asta p h c 25 years of pils - law.georgetown.edu …former public interest law scholars sarah craven...

38 S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 3 • g e o r g e t o w n L a w

25 Years of PILS


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39S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 3 • g e o r g e t o w n L a w

By Ann W. Parks

In the fall of 1988, Georgetown’s first class of Public Interest Law Scholars — 15 members of the enter-

ing first-year J.D. class — arrived on the Law Center campus, looking forward to studying with a group of like-minded peers.

“In the mid-1980s, entrance surveys showed that 11 percent of students entering the Law Center … wanted careers in public service, but only one percent of our graduates actually went into public service jobs,” explains Professor Phil Schrag, who started the PILS program with Professor Jeffrey Bauman and would serve as its director until 2009. “When we asked stu-dents why they dropped off their intended career paths, we discovered that a kind of ‘group-think’ developed … that only private sector work was respectable.”

Schrag and other faculty members believed that creating an identifiable group of students who were dedicated to public service — and who could support each other in their career goals — would help those students remain committed to what they had come to law school to do. “At many institutions [back then], public interest minded students were largely isolated, adrift in a sea of firm-driven classmates,” says Carmia N. Caesar, who directs the program today. “Phil Schrag, through the creation of PILS, provided those students with a life raft.”

The initiative worked. Twenty-five years later, approximately 250 students have graduated as Public Interest Law Scholars and moved on to distinguished careers in government, public interest law firms, prosecutors’ offices, legal aid, public defender work and other public interest positions.

PILS students — now eight per year — receive scholarship assistance and make a moral commit-ment to become public interest lawyers. Since the moral commitment was instituted in 1996, most PILS

students have embarked on public interest careers and many now serve as mentors to the program, which includes a first-year public interest law seminar. “On several occasions, a PILS student has gone for a job interview and found that the interviewer was a PILS alum,” Schrag says.

The program can boast two former Supreme Court clerks among its alumni [Caitlin Halligan (L’95) and Jennifer Clark (L’08)] and two who later served as special assistants to U.S. Cabinet members [Alexandra Stanton (L’98), who worked for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo, and Lee Mc-Goldrick (L’99), who worked with Secretary of Educa-tion Richard Riley]. The current mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, is an alum — Angel Taveras (L’96) — as is the district attorney of the city of Philadelphia, R. Seth Williams (L’92).

Today, PILS students “are working in ways that did not exist 10 or 15 years ago,” Caesar says. Fawah Akwo (L’15), for example, is working to develop strategies to increase access to technology for victims of domestic violence in Sub-Saharan Africa. “For these students, who are already making significant contributions to their communities, a Georgetown Law degree provides a set of skills and training that will further enhance the change that they are able to bring to the world.”

In these pages, we profile five PILS alumni: E. Débora Benchoam (C’87, L’00), coordinator of the protection group at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; Sarah Craven (L’92), director of the United Nations Population Fund’s Washington, D.C., office; McGoldrick, Teach For America’s vice president of legislative and regulatory analysis; Eric Rosenthal (L’92), founder and executive director of Disability Rights International; and Williams, who was honored at Reunion Weekend with one of the Law Center’s 2012 Paul R. Dean Alumni Awards. Their inspiring stories speak to the value and effectiveness of this remarkable program.


Former Public interest law scholars sarah craven (l’92) with girls from the Biruh tesfa (Bright Future) Project in addis ababa, lee mcgold-rick (l’99) as a White house Fellow in 2001 and eric rosenthal (l’92), taking notes at the vulcan psychiatric facility in romania in 2004.

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As coordinator of the protection

group at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, E. Débora Benchoam (C’87, L’00) reviews urgent requests for the Commission to act on a wide range of abuses

— from forced disappearances to torture to prison conditions. Part of the Organization of American States, IACHR strives to promote and protect human rights in the Americas.

“That human rights are protected and respected is one of the goals that has always been in my everyday work, and that’s what I would like to see accom-plished,” she says. “I still see many places where there are many human rights violations, and that is something that is necessary to try to address.”

