Fellows
Sara K. Jackson, 2007-08 Fellow
The Equal Justice Society selected Sara K. Jackson as our second Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow. Her fellowship began on October 1, 2007.
Sara graduated in June with a joint J.D. and Masters of Public Policy degree from the UCLA School of Law and School of Public Affairs. She served as vice president of the Student Bar Association, staff editor of both the Women’s Law Journal and Journal of Sexual Orientation Law and was awarded an Exceptional Merit Scholar by the Foundation of the State Bar of California. She also participated in the law school’s Hurricane Katrina Advocacy Clinic, Juvenile Hall Clinic, Public Interest Law Fund, and Students Helping Assure Racial Equity, Justice & Diversity.
Her summer positions include working at the NAACP LDF in New York City as a Political Participation and Education Divisions Legal Intern, for Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Paez as a Judicial Extern, and at New Schools Better Neighborhoods as a Policy Intern.
Before entering law school, Sara served as Program/Development Coordinator for Strategic Education Centers in Seattle and in Mbabane, Swaziland, and as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused and neglected children in Seattle’s dependency court system. She was also a youth law and housing discrimination intern for the Minnesota Legal-Aid Society in Minneapolis and a legislative assistant to Seattle City Councilmember Richard Conlin.
Sara received her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in women, environment and development from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. She’s proficient in Spanish and has some fluency in Kiswahili.
Claudia Peña, 2008-2009 Fellow
Claudia Peña of San Francisco will be EJS’s third Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow. She will start the one-year fellowship in the fall of 2008 after graduating in May from UCLA School of Law, where she serves as vice president of the Student Bar Association and chair of the Inter-Org Senate.
In addition to attending law school, Peña currently works as the student coordinator of the Prisoner Reentry Initiative, which is a collaboration between UCLA’s Critical Race Studies and A New Way of Life, a non-profit organization in Watts, Calif., providing housing and reentry support to formerly incarcerated women and their children.
She is an Academy Scholar for UCLA’s Law Fellows Program and was previously a legal intern for the Johannesburg, South Africa-based Lawyers for Human Rights, a law clerk for the firm of Moreno, Becerra & Casillas and a legal intern for the Badil Center for Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Her work experience also includes serving as the interim director for student diversity programs at Mills College and as a youth advocate at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
Peña received her B.A. in Sociology from Mills College and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including: Hernandez Stern Scholarship, Foley Minority Scholarship, Morrison and Forrester Diversity Scholarship, Palladium Award at Mills College, Mills College Phenomenal Woman Award and Latinos Unidos Scholar.
Nicholas Espíritu, 2006-07 Fellow
The Equal Justice Society announced on Aug. 15 that it selected Nicholas Espíritu as our first Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow. His one-year Fellowship started in October 2006.
At EJS, Nicholas has worked primarily on the Intent Doctrine, Black-Brown Relations and Judicial Nominations. His intent work has included developing informational materials for policy makers on the need to rectify the retrenchment in civil rights law that is related to Washington v. Davis and the intent doctrine.
He has also been developing materials to make cutting edge legal theories related to intent usable by practitioners. His work on Black-Brown relations has been focused on studying the possibility of coalitions between African Americans and immigrants on promoting just immigration reform. Finally, Nicholas’ work on the independence of the judiciary was expanded to include working in coalition with other organizations request the Senate investigation into the political dismissal of United States Attorneys.
Before joining EJS, Nicholas was the Thurgood Marshall Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. His work included litigation related to voting rights, immigrants’ rights and discrimination in the allocation of municipal services.
Nicholas obtained his B.A. from San Jose State University and his J.D with a concentration in Critical Race Studies from the UCLA School of Law, where he served as a managing editor for the Chicano-Latino Law Review. He was also one of the inaugural LatCrit Student Scholars and his article, “(E)Racing Youth: The Racialized Construction of California’s Proposition 21 and the Development of Alternate Contestations,” was published in the LatCrit symposium issue of the Cleveland State Law Review.
Nicholas now works as a Staff Attorney at MALDEF, focusing on Voting Rights issues.