Kristina Scurry Baehr, YLS 08 will spend her fellowship year working with the Carter Center to launch a Gender Crimes Prosecution Unit in Liberia. The Liberian Ministry of Justice has invited the Carter Center to develop a specialized unit to prosecute domestic violence and sex offense cases, and Kristina will be one of three Carter Center staff members creating the unit. In addition to general research and policy support for the project, she will write a report on a victim’s pathway from reporting to sentencing of the offender; research and recommend policies for collaboration among the police, physicians, and other state actors; write a handbook for prosecutors; and establish protocols and policies for the new unit.
Alisha Bjerregaard, YLS '08 will spend her fellowship year working with the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), where she works in the Africa Program on reproductive health issues in Kenya. Alisha has spent the last few months in Kenya working with CRR's partners, FIDA Kenya and the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance, on finalizing a draft Reproductive Health and Rights Bill and devising an advocacy strategy to address the issue of unsafe abortion in Kenya.
Matiangai Sirleaf, YLS '08 will spend her fellowship year working with the International Center for Transitional Justice in Cape Town, South Africa. She will work on a series of transitional justice initiatives in Western and Southern Africa. She will conduct a comparative study of transitional justice experiences in West Africa, focusing on Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana and coordinate a Southern Africa Transitional Justice Assessment in Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Angola. The main purpose of the West African comparative analysis is to influence the development of future transitional justice mechanisms in the sub-region. The purpose of the Southern Africa Transitional Justice Assessment is to identify major transitional justice issues and potential interventions across the sub-region.
Information About Current and Past Bernstein Fellows:
2007-08 Bernstein Fellows
2006-07 Bernstein Fellows
2005-06 Bernstein Fellows
2004-05 Bernstein Fellows
2003-04 Bernstein Fellows
2002-03 Bernstein Fellows
2001-02 Bernstein Fellows
2000-01 Bernstein Fellows
1999-2000 Bernstein Fellows
1998-99 Bernstein Fellows
The 2007-2008 Fellows
Nick Robinson is spending his fellowship year in India working with the Human Rights Law Network to develop resources and implement a strategy for addressing the right to water. Nick is writing a report that will examine the most critical issues that threaten the right to water in India. The findings will be shared with other non-governmental organizations, the government, and media. This report will also recommend judicial and advocacy strategies that are most likely to help guarantee the right to water. He is also working on several cases that involve the right to water in India.
Nick received his J.D. from the Law School in 2006. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Political Science and Law, Letters, and Society in 2002. After college, he worked with EarthRights International in Thailand on environmental and human rights issues in Burma. During law school, Nick was a student director of the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic. After graduation, he was a Yale Fox Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, during which time he clerked for Chief Justice Sabharwal of the Indian Supreme Court.
Katherine Southwick is working with Refugees International (RI), a humanitarian advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., to conduct research and advocacy on cases of statelessness in several countries (including Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, and Bangladesh). She will publish her findings in RI reports and will develop strategies to raise awareness of this global problem within the U.S. government, the UN system, and other policy and media circles. Through RI, Katherine has also conducted advocacy concerning crises in Africa, including Zimbabwe, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda. She has advised several organizations about the role of the International Criminal Court and the Responsibility to Protect in African peace processes.
Katherine grew up in Africa as the daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and received a B.A. and J.D from Yale University. After college, she worked for the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center in New Delhi, India. At the Law School, Katherine was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, student director of the Schell Center, and associate fellow of the Yale World Fellows Program. She represented asylum-seekers in the Immigration Clinic and pursued the year-long graduate seminar, Studies in Grand Strategy. She spent her summers working on the Milosevic trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department. Following graduation, she worked in private practice, specializing in international arbitration. Last year, she clerked for Judge Charles P. Sifton in the Eastern District of New York. She also worked with the Refugee Law Project in Kampala, Uganda. She has commented on Africa and human rights in major news sources, academic journals, and other research institutions.