Benchoam knows more than most people about human rights violations. Long before she entered Georgetown Law’s Public Interest Law Scholars program in the fall of 1997, she spent four years in jail as a political prisoner in Argentina. When Ben-choam was 16, she and her 17-year-old brother were student activists during the military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983 in that country. Benchoam’s brother was organizing a protest against the military in 1977 when soldiers showed up at the family’s home in Buenos Aires.

“The military blasted the door open at dawn to enter my home, where they killed my brother in front of me and they took me to jail,” she says. “I was in prison for four and a half years with no charges until I was able to be released with the help of international pressure.”

One of those who helped secure Benchoam’s release was Marshall Meyer, a rabbi from the United States working in Argentina. Another was U.S. Rep.

25 YeArS of PILS

e. Débora Benchoam (C’87, L’00)


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William Lehman, D-Fla., who not only negotiated diplomatically on her behalf but helped her attend Georgetown University following her release from prison in 1981, when she was 19. “I was determined to do something with human rights,” she says.

Necessary changesAs an undergraduate, Benchoam pursued her own independent study program on the history and politics of Latin America. After graduating in 1987, she learned about the law firsthand as one of several plaintiffs suing an Argentine general, Carlos Guill-ermo Suarez Mason, in U.S. federal court for human rights violations during the dictatorship. The case, a civil suit brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act, was successful; one of Benchoam’s lawyers, in fact, was Professor David Cole, then working for the Cen-ter for Constitutional Rights.

After earning a master’s degree in education at Columbia in 1991, Benchoam moved back to Argentina, by then a democracy. But while working on a dissertation — on creativity as a form of survival in detention centers and concentration camps — she realized she needed to learn more. “I started to work in education and human rights, but I saw through my work that other kinds of changes were necessary … so I decided to come back [to the United States] and study law,” she says.

‘fantastic medium’As a PILS student at Georgetown Law, Benchoam first worked with alum Eric Rosenthal (L’92) — who had by then founded Mental Disability Rights International [see page 46] — in work that started as a summer Equal Justice Fellowship then continued into her second year at Georgetown Law. Benchoam, in fact, would help Rosenthal co-author the Septem-ber 2000 report that brought worldwide attention to abuses in Mexican psychiatric facilities.

“It’s very hard for most people to understand what it’s like to be detained in horrible conditions like this,” Rosenthal said recently of their Mexico investiga-tion. “You walk into a horrendous psychiatric hospital where people are abused, they are held in terrible conditions, naked, dehumanized. Débora, who had herself been detained, was able to cut through the many barriers and relate directly to the people who were in these facilities.”

During her third year of law school, with a sepa-rate grant from the PILS program, Benchoam began volunteer work at the IACHR — where she works as an attorney today. “The PILS program was a fantas-tic medium for me,” Benchoam says — adding that though she was already deeply committed to human rights as a career, PILS supplied her with the means to work as a professional in the area. “For that I have been most grateful. … I was already focused on an area, but sometimes it helps students who do not have experience in public interest to have a chance to broaden their view of human rights. … [So] it’s very important — not only to support the PILS program, but for PILS to continue.”



According to a report issued by the U.N.

Population Fund, one out of nine girls world-wide is married before her 15th birthday. Girls not unlike Kakenya Ntaiya, engaged at the age of 5 in the small Maasai village of

Enoosaen, Kenya. Ntaiya was supposed to undergo the practice of female genital mutilation and be mar-ried by the time she reached her teen years, but as a young girl, she made a terrible bargain: she would willingly undergo the circumcision ritual if her family would allow her to finish high school.

She later negotiated with village elders to let her attend college in the United States on the condition that she return to Enoosaen and use her education to help others there. She earned a Ph.D. in education and now runs a girls’ school in Kenya.

“I’ve been with her every step of the way with that girls’ school,” says Sarah Craven (L’92), a former Pub-lic Interest Law Scholar who now acts as the chief of the Population Fund’s Washington, D.C., office. “We’re about to bring in our fifth class of girls, and one of the pledges for being part of that school is that the families and the girls have to sign an agreement that they will not undergo female genital mutilation.

