in voting rights — including recent New York State electoral reform — as well as the myth of voter fraud and the disenfranchisement of incarcerated people. CUNYLR awarded one scholarship to a CUNYLR staffer and one scholarship to a student within the wider law school community based on their excellent responses and financial need.
Nicole de los Santos
Nicole de los Santos ’21
CUNYLR Senior Staff Member
The Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Law Unit
New York, New York
I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in such essential work at an organization that is committed to advocating on behalf of indigent non-citizens. I spent 10 weeks working in the Federal Litigation practice group within the Immigration Law Unit (ILU).
The group had filed numerous successful habeas petitions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which were essentially requests for the district court to release our clients on conditional grounds to prevent them from being exposed to the virus while in detention. I was fortunate to work closely on two briefs before the Second Circuit, both involving lawful permanent residents seeking relief.
I had the opportunity to work on a summer-long research project on country conditions. This research is necessary to support the asylum and refugee claims for non-citizens who have come to the United States to escape terrible conditions in their homelands (commonly involving extreme human rights violations). I focused my research work on Honduras, specifically the Garifuna people’s experience of institutionalized racism, and the corresponding government acquiescence.
I also participated in Legal Aid’s comment in response to the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s recently proposed rule attacking existing asylum protections. If implemented, the proposed rule would (among other things) essentially raise the standard for establishing a claim for asylum or withholding from removal, making it easier for the federal government to reject (or “pretermit”) applications before a noncitizen can fully make their case through evidence and testimony. Legal Aid acted swiftly to conduct focus group discussions within the organization, which I participated in, exploring the irreparable harms the proposed rule would cause our clients.
Despite the challenges of doing a remote summer internship, Legal Aid made every effort to ensure our experience was fruitful and challenging for all interns. I am grateful to the generous donors who funded the CUNY Law Review Voting Rights Scholarship and made this summer internship possible for me, especially during such an unprecedented and tumultuous time.
Ian Sinclair
Ian Sinclair ’22
Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project
New York, New York
This summer I worked on the housing team at the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project (UJC SNP), a non-profit devoted to securing safe housing and fundamental resources, such as food and cash assistance, for New York City’s most underserved and marginalized individuals and communities.
My hope coming into law school was to work on impact cases at the intersection of housing and economic justice and civil rights. Working at UJC SNP bolstered my interest in seeking fair housing conditions for all and showed me the importance of client-centered work in crafting policies and programs.
My work was split between litigation and legislative advocacy. On the litigation side, I was fortunate to work on a wide spectrum of housing cases in the Housing Part of the New York City Civil Court. I assisted a staff attorney with both defensive and affirmative litigation for tenants that lived in rent-stabilized housing, relied on City or Federal voucher programs, lived in public housing, or lived in market-rate development.
On the legislative side, I assisted the executive director with various writing and research tasks in the furtherance of UJC SNP’s legislative agenda. This work included writing a Sponsor Memo and Bill Summary for a recently introduced state bill, as well as direct edits to a legislative proposal prior to submission. I also assisted in the formulation of a nascent legislative proposal related to housing code violations and restrictions on a landlord’s right to evict. Given the broad objectives of the proposal, I did extensive case research related to potential constitutional challenges that could undermine various parts of the proposal and memorialized suggestions and ideas about the law’s defensibility.
This work taught me important lessons about the incredible one-sidedness of the housing court system, driven in part by unequal access to counsel, and how much of the job of housing defense attorneys is not to assist vulnerable tenants in securing basic housing standards but to leverage the few defensive tools that are available to delay what is often an inevitable eviction. It also gave me practical experience with how prior case law shapes future legislation and policy, and great exposure to the procedural requirements of the legislative process. Working on both litigation and legislative work was enlightening. It allowed me to both think through future legislation while also seeing firsthand the day-to-day application of similar laws and how our legal systems can marginalize or support vulnerable communities. I am grateful for the opportunity.
This year, CUNYLR is continuing to publish vital social justice scholarship. Working remotely through the pandemic, our team has focused on amplifying the wisdom of organizers, lawyers, students, and community members at the front lines of struggles for collective liberation. Our upcoming issue, coming out in February 2021, focuses on lessons from lawyering in crisis, broadly understood to encompass strategies for resilience and resistance to systemic injustice.
Our goal is to create another set of summer scholarships to support students working for public interest. These scholarships are key to our mission because they bring our work beyond the written page. They also help reduce financial barriers to pursuing unpaid summer internships.
We are also raising funds to ensure our journal’s continuity in the face of uncertainty, making sure we can cover essential costs like publishing and printing.
We are ever-grateful to our donors for their support.
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