Two Columbia Law School students focusing on distinct areas of public service will soon embark on legal careers serving their local and international communities.
After graduating this May, Yasmin Dagne and José Miranda will participate in the Leonard H. Sandler Fellowship at the Humans Rights Watch (HRW) and the Immigrant Justice Corps Fellowship at Catholic Migration Services, respectively. Both students are among a group of seven Columbia law students selected for prestigious public law fellowships.
“If it’s just one person that you can help out, then I think that that is a great and universal service,” said Dagne. “I don’t think you can measure public service by number of people helped or amount of money given, but I think it’s sort of an ethos that instructs your work and how you think about your work.”
Dagne will be investigating human rights abuses in her year-long fellowship at HRW. Her work will build on the knowledge she gleaned from her constitutional, administrative and immigration law courses, internships with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and U.S. District Court and her experience working at the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia.
The experience working in the clinic “had a great impact on my outlook on the human rights community,” she said. It exposed her to a number of advocates who demonstrated innovative ways to address and conduct the “grunt work” – interviews, translations, field research – of being a human rights lawyer and supporter. “It was a great marriage of both the theory and actual practice.”
Throughout her public service work, Dagne has taken seriously the gravity of the role she will assume as a human rights lawyer.
“Anyone who works in these areas, you have to recognize that the job that you have is because there is a grave injustice somewhere in the world” or “literally streets away from us,” Dagne said.