As a result, it’s spreading through the entire commu-nity, because so many people want their daughters to go to that school.”

Craven has been trying to raise awareness about child marriage for more than a decade, she says. When she invited Ntaiya to speak at a panel she was organizing on the issue 10 years ago, the topic received little worldwide attention; today, it’s reached the highest levels of the U.S. government and the United Nations.

A U.N. resolution last year, for example, designat-ed 10/11/12 as the first ever International Day of the Girl Child — calling for an end to child marriage and focusing on girls’ education as a key strategy in the fight against it. The day was celebrated worldwide, and events in New York and Washington, D.C., were attended by such dignitaries as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For Craven, whose agency has made “a huge ef-fort to support new programming in this effort,” the day reflected 10 years of hard work and dedication. “That’s how long it takes [for something like this] to percolate,” Craven says. “It takes time and awareness to build these things.”

25 YeArS of PILS

Sarah Craven (L’92)


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Like-minded peersCraven knew even before law school that she wanted to work in the field of human rights. A native of Hawaii, she earned a B.A. in anthropology and political science from Macalester College in 1985. She then headed to the University of Cambridge for a master’s degree in anthropology before coming to Washington, D.C.

“I ended up working with my hometown senator [Spark Matsunaga, D-Hawaii] on aging issues, and then I ended up working for Sen. Tim Wirth [D-Colo.],” Craven said. During this same time, she was applying to law schools. “I really wanted to be able to have a credential that would allow me to be an advo-cate for the issues I cared most deeply about, which were girls and the status of women in the developing world.”

Once accepted at Georgetown, she applied to the PILS program. “We [the PILS students] were both an experiment as well as something that Phil [Schrag] cared deeply about. … Georgetown’s a big law school, so it [was wonderful] to have that small community of like-minded peers.”

And with mentors like Professor Peter Edelman for constitutional law, Professor Charles Abernathy for civil procedure and civil rights and Professor Susan Deller Ross for what was then called the Sex Discrimination Clinic, her interest in women’s rights — and international women’s rights — flourished. She spent her 2L summer in Geneva, working for the International Commission of Jurists, an organiza-tion looking at human rights issues facing lawyers and judges around the world. “To be able to work for a very … pro-active group that could really push the U.N., it was just an incredible summer,” she said. “I really did go into law school knowing that I wasn’t going to come out working for a firm.”

The Spirit of PILSAfter graduation, Craven spent a year with the Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow-ship Program and another year as a policy adviser for the nonprofit Centre for Development and Population Activities, where she helped people running family planning clinics develop political and advocacy skills.

“There was a 1994 International Conference on Population and Development where the world came together and said we are not going to look at popula-tion growth as an unchecked explosion; instead, we are looking at this from a human rights framework, that every individual has the right to determine their own family size and has the means to do so,” Cra-ven explained, noting that in connection with that conference she got to travel all over the world doing advocacy training. “That was perhaps the best job I ever had.”

After four years with the Center, she headed to the State Department to work for her old boss, Tim Wirth, as senior adviser at the Office of Population; in 1998, she moved into her current position as director of the Population Fund’s D.C. office.

“The spirit of this job is often the kind of spirit that I think PILS created in me,” she said. “This is a very entrepreneurial, creative opportunity and I’ve gotten to work on so many issues that are near and dear to my heart.”



When Lee McGold-rick (L’99) was a

college student at Mc-Gill University in the early 1990s, she spent her summers back in this country, teaching at a Head Start pro-gram in Albany, New

York. So it was only natural for her Canadian college roommate to ask McGoldrick if she had ever heard of a new organization called Teach For America.

“She had seen a ‘60 Minutes’ show that did a profile on Teach For America,” says McGoldrick, who is now the organization’s vice president of legislative and regulatory analysis. Back then, she was unfamil-iar with the nonprofit, which recruits recent college graduates and professionals to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools.

