2018 Award
J.D. STUDENT RECIPIENT
Cameron Clark
Cameron is a 23-year old activist-scholar from Houston, TX. The child of West African immigrants, Cameron is the first in his family to attend graduate or professional school. Cameron currently serves as the Managing Editor of the Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice, publishing commentaries on legal developments in Critical Race Theory. Cameron has served as a representative to the Dean’s Task Force on Academic Community and Student Engagement, Director of the Student Government Committee on Diversity & Inclusion, and Political Advocacy Chair for both the Harvard Black Law Students Association and HLS Lambda. Cameron is a member of Reclaim Harvard Law and has organized with staff, students, and faculty for the removal of the Royall/HLS Shield and in support of Harvard dining hall workers on strike.
In his time at HLS, Cameron has worked to implement and test a body camera pilot program in Boston; supported queer/transgender mental health patients and students in Los Angeles; and uplifted prisoners with intellectual disabilities on death row in Houston. Cameron has participated in the Education Law Clinic and is currently enrolled in the Delivery of Legal Services Clinic. Cameron’s work in solidarity with marginalized and systemically targeted communities has marked the most enriching part of his legal education.
Beginning in Fall 2018, Cameron will join the Southern Poverty Law Center as a recipient of the organization’s Criminal Justice Reform Fellowship. Cameron’s work will take him to New Orleans, where he will support a class action lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s resource-starved public defender system as a violation of defendants’ due process and equal protection rights.
Read the Harvard Law Today’s profile of Cameron Clark.
2017 Award
ALUMNI RECIPIENT
Lam Nguyen Ho (J.D. 2008)
Lam is in his dream job as the Executive Director of the Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA), which he founded with an HLS Venture Fund grant. CALA uses a social justice community-lawyering model, “community activism lawyering,” to unite lawyers and activists for greater social change than what lawyers alone could achieve. CALA serves directly 2000+ families annually—at clinics located within their communities: mostly undocumented immigrants, day laborers, and sex workers who cannot access assistance from other legal organizations. Importantly, CALA impacts many thousands more by supporting activist partners’ grassroots activism, while also trying to change the legal aid industry.
CALA is the culmination of Lam’s community work, education, and legal experiences. He came to HLS seeking to combine the law with his background as a queer, immigrant activist of color, having escaped poverty. He discovered community lawyering at ROAD (Reaching Out About Depression) supporting low-income women health activists, and with Lucie White, for whom he served as a research/teaching assistant for Poverty Law. He further explored models of community- and movement-based lawyering at HLAB, where he was President; Defenders; ACLU National Litigation Department, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and Urban Justice Center. Through these opportunities, he completed over 3000 pro-bono hours at HLS. He also ran the Giving Tree, which raised nearly 2000 gifts for families served by HLS’ clinical programs.
He was a Skadden Fellow at LAF, where he created 10 community-based clinics on the west side of Chicago, and a staff attorney at Equip for Equality, defending the civil rights of people with disabilities. In these positions, he experienced firsthand the challenges of community lawyering and civil legal services, and was inspired to innovatively confront these challenges through the creation of CALA.
J.D. STUDENT RECIPIENT
William Ahee (J.D. 2017)
William graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. During his seven-year route through his undergraduate studies, William worked on a number of food justice and farming projects. In Detroit, William worked closely with multiple urban farms developing training and entrepreneurial projects. William also helped to develop and implement an initiative to expand access to fresh foods using the existing infrastructure of corner stores in Detroit neighborhoods. In upstate New York, William worked as a farmhand and apprentice on a community-supported agriculture farm. William decided to go to law school after witnessing friends unjustly convicted of crimes, coworkers’ families deported, and entire neighborhoods suffering a lack of basic services while enduring continuous state violence. During law school, William has participated in Harvard Defenders, the Housing Law Clinic, and the Criminal Justice Institute. William is currently a Co-Executive Director of the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project. In his summers, William worked at Equal Justice Under Law in Washington, D.C., and Metropolitan Public Defender in Portland, Oregon. After graduation, William will move to McAllen, Texas, for a job with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, where he plans to provide direct services to clients while simultaneously seeking to address some of the underlying issues that bring clients in the door.
2016 Award
ALUMNI RECIPIENT
Melody Webb (J.D. 1993)
Melody was raised in humble circumstances in Washington D.C., which influenced her course of studies as a Social Studies honors major at Harvard College (1990) and Harvard Law School (1993). After clerking for the Honorable Emmet Sullivan, she declined to follow a career in government or law firms, and instead, started and ran a conflict resolution program for court-involved and at-risk youth in Washington, D.C., as an Equal Justice Works Fellow, recruiting and training dozens of volunteer attorneys and students for the initiative. Since then, she has held staff and pro-bono positions that have been aimed at helping the most vulnerable in society. As a staff attorney, she advocated before the U.S. Congress on behalf of homeless, District of Columbia residents and clients of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless; as an Associate General Counsel at Service Employees International Union, she ran a coalition to restore thousands of minority voters in Virginia to the rolls in the 2008 general election; and as Legal Director of the Employment Justice Center, she worked to combat employment discrimination against Hispanic and African American low-wage workers and returning citizens. For years, on a volunteer basis, she initiated and ran advocacy campaigns, including a 2004 effort for District residents affected by lead-in-water, through the on-line advocacy organization she founded, Lobbyline.com; more recently, she created and has been operating on a shoe-string and on a pro-bono basis, Mothers’ Outreach Network, which provides legal education workshops and resources for low-income mothers in Washington DC, with the help of an all-volunteer group of attorneys as well as law students from Georgetown Law School.
