 Student wins Google Public Policy Summer Fellowship
Brian Rowe ’09 was selected for a Google Public Policy Fellowship to work at Public Knowledge in Washington D.C. in summer 2009. He was selected for one of 15 spots from more than 600 applicants.
Public Knowledge is a nonprofit organization that works on access to knowledge and technology issues including broadband, copyright, public domain and net neutrality. The fellowship will give him first-hand experience working with legislators and activists on cutting-edge technology and access issues.
Rowe is the founder of Freedom for IP, a volunteer organization started in 2005 focusing on the intersection of human rights and intellectual property. He interned at Creative Commons last summer working on public domain and noncommercial use in copyright. He serves on the Washington State Bar Association's Access to Justice Technology Committee and is an active member of Students for Free Culture. Last fall, he wrote a mock trail for the Future of the Law Institute that was used by high school students learning about fair use of music and bloggers’ rights. He also helped plan the Seattle Law of the Commons conference.
Rowe has a background in information technology and has a B.S. in Informatics and a B.A. in political science, both from University of Washington. His writing can be found at BrianRowe.org. |
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Persis Yu
Student wins New York fellowship to work on credit reporting
One of the law school’s first Scholars for Justice is also the first student this year to win a post-graduate fellowship to complete a public interest project.
Persis Yu ’09 received the two-year Hanna S. Cohn Equal Justice Fellowship, awarded to a talented, committed law school graduate at the beginning of her or his career in the area of poverty law. She will begin working at Empire Justice Center in Rochester, N.Y., in September.
The goal of the fellowship is to increase legal advocacy for Greater Rochester’s poor people in high priority areas that are currently underserved. Yu, who has been interested in credit reporting and authored a note as a staffer for the Seattle Journal for Social Justice on the issue, proposed a project to pursue litigation and advocacy work to address inaccuracies, misuse and bias in the credit reporting system. She will work on consumer protection cases, develop a clinic to address fair credit reporting issues and pursue impact litigation and legislation.
Yu is thrilled that she received a fellowship doing exactly the type of work she wanted to do. She says credit reporting is biased against those with low incomes and hurts people who are applying for jobs or seeking insurance as more and more companies use credit reports in making decisions. Having a mortgage boosts your score, for instance, while paying your rent on time doesn’t get reported. Student loans are considered “good debt” while other loans can lower a score. Many times, those with the most problems on their reports have limited help in getting inaccuracies corrected.
“The original idea was to determine if people qualify for mortgages and credit cards, but it’s gone so far beyond that,” Yu said. “It wasn’t supposed to be used to determine whether someone is going to get sick or get in an accident.”
Yu came to law school after being a social worker and earning a master’s in social work. She worked to create legislation on children’s issues including child care, foster care and Children and Family Services. She has done direct service work for Child Care Resources, working with families to find child care, specifically homeless families and those who were trying to get off public assistance.
In law school she has been active in the Asian Pacific Islander and the LGBT communities, SJSJ and the Social Justice Coalition. She was a law clerk at the Washington State Attorney General’s Office.
She received one of the first Scholars for Justice awards, a full-tuition scholarship given to a student committed to social justice. With many public agencies facing hiring freezes or cutbacks in the difficult economy, Yu is grateful for the opportunity the fellowship provides.
“I take my moral commitment to do public interest work very seriously,” she said. “But beyond that, law school is a hard experience, and I wanted to leave and do what I came here to do.”
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