Post date: August 25, 2000
Sophie Bryan (HLS ’00), who will be a Skadden Fellow at the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain, Boston, is the 2000 Edith Fine Public Interest Fellow. Sophie has been a strong presence at Harvard Law School, as Co-Chair of the Student Public Interest Auction and founding member of the Project on Law and Organizing. She has served on the Legal Services Center Student Advisory Board and as a Peer Counselor for the Office of Public Interest Advising. Sophie is on the Executive Board of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
The annual Fine Fellowship supports the work of a Harvard Law School graduate who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership and commitment to public service work, especially in the areas of civil or criminal legal assistance to the poor, women’s reproductive rights, and anti-discrimination work.
Friends, family, and colleagues of Judge Fine established the fellowship in 1996 to honor Fine’s distinguished public service career and her pioneering role as one of the earliest women graduates of Harvard Law School. Fine, a member of the Class of 1957, died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 64.
Fine was one of five women in the Class of ’57, the fifth graduating class at the School to include women. Her diverse career included Peace Corps service as an administrator in Lima and Peru, work with the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington D.C., and time as assistant corporation counsel for the city of Boston. She taught law at Yale University and the University of Puerto Rico. In 1973 Fine became presiding justice of the Brookline Municipal Court, moved to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1982, and to the state appeals court in 1984.