Etelle Higonnet is working in Iraq as Analysis Director with the Iraq History Project, a large-scale human rights documentation initiative that has gathered more than 7,000 testimonies from victims of rights violations around the country. Prior to moving to Iraq, Etelle served as a consultant to UNICEF in New York and produced a documentary film on sexual violence in Cote d'Ivoire. From 2006 to 2007, Etelle spent her fellowship year with Human Rights Watch in and around the Ivory Coast documenting sexual violence in the current civil war. Etelle investigated patterns of sexual violence experienced by women across Côte d'Ivoire, including rebel and government-held territories, as well as throughout Liberia, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Her research was published in several reports and smaller pieces, most notably “My Heart is Cut”: Sexual Violence by Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d'Ivoire. Etelle organized advocacy campaigns around her findings in cooperation with local and international partners, focusing on pushing for accountability mechanisms.
Etelle graduated from Yale University in 2000 and Yale Law School in 2005. Following her graduation from the Law School, she became the Senior Research Fellow and General Project Coordinator at the International Human Rights Law Institute. She has four publications pending on transitional justice issues. While at the Law School, she worked on the Yale Journal of International Law and the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, organized numerous talks on international human rights issues, and represented individuals seeking asylum in the United States in the Immigration Clinic. During law school, Etelle was also a consultant for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, drafting a strategic plan for a documentation system based on the work of the Yale-affiliated Documentation Center of Cambodia. She consulted for the Royal Cambodian Government Task Force for the Extraordinary Chambers, which has spearheaded the government’s creation of a war crimes tribunal for the Khmer Rouge, and interned at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Etelle worked as a summer associate in the New York and Paris offices of Sullivan & Cromwell. Prior to law school, Etelle was the Africa Associate at Human Rights Watch and worked for a human rights NGO in Senegal, running the organization's ten field offices.
Jeremy Robbins spent his fellowship year in Argentina working with the Center for Legal and Social Studies (El Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales) and the Association for Civil Rights (Asociacion por los Derechos Civiles) to develop and implement projects on behalf of people detained in Argentine prisons. Projects included: litigating to increase access to employment, education, and progressive programming; photographically documenting human rights abuses in Argentine prisons for two published human rights reports; strengthening public defense services; and partnering with Argentine publishers and pharmaceutical/hygienic-product companies to provide children’s books and toiletries in the prisons in which children under four live with their incarcerated parents. Jeremy also published an article on social change litigation in the Argentine political science journal Nueva Doctrina Penal.
Jeremy received his B.A. in Political Science from Brown University in 2002 and is a 2006 graduate of the Law School. Following college, Jeremy moved to Chile, where he engaged in a series of volunteer experiences that included teaching English to Former sex workers seeking high school equivalency degrees and building a library in a small village. In law school, Jeremy was active in criminal justice reform through both the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Legal Services Clinics and through summer employment at a drug policy reform organization and a prisoners' rights law firm. Jeremy’s interest in Latin America led him to participate in and coordinate the Linkage Exchange Program, through which he spent a month in Argentina during his first law school summer. Jeremy is now a litigation associate at WilmerHale in Boston where, along with working on general corporate litigation matters, he is part of the firm’s team representing six Bosnian men detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and federal courts in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts.
Sari Bashi spent her fellowship year in Israel, establishing Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which offers legal assistance to Palestinians who face restrictions on their freedom to travel within and outside the Occupied Territories. Gisha is a new Israeli NGO whose founding was made possible, in part, by the Bernstein Fellowship. Sari continues to serve as Gisha’s director, now directing a staff of nine, and is working to help individuals gain access to fundamental necessities such as jobs, schools, medical services, and family unity, by petitioning the Israeli military bureaucracy and Israel’s Supreme Court, using international and Israeli law. Gisha also produces reports on the regime of travel restrictions and uses media and direct lobbying to change policies. Following completion of her Bernstein Fellowship year, Sari received a social innovation fellowship from the Echoing Green Foundation to support her work with Gisha. She also teaches a class in international law at Tel Aviv University.
Sari received her B.A. from Yale (1997) in Ethics, Politics & Economics. After college, she conducted research on ethnic identity among Ethiopian immigrants to Israel as part of a Fulbright Scholarship and worked as a Jerusalem correspondent for the Associated Press. Sari graduated from the Law School in 2003. As a law student, she participated in clinics bringing federal litigation on behalf of prisoners and providing legal services to residents of a public housing project in New Haven. She also co-coordinated a study on the way in which Yale Law School educates female and male students; the study’s results have been published in the Journal of Legal Education and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. She spent her summers at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Additional law school activities included work as a Civil Procedure teaching assistant to Professors Owen Fiss and Harold Koh and participating as a finalist in the Morris Tyler Moot Court competition. Licensed in the United States and Israel, Sari clerked for Israel Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levi and has assisted Israel Supreme Court President Aharon Barak in academic projects, including translating his book, Purposive Interpretation in Law, from Hebrew into English.