But McGoldrick was intrigued enough, in those pre-Internet days, to pick up the phone and call in-formation — guessing, correctly, that the organization was based in New York City.

“I remember just dialing 212-555-1212, and I was very lucky, because I said the wrong name,” says McGoldrick. “I said, ‘Is there a ‘Teach America’ and the operator said no, and they could have just ended the call there.”

Fortunately for McGoldrick’s future career, the operator noted that there was, in fact, a “Teach For America,” and three weeks later, she was on a Grey-hound bus from Montreal to New York for an inter-view. Not long afterward, she was teaching English at an inner-city school in Los Angeles. “I learned how to be a very good manager, because there was a lot to manage,” she said. “I had no fewer than 150 students a day, sometimes more.”

After a few years, McGoldrick decided she need-ed to learn more, and law school was the logical next step. “The day I was accepted into the Public Interest Law Scholars program was the absolute tipping point, and the day that happened was the day I decided to come to Georgetown,” she says.

Other factors would contribute greatly to the PILS experience, from the initial phone call from Professor Phil Schrag to the “incredible practical and clinical experience” of many of the Georgetown Law faculty.

“All of those were big factors in my decision, and when I came and visited I remember thinking that Georgetown felt extremely practical [and] hands-on; there was a mature student body and I think the presence of the robust evening division contributed to this,” she said. “I thought, this is the place for me.”

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Lee McGoldrick (L’99)


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Street LawAt Georgetown, McGoldrick spent her summers working as a congressional fellow in the education office of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D.-Mass., and also did an Equal Justice Foundation Fellow-ship working on local D.C. education issues for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

Two clinics would also help shape her future career. One was Chai Feldblum’s Federal Legisla-tion and Administrative Clinic, which McGoldrick draws on in her job today. “I spend a lot of my days now looking at statutes and regulations, helping folks understand what they say and what the implications are, and I really credit Georgetown with equipping me well to engage in that,” she says.

The other was Professor Rick Roe’s Street Law Clinic, which sends law students into high schools to teach about the law. In fact, McGoldrick would stay on as an adjunct professor in the Street Law Clinic after graduation.

She was serving in the role one day in fall 1999 when a student, Josh Kern (L’01), came into the Street Law seminar and remarked that he’d like to build a better high school than what he was then witnessing in Washington, D.C. So at Kern’s urg-ing, McGoldrick drafted a syllabus for a new class in Modern Education Reforms. The class, launched less than two months later, would culminate in a proposal to launch a charter school, now known as Thurgood Marshall Academy.

McGoldrick moved on to a White House Fel-lowship, where she was assigned to work at the U.S. Department of Education. The highlight of the fel-lowship was an international policy trip to India and Pakistan in the summer of 2001. “I remember visiting

a school in a refugee camp along the Pakistan-Afghan border … that was a really great year for both sort of diving into the area that I was specializing in but also expanding my thinking and expanding my exposure to other issues, too.”

Master planTeach For America was not a given — McGoldrick did look at some law firms — but after working at a large government organization like the U.S. Depart-ment of Education, the idea of signing on with a nimble new nonprofit appealed to her, she said. And as a former TFA member, she definitely knew the ropes.

She came on board as vice president of regional operations and transitioned into vice president of growth strategy in 2006. She took over her current role as vice president of legislative and regulatory analysis last year. “I definitely felt the draw to get back to some of what I really loved while I was in law school.”

And while she says she’s “not big on master plans” — she couldn’t have planned for that kindly tele-phone operator in the 1990s to point her in the right direction, she says — McGoldrick can trace a career connection back to PILS.

“The Public Interest Law Scholars program, it’s why I came to Georgetown, and then so much of what I’ve done since Georgetown connects deeply to it,” she says. “Especially now, I’m thinking if I had not taken Chai’s clinic … how would I be doing what I’m doing right now?” she explains. “I came to see, wow, I really think this stuff is fun — so I’m really grateful for that.”



