The scholarships, all of which the Association attempts to maintain in the amount of at least $5,000, are presented to the winners at the Annual Meeting in August.
2024 SCHOLARSHIP WINNER
Recipient of the 2023 Jacobsen Scholarship
Mersadie Murray (“Sadie”) is ranked first in her class of 282 students at the University of Wisconsin Law School (UW Law), is a member of the UW Law Review, UW Law Moot Court Board, and serves on the e-board of the Public Interest Law Foundation for the past two years. She has undertaken a passionate and selfless commitment to public service in her representation of prisoners serving excessive sentences. In pursuit of her passion, Sadie does the heavy lifting that high-quality criminal defense work demands, including combing through piles of medical records, scouring hundreds of pages of prison records and court reporter’s transcripts, examining police reports and attorney files. Prior to attending law school, Sadie was involved with the restorative justice project and worked directly with inmates at a local prison, which involved facilitating talking circles, organizing speakers, and developing community service projects for inmates. Working with vulnerable clients involved in the court system requires the ability to communicate clearly and in a way that anyone can understand (a skill she learned as the live-in caregiver to and teacher of an autistic child the year prior to law school). During Sadie’s experience with the restorative justice project, she experienced firsthand the personal transformation an offender undergoes when given the resources and opportunity to restore some of the damage for which the offender was responsible. While not entirely sure what she plans to do after law school, Sadie’s experiences before and during law school have made her passionate about helping vulnerable people and she hopes to assist with many more personal transformations in her future professional life.
Lindsey Hernandez
Recipient of the 2024 Cohn/Dorsett Memorial Scholarship
Lindsey Hernandez is attending the Quinnipiac School of Law where she is ranked number ten of her class or the top 9% of the class. This earned her an award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Constitutional Law, and the John Hanny Memorial Scholarship, an endowed scholarship for her commitment to giving back to her community. She is also a student working with the Civil Justice Clinic, a Clinic that Assists low-income clients in need of immigration assistance, including asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors, undocumented victims of domestic violence and of other serious crimes, such as human trafficking. During her first semester in the Clinic, Lindsey did an outstanding job of working with an unaccompanied minor from Guatemala and his monolingual mother who were together seeking probate court orders and findings to support an immigration petition. Using an interpreter and her own intermediate Spanish, Lindsey was able to give the mother the support she needed, and, on the day of trial, Lindsey and the mother together presented coherent, credible, and confident testimony that ultimately convinced the judge to grant the requests he had previously denied. Lindsey’s commitment to her schooling and volunteer work is extraordinary. What is most significant is that she has accomplished all this while working twenty hours per week to put herself through law school.