Avani Mehta Sood spent her fellowship year working with the International Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), promoting use of the Indian Supreme Court’s Public Interest Litigation mechanism (PIL) to address violations of women’s rights in India. Avani participated in legal training workshops to familiarize judges and lawyers in India with international law relating to women’s human rights. She also conducted analyses of applicable Indian constitutional law, case studies of several landmark PIL judgments, and interviews with Supreme Court and high court justices, lawyers, public health and human rights activists, academics, social scientists, journalists, and former PIL petitioners in India about their experiences with the PIL system. Avani used this material to author a report, Litigating Reproductive Rights: Using Public Interest Litigation and International Law to Promote Gender Justice in India, which CRR published and distributed to courts, law schools, lawyers, and NGOs in India and other countries, to be used as a tool for research, litigation, and advocacy. Avani also used her fellowship research to write an article that will soon appear in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law.
Following her fellowship year, Avani stayed on at CRR to work on a fact-finding project to document violence and rights abuses faced by women seeking reproductive health care services in Kenya. The resulting report, Failure to Deliver: Violations of Women’s Human Rights in Kenyan Health Facilities, was published and distributed by CRR in 2007. Avani is now in her first year of a Ph.D. program in Social Psychology at Princeton University, studying the intersections between law and social science. She is currently conducting research on the relationships between findings of harm and decisions to punish, and co-authoring a paper examining how and why people condone torture in the context of interrogation.
Avani received her B.A. in Psychology from Princeton University in 1999 and graduated from the Law School in 2003. At the Law School, she was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal, a board member of Yale Law Women, and a member of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. In addition, Avani provided legal representation for domestic violence victims in family law and immigration proceedings through a clinic at New Haven Legal Assistance and pro bono programs at Sanctuary for Families in New York. After graduating from the Law School, Avani spent a year working on international arbitration and internal investigation cases at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, followed by a clerkship with Judge Kimba M. Wood in the Southern District of New York.
2004-05 Bernstein Fellows
Liz Brundige spent her fellowship year working with the International Association of Women Judges in Washington, D.C. Her work involved two month-long trips to Southern and East Africa, where she helped implement a judicial education program designed to enable judges to use international human rights law in deciding cases involving violence and discrimination against women. She also worked with IAWJ members in Zambia and Tanzania to develop a multi-faceted program addressing the legal and gender dimensions of HIV/AIDS.
Liz received a B.A. in History from Yale College and an M.Phil in Development Studies from Oxford University. As a law student, she was a student director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, an articles Editor of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, an Editor of the Yale Law Journal, and a Coker teaching fellow. During her summers, she conducted human rights field work in Nepal, represented asylum seekers at the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Clinic, and worked at the Witswatersrand University Law Clinic in South Africa. She received the Khosla Memorial Fund for Human Dignity Prize for her law school human rights work. After graduation, Liz clerked for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Following her fellowship year, she clerked for Justice S. Sandile Ngcobo of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and then served as an Associate Legal Officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Liz is now the Robert M. Cover - Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights at Yale Law School, where she co-supervises the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and helps coordinate the Schell Center’s human rights activities. Liz is also a Lecturer at Yale University and teaches International Human Rights at Yale College.
Brandee Butler spent her fellowship year in Libreville, Gabon, working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the Child Protection Program. Her work entailed documenting and developing strategies to improve the state protocol for repatriating victims of child trafficking, advocating for bilateral coordination of repatriation/reunification protocols, developing awareness campaigns on child trafficking and exploitation, and promoting juvenile justice reform.
Brandee received her B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1999 and graduated from the Law School in 2002. During law school, she received a Schell Center Summer Human Rights Fellowship to work at the Rape Crisis Center in Cape Town, South Africa, where she researched sexual-offenses legislation and revised and edited the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Guide. Through the Law School’s Intensive Semester program, Brandee spent half of her third year at the Center for the Study of AIDS in Pretoria, South Africa, conducting independent research, writing about the legal implications of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis, and working on a human rights-based training manual to empower prospective HIV/AIDS vaccine trial participants.