25 YeArS of PILS

eric rosenthal (L’92)

eric Rosenthal (L’92) studied mental

health in college, planning to become a psychiatrist. But during a volunteer stint in a psychiatric hospital, he realized he didn’t want to be a mental health

professional. So he went to Israel and herded sheep.“It was my first work experience after college,”

laughs Rosenthal, who is today the director of Dis-ability Rights International, the nonprofit he founded after graduating from Georgetown Law. Back then, he was working at Neve Shalom, a peace-building village of Jews and Palestinian Arabs of Israeli citizen-ship. “One of the important skills I learned in peace building between Arabs and Jews [was] Bedouin sheep herding techniques … we used the traditional Bedouin approach, which is to wander across the hill-sides with our sheep, and so learned about Bedouin culture.”

The experience in Israel made Rosenthal want to change focus — or so he thought — and become an international human rights lawyer instead of a psy-chiatrist. But those two seemingly disparate interests, mental health and international human rights, would one day merge in a way that neither Rosenthal — nor anyone else, for that matter — could have envisioned.

From the hillsides of Israel, Rosenthal came to Washington to work in what is now the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. There, he learned about legal rights issues relating to mental health, bid-ing his time while he applied to law school to study international human rights. In the late 1980s, the two subjects were still worlds apart.

The critical moment came at Georgetown Law when Rosenthal — a Public Interest Law Scholar — found himself in his first class in international human rights. “People said a little bit about themselves, and I mentioned that I was interested in human rights but that I had this mental health background,” Rosenthal recalled. “The professor after class walked over and said to me, ‘For your term paper there’s a subject that I’d really like you to write about … I have never seen anything written in the international human rights field about the international human rights of people with mental disabilities.’”

overlookedThe (adjunct) professor was Juan Mendez — who is today the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. “He was one of the founders of the human rights field; he was a political prisoner himself in Argentina, he was tortured, and I’ve since come to understand why he would understand the mental health implications of human rights issues because of the incredible impact


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that it had on him and his family to be detained and tortured,” Rosenthal explains. “So it is significant that he was the one who charged me with this … I wrote a paper for his class that I later turned into a law review article, and that paper and that law review article really provided the framework for the next 20 years of my career.”

As Rosenthal soon discovered, he was entering a field that didn’t exist. Scouring the law library in 1990, he found work about human rights abuses against political dissidents in Soviet psychiatric hos-pitals — but not much else. “It had never occurred to people that [persons] who are in the psychiatric hospitals who are not political dissidents … also had rights,” Rosenthal explains. “I knew from my civil rights background that in the United States, we spent 20, 30 years working to deinstitutionalize and to protect the rights of people with disabilities under civil rights law … [so] why is it that in the interna-tional area this issue has been completely and totally overlooked?”

Using the summer research funds he received as a PILS student and a fellowship he obtained from the Ford Foundation, Rosenthal headed back to the Middle East during his 1L and 2L summers to do field research on mental health and human rights issues. “PILS was important as a supportive commu-nity,” Rosenthal says. “But the fact that it gave me the support to get that practical hands-on experience was invaluable.”

GratifyingRosenthal launched Mental Disability Rights Interna-tional (now Disability Rights International) right after law school — and has never looked back. A report on abuses in Mexican psychiatric facilities received worldwide attention in 2000, prompting the new Mexican government that came into power to initiate a resolution to begin drafting what would later be-come the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

An analysis of how U.S. foreign assistance could perpetuate the segregation of persons with disabili-ties when used in a discriminatory manner abroad led Congress to adopt legislation requiring the U.S. Agency for International Development to abide by its own disability policy — ensuring that federal dollars are used in a manner that is inclusive and appropri-ate for people with disabilities. For his efforts, he received the Betts Award from the American As-sociation of Persons with Disabilities, a prestigious disability rights award in the United States.

To Rosenthal, the most satisfying thing about his work has been the transformation of the field as a whole. “When I first started saying I’m a lawyer, I want to do international human rights for people with disabilities, in most parts of the world people would just look at me and say, ‘What do lawyers have to do with mental health? What does human rights have to do with mental health?’” he says. “And in 20 years I’ve seen a total transformation from it being an overlooked field to it being one of the core areas of international human rights. That’s a deeply gratifying feeling.”



