Pro Bono Publico Award Finalists
At the October Mini-Conference, we announced the finalists for this year’s PSJD Pro Bono Publico Award. To commend each finalist on their hard work and to demonstrate how difficult it will be to select the winner, we will feature a different finalist on the blog every Monday for five weeks.
This week we feature Emily Holland from Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California.
Emily Holland
Emily was chosen as a finalist because of the strength of her dedication to pro bono service, which has taken her overseas to help ensure individuals’ rights are protected. Emily’s passion for volunteering began before law school, and her experiences have driven her to continue her work at Pepperdine. During her 1L summer, Emily worked as a judicial extern to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rwanda, where she learned about the ethics of sentencing and criminal justice. She was able to apply what she learned on a week-long clinic in Uganda where she successfully negotiated a plea deal based on insufficient evidence. But Emily’s passion for service knows no borders as is evident by her participation in the Community Justice and Legal Aid Clinics at Pepperdine. Her work with these clinics allowed her to advocate for human rights and access to justice in international and domestic contexts. As her supervisors have stated, Emily’s “priority is people,” and she is described as “a true representation of the spirit of pro bono.”