Following her fellowship year, Brandee joined the Alliance for Children’s Rights, a legal non-profit organization that helps children in the dependency system gain access to education, health care, and other benefits and services in Los Angeles County. Brandee is now a Program Officer for Human Rights and International Justice at the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago.
Tara J. Melish spent her fellowship year at the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), working to deepen legal protections for economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas through advocacy and litigation before the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights. Following her fellowship, Tara worked as Associate Social Affairs Officer in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and as Mental Disability Rights International’s (MDRI) United Nations representative in the drafting negotiations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol. She is now Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Active in reporting procedures and litigation initiatives before UN and OAS bodies, Tara serves as consultant or legal adviser to a range of domestic and international organizations, including CEJIL, MDRI, and a number of Latin American NGOs. She publishes and lectures widely on human rights issues and has taught human rights law, international litigation, constitutional law, criminal law, and torts at a variety of law schools, most recently at the University of Virginia and University of Georgia Schools of Law. She will teach a course on Human Rights Advocacy and Dissemination at Oxford University in the summer of 2008 and has served as visiting scholar at the George Washington University School of Law. While a student at the Law School, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, Student Director of the Schell Center, and teaching assistant for an undergraduate human rights course. She received the Ambrose Gherini Prize, for best student paper on a subject of international law. Following law school, she also clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and has been the recipient of professional fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation.
Brent Wible spent his fellowship year working with the Academy for Educational Development (AED) in Washington, D.C., addressing the issue of sexual abuse and sexual harassment in the schools of Bénin, West Africa. He spent a month in Bénin, where he organized several community workshops and administered a set of questionnaires to gain perspective on the problem. After returning to AED, Brent presented his work at an annual international conference on development and education. He also drafted a report, Making Schools Safe for Girls: Combating Gender-Based Violence in Bénin (2004), which was published by AED. His article exploring strategies to address the problem appeared in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
Brent graduated from Haverford College in 1998 with a B.A. in History. After college, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bénin, where he taught English in secondary school. At the Law School, Brent served as a student director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, and Editor on the Yale Law Journal. He also worked as a research assistant to Professor Amy Chua. During his first law school summer, Brent worked on refugee issues at the International Rescue Committee in New York. He split his second summer between the law firms of Debevoise & Plimpton in New York and Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. Brent has published law review articles in the Yale Law Journal, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. Brent clerked for Judge Allyne R. Ross of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is now an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Molly K. Beutz is an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School. Drawing on her human rights expertise and background as an IP litigator, Molly’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of intellectual property and human rights. Her recent work investigates the role of cultural rights and technology in achieving democratic objectives and the respective responsibilities of states and international institutions in that process.
Molly spent her fellowship year working with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, where she led a fact-finding team researching state protection of refugee and immigrant victims of domestic violence in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to joining NYLS, she was a Visiting Lecturer in Law and the Robert M. Cover- Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights at Yale Law School. While the Cover-Lowenstein Fellow, Molly led fact-finding teams reporting on women’s rights in Zambia, the lack of remedies for human rights violations in Kashmir, and the effect of zero-tolerance policies on the right to education in Connecticut; she also participated in litigation before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and other international tribunals. After graduating from Yale Law School in 2001, Molly clerked for the Honorable Denise Cote, U.S. District Judge, in the Southern District of New York.
Eric A. Friedman joined the staff at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in Washington, D.C., after his 2002-2003 Bernstein Fellowship at PHR. Eric’s current work focuses on U.S. and international responses to the massive shortage of health care workers in sub-Saharan Africa and the broader need for strengthening the health system, as well as on the U.S. global HIV/AIDS policy. He serves on the Board of the Global Health Workforce Alliance, an international partnership hosted by the World Health Organization, and chairs the Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative, an international network affiliated with the Alliance. He authored PHR’s 2004 report An Action Plan to Prevent Brain Drain: Building Equitable Health Systems in Africa and co-authored a new publication on The Right to Health and Health Workforce Planning. During his Bernstein Fellowship year, Eric wrote a white paper on unsafe health care and HIV/AIDS.