25 YeArS of PILS

r. Seth Williams (L’92)

When Philadelphia District Attorney

R. Seth Williams (L’92) visited South Africa last year on an Eisenhower Fellowship, he noticed men bowing their heads to their elders and saying the word “ubuntu.”

“It’s a Zulu word that means respect and humani-ty, but the deeper meaning, when someone bows their head and says ‘ubuntu,’ [is] ‘I am who I am because of you,’” said Williams. “There’s such a great connection between these people, an interrelationship, and it’s the lack of that which allows for so much street vio-lence, I believe, in Philadelphia — the fact that these young men don’t think they are connected with each other, when really they have so much in common.”

Fortunately, “ubuntu” is a principle that has reso-nated with Williams during his life, even if he didn’t yet know the word. He still refers to Professor Phil Schrag, who directed the PILS program while Wil-liams was at Georgetown Law, as “Uncle Phil.”

“He always took a personal interest in our careers, in guiding us through law school, and was always accessible to help us and to answer questions and to guide us,” Williams says. “I’m very grateful for him.”

Another role model was his father — who Wil-liams called “his best friend” in a Georgetown Law video interview that aired when Williams was honored with one of five Paul R. Dean Alumni Awards at Reunion Weekend last fall. “My father would often repeat at dinner, or wherever we were, unless you are willing to be part of the solution you forfeit your right to complain.”

Serving the publicIt’s a right that Williams himself has never given up. As a teenager in Philadelphia in May 1985, he saw more than 60 homes in his neighborhood burn down — the result of a bomb dropped by police on a house owned by members of MOVE, a black liberation group. Williams, then in high school, led an effort to get clothes for the survivors.

And when he reached Penn State, he was presi-dent of the entire undergraduate student government — representing 57,000 students — as well as presi-dent of the Black Caucus. “I led marches and protests and sit-ins, and was arrested protesting racism at Penn State,” Williams says. “I knew that I wanted to go to law school, to serve the public in some fashion.”


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The PILS program was one of the reasons Wil-liams chose Georgetown Law — in addition to the school’s Washington, D.C., location. Like Craven, his mentor would also be Professor Peter Edelman, former legislative aide to Robert Kennedy.

“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to work for the NAACP’s legal defense fund like my hero, Thurgood Marshall, or if I wanted to do something with the [disabled] or with housing law,” Williams says. The critical moment came when Wil-liams took part in Schrag’s Center for Applied Legal Studies clinic and the Criminal Justice Clinic with Professor John Copacino. “From [those experiences] I really knew that I wanted to be a champion and an advocate for victims of crime and do all that I could to ensure that the Constitution was protected.”

Being a championWilliams still remembers the date he began working at the D.A.’s office as an assistant district attorney, September 8, 1992. He worked there a decade. But be-cause at Georgetown he also learned that lawyers can “reinvent” themselves, he next tried his hand at private practice in a mid-sized law firm. He was then appoint-

ed inspector general by the mayor of Philadelphia. After another stint at a law firm, he ran for district

attorney in 2009 — winning 75 percent of the vote — and has been serving in the role since January 4, 2010. He is the city’s first African American D.A. “It’s my responsibility to ensure public safety in the city of Philadelphia and to ensure that the right people are prosecuted, that their rights aren’t trampled upon, but also to be an advocate and a champion for the victims of crime,” he says.

He’s been broadening his horizons as well. During his Eisenhower Fellowship to Australia and South Africa, for example, Williams examined the successes of other nations that have taken a holistic approach to addressing crime, looking at how education, econom-ic development and public health issues affect law enforcement. And of course, he’s stayed connected to Georgetown, participating in the alumni admissions program and fulfilling PILS-related speaking requests that come his way.

“The PILS program is a wonderful [way] to encourage students to remain committed to careers in public interest law,” Williams says, “and that’s the most important thing.”


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