Newton, MA--Boston College Law School is pleased to announce that two BC Law graduates were awarded Equal Justice Works Fellowships for 2010.  

Attorney Jason Langberg is currently an Everett Fellow at Legal Aid of North Carolina. Langberg’s fellowship will be hosted by Advocates for Children, Durham, North Carolina.  His project will focus on dismantling the school to prison pipeline.  Langberg graduated from BC Law in 2009, where he was a Public Service Scholar and the recipient of the Aviam Soifer graduation award.  During law school he interned at the Children's Law Center of Massachusetts and the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and was a student attorney in the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project and the BC Defenders Clinic. Prior to law school he worked with at-risk youth in various capacities.

Erin Cox, a 2010 graduate of BC Law, will be working with Lutheran Social Services in Wellesley, Massachusetts.  Cox’s fellowship will focus on representing unaccompanied immigrant children who are faced with deportation in the Great Boston area.  Prior to law school, Cox worked as a case manager resettling refugees. As a law student she participated in BC Law’s Immigration clinic where she represented an unaccompanied minor.  Cox spent her summers working with Boston’s immigrant community at the Community legal Services and Counseling Center and the Political Asylum/ Immigration Representation Project.

The Equal Justice Works (formerly NAPIL) Fellowships Program was launched in 1992 to address the shortage of attorneys working on behalf of traditionally under-served populations and causes in the United States and its territories. Recognizing that many obstacles prevent committed attorneys from practicing public interest law, including the dearth of entry-level jobs and daunting educational debts, the program provides financial and technical support to lawyers working on innovative and effective legal projects. The two-year Fellowships offer salary and generous loan repayment assistance; a national training and leadership development program; and other forms of support during the term of the Fellowship.

In 1997, with the support of a substantial matching grant from the Open Society Institute (OSI), the foundation created by financier and philanthropist George Soros, the Fellowships Program was expanded to encourage partnerships between law firms, corporations and public interest organizations to fund Fellowships. As a result, in 1998, the Fellowships Program, then called NAPIL Equal Justice Fellowships, became the nation’s largest postgraduate legal fellowship program by supporting 86 fellows working on domestic violence, homelessness, community economic development, immigration, civil rights, juvenile justice, employment rights, access to health care, consumer fraud, environmental justice and other critical issues. Equal Justice Works is currently supporting 100 Fellows in the field in the classes of 2008 and 2009.

Equal Justice Works is committed to recruiting attorneys who represent a variety of experiences and backgrounds and to providing them with a strong foundation on which to build a public interest career. Equal Justice Works Fellowships seek to develop the public interest law leaders of the future, whether they continue to work in the nonprofit arena or become pro bono advocates in the private bar.

Equal Justice Works Website