Eric graduated from the Law School in June 2002. He was a member of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic from his second semester of law school on. There he helped prepare a human rights and HIV/AIDS framework, led a project to help develop model HIV/AIDS legislation for several countries in East Africa, did preliminary work for a report on human rights and HIV/AIDS in India, and worked on AIDS funding. He also worked on issues related to the Ethiopian-Eritrean war and human rights violations based on sexual orientation. Eric wrote an article on debt relief for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal and was an articles editor for the journal. Eric received the Khosla Memorial Fund for Human Dignity Prize for his human rights work in law school. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale, graduating in 1999 with a B.A. in psychology.
Susan Benesch is a Clinical Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, supervising students representing asylum seekers and teaching human rights law. Before her Georgetown fellowship, she directed the Refugee Program at Amnesty International USA in Washington, D.C., where she worked on asylum and refugee issues, focusing especially on child asylum-seekers, and on the U.S. government’s discriminatory treatment of Haitians. As a Bernstein Fellow, Susan worked at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First), where she built a network of grassroots activists around asylum issues, and went on to advise the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on building a similar network for genocide prevention.
Susan graduated in 2001 from the Law School, where she founded the Cuba Exchange Project, sending Yale students to Havana to debate Cuban law students on topics including human rights. Also during law school, Susan worked at the ICTY, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Mandela Institute for Prisoners in Ramallah, the West Bank. As a member of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, she worked for Human Rights Watch on the Pinochet case and led a team of students working on a suit against two Salvadoran generals living in Florida, seeking to hold them liable for massacres in El Salvador.
For six years, before law school, Susan was a full-time newspaper correspondent in Latin America and wrote for magazines such as the New Republic and the Columbia Journalism Review. She covered a dozen countries, focusing especially on Haiti and Cuba. After leaving Haiti in 1994, Susan co-authored a book, The Hand of the Poet (Rizzoli 1997).
Marco Simons is the Legal Director of EarthRights International (ERI), in Washington, D.C., which focuses on holding corporations and other actors accountable for human rights and environmental abuses. He also spent his Bernstein Fellowship year with ERI, working on litigation and advocacy projects promoting multinational corporate responsibility and accountability for human rights violations.
After his fellowship year, Marco clerked for the Honorable Dorothy Wright Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California. After his clerkship, he practiced human rights and civil rights law with Hadsell & Stormer in Pasadena, California. With ERI and with Hadsell & Stormer, Marco has been counsel in Doe v. Unocal Corp., a lawsuit seeking to hold oil companies liable for human rights abuses associated with a gas pipeline project in Burma; in 2005, the parties announced a historic settlement providing compensation to the plaintiffs. Marco is currently involved in several other transnational lawsuits through ERI, including Bowoto v. Chevron, involving abuses against oil protestors in Nigeria, which is scheduled for trial in 2008. He has also taught human rights law at Occidental College and American University’s law school.
Marco graduated in 1997 from Harvard College, where he received a joint degree in environmental science and archaeology, and graduated from Yale Law School in 2001. While at Yale, Marco served as a student director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Project, a student-run organization; he also worked for a semester with the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, with which he traveled to Kenya to assist in researching and writing Spare the Child, a Human Rights Watch report on corporal punishment in Kenyan schools.
Fiona Doherty spent her fellowship year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she worked with the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ). She assisted in CAJ’s efforts to ensure that the human rights commitments in the Good Friday Agreement were fully implemented. While at CAJ, Fiona worked on the implementation of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland and on reform of the judiciary. She also assisted in many of CAJ’s legal cases, involving such issues as the government’s use of lethal force, collusion between the security forces and paramilitaries, and prisoners’ rights.
