2020 Peggy Browning Summer Fellows

2020 Peggy Browning Summer Fellows Jordan Palmer JD’21 University of California Los Angeles School of Law Los Angeles, CA Gilbert and Sackman Los Angeles, CA Jordan is an activist and organizer in Los Angeles interested in prison abolition and the labor movement. She is a volunteer organizer with her school’s National Lawyers Guild, a co-founder of the Survivors and Allies Support Network, a co-chair of the Labor and Economic Justice Clinic, and the Jane Kahn Prison Law Fellow for the Prison Law and Policy Program. She is the recipient of her school’s Public Interest Law Program’s 2019 U Serve LA Award. Last summer, Jordan learned about progressive movement lawyering as a summer law clerk for UNITE HERE Local 11. When she is not in school, Jordan is a proud volunteer organizer with Soldiers of Pole, the newly-formed strippers’ union and partner of CWA launching a stripper-led labor movement. David Orkin JD’22 City University of New York School of Law New York, NY Make the Road New York New York, NY Prior to law school, David was a paralegal at an immigration law firm specializing in deportation defense and asylum in San Francisco. He first became interested in migrant justice as a student at Vassar College. His love of food, cooking, and gardening led him to work at several small farms, where he became involved in farmworker advocacy. These experiences inspired his academic studies in migration and border studies, and eventually he moved to Southern Arizona to get more involved in the border anti-militarization movement. Since then, he has worked in migrant humanitarian aid in both Arizona and Southern Mexico, the Arizona-Palestine solidarity movement, and provided support to migrants in detention centers in the U.S. Ashleen O’Brien JD’21 University of Washington School of Law Seattle, WA Fair Worker Center Seattle, WA Ashleen hopes to use her legal training to support the organizing of low wage workers who are at the forefront of movements for radical social change. Prior to law school, she spent two years working at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, an immigrant legal advocacy organization based in Seattle. She also worked as a server at a small restaurant, where she organized with coworkers to challenge the employer’s minimum wage violations. Both of these work experiences demonstrated the ways people of color, immigrants, and women face disproportionate barriers to accessing safe and respectful workplaces. Ashleen then spent her first law school summer as a Laurel Rubin Farmworker Justice Intern at Columbia Legal Services. She also engages in community organizing around issues of prison abolition and anti-imperialism. Sommer Omar JD’21 Yale Law School New Haven, CT New York Hotel & Motel Trades Council New York, NY Sommer first gained an interest in defending labor after the 2016 election while working at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. There, she learned about right-to-work laws, the erosion of wage theft enforcement, and the cascading material and legal consequences of an increasingly fissured labor market. Shortly before law school, she was a policy fellow on an attorney general’s campaign in New York where she honed her interest in how to leverage progressive legal action to strengthen the labor movement. In law school, she volunteered with UNITE HERE Local 33, where she helped facilitate a school-wide comment- writing campaign to delay the implementation of the NLRB’s recently announced rule denying graduate students the right to organize as employees.

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