J.D. STUDENT RECIPIENT
Faye Maison (J.D. 2016)
Faye will be working as a juvenile public defender in Maryland after graduation. Her path to public defense combines her love for education, desire to work with people, and courage to be critical of the institutions she inhabits. Prior to law school, Faye worked in various education fields: She was the director of SCHOLAR, an intensive science program for public school students in New Haven; served as a Woodbridge Fellow, a fellowship in higher education administration at Yale University; and worked as a fellow with Medic Mobile working on community education in Bangladesh. Her educational experiences led her to co-found Students for Inclusion, an organization that empowers students to take ownership of their legal education. She was intent on pursuing a career in education until she worked as a legal advocate for the DC Public Defender Service at a youth detention center. After witnessing the pervasive inequality youths faced in the DC juvenile justice system, Faye has remained committed to client advocacy, working for the Committee for Public Counsel Services through the Child Advocacy Clinic, the Criminal Justice Institute, and the Mecklenburg County Public Defender Office. She is currently fusing her two interests in education and client advocacy by working on storytelling techniques through a documentary workshop with 9th grade biology students in Lawrence, MA with the HLS Doc Studio and developing a curriculum for youth affected by the juvenile justice system that she hopes to use with her future clients.
J.D. STUDENT RECIPIENT
Lindsey Whyte (J.D. 2016)
Before coming to law school, Lindsey spent five years working to connect low-income communities with legal and public resources, first in rural Montana, where she helped create a pro se legal advocacy program for survivors of domestic violence, and then in Seattle, where she advocated for individuals facing denial and termination from public assistance programs and helped administer an emergency eviction defense legal clinic. During law school, Lindsey has been a member of Harvard Defenders, serving on the board for the past two years, and the Tenant Advocacy Project, where she primarily assisted clients facing denial of subsidized housing as the result of alleged criminal activity. As a student attorney and member of the board of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, Lindsey has had the immense privilege of working with and learning from some of the most talented and inspiring clients, colleagues, and clinical instructors she could possibly imagine, and has had the opportunity to carry forward her commitment to fighting the collateral consequences of alleged criminal activity as a member of the Bureau’s Housing Practice, arguing the case of one of her former TAP clients before the state Court of Appeals in the fall of 2015. At HLS, Lindsey has also participated in the negotiation and mediation communities, facilitating a semester-long series of dialogues on race and pedagogy at the law school with an amazing group of 1L and upper-level students, and seeking always to use this learning to open spaces for conversation and communication. In her summers, Lindsey has worked at the Bronx Defenders and the King County Department of Public Defense, and will pursue a career in public defense after clerking on the State Supreme Court of Washington.
LLM/SJD RECIPIENT
Ana María Mondragon Duque (LLM 2016)
Ana María is a Colombian lawyer who has dedicated her work to represent victims of human rights abuses and environmental degradation situations before the Inter-American System on Human Rights, UN bodies and domestic institutions in Latin America. Her path as human rights defender began in 2007 when, in response to Colombia’s political and social crisis, she founded an NGO called “Spirit of the Constitution of 1991 (E-91)”. Her work with this organization was diverse, ranging from pursuing reparations for victims of the armed conflict to teaching human rights workshops in public schools. Ana has worked at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, at the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) in San José, Costa Rica, and at the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA) in Mexico City, San Francisco and Bogota. In these settings, she worked on landmark cases that involved the rights of indigenous peoples, human rights defenders, and LGBTIQ individuals, as well as cases of environmental and social impacts caused by the implementation of development projects and corporate activities. Among others, she has pursued two of the most emblematic cases on human rights and the environment issues pending before the Inter-American Commission: La Oroya case against Peru and the Belo Monte case against Brazil. Ana believes that to overcome poverty and social conflict, Latin America must engage in the challenge of achieving sustainable development with a strong human rights focus. As a Fulbright scholar, she decided to come to Harvard to be an active agent of this challenge.
2015 Award
- Alumni: Laura Maslow-Armand ’92
- Student: Donna Harati
2014 Award
- Alumni: David Singleton ’91
- Student: Jessica Frisina
2013 Award
- Alumni: Laurel Firestone ’04
- Student: Stephanie Davidson
2012 Award
- Student: Sam Levine
- Alumni: Bill Beardall ’78
2011 Award
- Alumni: Cynthia Chandler ’95
- Student: Emily Inouye
2010 Award
- Alumni: Cori Crider ’06
- Student: Michael Admirand
2009 Award (awarded 2010)
- Student: Jacob Howard
2008 Award
- Alumni: Jennifer Rosenbaum ’02
- Student: Lam Ho
2007 Award
- Alumni: Ariel Dulitzky ’99
- Student: Rebecca Hamilton
2006 Award
- Alumni: Fern Fisher ’78
- Student: Stephan Sonnenberg
2005 Award
- Alumni: Luz Herrerra ’99
- Student: Chi Mgabo
2003 Award
- Alumni: Jessica Budnitz ’01
- Student: Gary Slossberg
2002 Award
- Alumni: Sarah Buel ’90
- Student: Matthew Colangelo
2001 Award
- Alumni: Earl Martin Phalen ’93
- Student: Aaron Bartley