After her fellowship, Fiona worked as a Senior Associate at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). She worked primarily in the U.S. Law and Security Program but was also involved in the Human Rights Defenders’ Project, where she worked on issues relating to Northern Ireland. She is now an Assistant Federal Defender at the Federal Defender’s office in the Southern District of New York
Fiona graduated from the University of Virginia in 1996 with a B.A. in History and Slavic Languages and Literature. She graduated from the Law School in 1999. During her law school summers, she interned with the Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, an agency in Tennessee that represents death-row inmates on their state and federal habeas appeals, and the Mandela Institute for Prisoners in the West Bank. Upon graduation, Fiona received the C. LaRue Munson Prize for clinical work. After graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Robert D. Sloane (2000-01) spent his fellowship year working for Tibet Justice Center (formerly the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet) to promote human rights for Tibetans, facilitate the legal representation of Tibetan refugees, and advocate for the Tibetan people’s right to self-determination. He traveled to Nepal and India to carry out field research and cooperated with the Tibetan government-in-exile in connection with its advocacy work at the United Nations and before human rights treaty bodies.
Rob received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he studied philosophy, in 1996; his J.D. from the Law School in 2000, where he worked for the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, serving as a student director in his third year, and received the Khosla Memorial Fund for Human Dignity Prize; and a high-level diploma in public international law from the Hague Academy of International Law in 2007. After completing his fellowship, Rob clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2001-02); worked as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton (2002-03), where he helped litigate the initial stages of the Avena case before the International Court of Justice; and clerked for Judge Gerard E. Lynch of the U.S District Court for the Southern District of New York (2003-04). He spent the 2004-05 academic year as a Schell Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at Yale, where he taught International Human Rights at Yale College and co-taught International Arbitration at the Law School. During the 2005-06 academic year, he worked as an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School. He is now an Associate Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, where he teaches international law and criminal law. He also serves as chairman of Tibet Justice Center’s board of directors.
Jonathan Freiman divides his time between Yale Law School and the law firm of Wiggin & Dana. In 2003, he co-founded, with Dean Harold Koh, the National Litigation Project of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale and has spent the last five years there working on litigation addressing the balance between national security and civil liberty after 9/11. He has spoken on post-9/11 and other human rights issues in Europe, Canada, and the United States, at fora including the Federalist Society, a U.N. Expert Roundtable, PBS, and the BBC. As a partner at Wiggin & Dana, Jonathan represents clients in complex litigation and appeals. He has been listed in the last three editions of The Best Lawyers in America for his work as an appellate lawyer.
While a student at the law school, Jonathan served as the Student Director of the Lowenstein Clinic, where he shared the Florida Supreme Court Award for Excellence in Pro Bono Lawyering and an award from the Cuban American Bar Association. He was a co-recipient of the Albom Prize for excellence in appellate advocacy related to a clinical program, a Keck Foundation Fellow in Legal Ethics, a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal, and a research assistant to Professors Paul Kahn and Harold Koh. Following graduation in 1998, Jonathan was a Visiting Lecturer at Yale College, where he taught a transitional justice seminar, Collective Violence and Memory. Just prior to the Bernstein Fellowship year, Jonathan clerked for the Honorable Louis H. Pollak, former Dean of Yale Law School. He spent his fellowship year examining ways to integrate international human rights law into the core legal curriculum, then remained in New Haven as a Schell Fellow at the Law School, where he and a team of students from the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic spent two years researching and analyzing the law and practice of governmental interception of refugees at sea.
Jaya Ramji-Nogales spent her fellowship year launching a refugee law clinic at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her work in South Africa included representing asylum seekers before the Refugee Appeal Board; bringing legal challenges to conform South African refugee policy to international standards; and training law students, UNHCR employees, government officials, NGOs, and refugee communities in refugee law.
Jaya is an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, where she teaches Civil Procedure, Evidence, Refugee Law and Policy, and Transitional Justice. From 2004 to 2006, she was a fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she supervised students representing asylum seekers. From 2002 to 2004, Jaya was a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. After returning from Africa, she joined Debevoise & Plimpton, where her pro bono projects included a Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act challenge to the Ethiopian government’s unlawful expropriation of property from individuals of Eritrean descent, a suit initiated by the Lowenstein Clinic based on Noah Novogrodsky’s Bernstein Fellowship work; writing a report for Human Rights First on the comparative law and practice of detention of asylum seekers; and supervising the asylum program.
Jaya graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995 and from Yale Law School in 1999. As a law student, Jaya joined both the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Immigration Legal Services Clinic. During her summers, Jaya worked with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center in New Delhi, India, and the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Among other publications, she has written two pieces stemming from her work in South Africa: “Inside Illegality: Migration Policing in South Africa after Apartheid,” 48(3) Africa Today 35 (2001) (with Jonathan Klaaren) and “Interpretation Consistent with International Law? The Detention of Asylum Seekers in South Africa,” 20(3) Refuge 1 (2002).
Mark Templeton spent his fellowship year in Bangkok, Thailand, where he helped to establish a regional office for the New Delhi-based South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center (SAHRDC). During that time, he carried out a fact-finding trip to Pakistan and worked with grass-roots organizations in northeastern Thailand, representing fishers and farmers affected by development projects. He also published an article about human rights protections under the new Thai constitution and wrote a report on Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission.
After completing his fellowship year, Mark served as Special Assistant to Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Harold Koh. He was a member of the U.S. delegation to the 2001 U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Mark received an A.B. degree in Social Studies from Harvard College in 1994. A 1999 graduate of the Law School, Mark was a student director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. He served as a research associate with the SAHRDC in Delhi during the summer between his first and second years of law school and published a summary of his broadcasting-reform research project. He has served as a consultant and author for Human Rights Watch and a consultant and editor for the Open Society Institute. While a consultant for McKinsey & Company, his clients included the U.N. Development Program’s Commission on the Private Sector and Development and leading biodiversity conservation organizations. He is now Associate Dean for Finance and Administration at the Law School.
1998-99 Bernstein Fellows
M. Ahadi Bugg-Levine spent her fellowship year working with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in Johannesburg, South Africa, to promote the rights of people with disabilities. Ahadi’s work focused on drafting the disability provisions of South Africa’s Equality Act, as mandated by the Constitution; educating disability rights activists on the legislation; and providing technical legal assistance on the legislation and other disability and human rights law issues to disability rights groups, Members of Parliament, and the office of the Deputy President and President. She also advised the SAHRC’s legal staff on disability-related complaints.
Ahadi has advocated for the rights of women and children, people with disabilities, and racial minorities in Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. She has also served as Senior Counsel for the City of New York. Ahadi is currently a Fellow for The Atlantic Philanthropies and works on new initiatives with the President, Executive Vice President, and senior staff.
Ahadi graduated from Wellesley College in 1992 with a B.A. in Political Science and Women’s Studies. She received her J.D. from the Law School and her M.A. in Political Science from Yale University in 1998. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2001.
Noah Novogrodsky was awarded a Bernstein Fellowship for 1998-99 to conduct constitutional development work in the Horn of Africa. When war broke out in May 1998 between Eritrea and Ethiopia, Noah turned his attention to investigating and documenting war-related human rights abuses, visiting refugee camps on both sides of the border, writing articles for publication in U.S. media, and sharing his findings with human rights groups, aid agencies, and UN officials. In particular, Noah sought to highlight the gross violation of rights resulting from Ethiopia’s expulsion of thousands of ethnic Eritreans and the expropriation of their property.
Noah is currently a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, on leave from his position as an Adjunct Professor and the Director of the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. In September 2003, Noah began Canada’s first international human rights clinic at the University of Toronto law school.
Noah graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Political Science in 1992 and earned an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in 1994. While at the Law School, he co-taught a seminar called “Bearing Witness” with Professor Harlon Dalton, co-chaired the Cambodia Genocide Justice Project, worked as a Research Assistant for Professors Owen Fiss and Paul Gewirtz, and acted as a team leader for the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. With Jeff Prescott and Bob Ahdieh, he received the 1996-97 C. LaRue Munson Prize. Following his graduation from Yale Law School in 1997, Noah worked as Law Clerk for Judge Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. Between January 2000 and July 2002, Noah was an associate in the San Francisco office of Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin.
Jeffrey Prescott is Deputy Director of The China Law Center and a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He spent his fellowship year (1998-99) at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First), where he worked on projects in support of human rights and the rule of law. Following his fellowship, he continued at the Lawyers Committee as a staff attorney. In 2001-02, he taught human rights law at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, on a grant from the Luce Foundation. He joined The China Law Center in 2002 and established and directed the Center’s Beijing office until returning to New Haven in 2007.
Jeff received his B.A. from Boston University in 1993 and is a 1997 graduate of the Law School. After graduation, Jeff clerked in the chambers of the Honorable Walter K. Stapleton, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.