Public Advocates 2021 Fellows and Law Clerks

AJ Hudson is an environmental justice organizer, climate activist, and community educator. Before law school, AJ spent five years teaching and eventually co-founded a public high school in one of the most disenfranchised, polluted, and over-policed neighborhoods in Brooklyn, NY. His experiences teaching Black students who were already overwhelmingly socially marginalized while managing an emerging lead poisoning crisis in a decrepit school building, led to his pivot towards environmental justice activism. In this work he has led community workshops on climate justice and political action with UPROSE, organized coalitions to pass New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and helped to plan and execute the 2019 Climate Justice Youth Summit, the nation’s largest gathering for young people of color on climate change.

Before starting law school, Elóra spent eight years teaching Resource Special Education in Richmond, CA. Additionally, she co-founded and directed the Richmond site of Aim High, an organization focused on providing summer opportunities for students from low-income neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Elóra has worked with students in grades K-8, exclusively in Title I Schools. As a teacher and school leader, Elóra encouraged every student, teacher, and family member to fully embrace the theory of growth mindset and the power of community. She worked to organize families, teachers, and students around issues of school leadership, teacher shortages, and student needs. She is particularly passionate about ensuring that all students receive access to a quality education.

Elóra is currently a J.D. candidate at Stanford University, where she is wrapping up her first year. She graduated with honors from The University of Chicago, where she studied Anthropology and Biology, and she holds an M.A. in Special Education from Loyola Marymount University. Elóra was recently elected as the incoming President of Stanford Law School’s Youth & Education Advocates organization and she is additionally a board member of the Black Law Students Association and the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. When she is not working on understanding and complicating systems, you can usually find Elóra in her vegetable garden or curled up with a good book and her dog, Lorca.

Esme is a rising 2L at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Prior to law school, Esme worked for Bet Tzedek Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm representing low-income and vulnerable communities. She has also worked with WE ACT for Environmental Justice and Legal Hand, where she connected community members to housing, immigration services, and public benefits.

Esme graduated from Columbia University with a BA in American Studies. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she has a deeply personal interest in racial and environmental justice. She looks forward to joining Public Advocates this summer to continue challenging the systemic causes of poverty and racial injustice.

Grace is currently pursuing her J.D. at U.C. Berkeley School of Law. She is passionate about youth advocacy and education equity, issues that she first started working on as a volunteer tutor to incarcerated students while an undergraduate at New York University. Since graduating with her B.A. in Education Access and Social Justice, she went on to earn her M.A. in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount University and teach kindergarten in the Oakland Unified School District. As a law student, Grace is a general editor for the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, a student advocate with the Youth Advocacy Project, and an intake counselor at the ACLU of Northern California.

Gracen Evall will be joining Public Advocates as a summer clerk with the Metropolitan Equity Team. She is a law student at U.C. Berkeley focused on housing and environmental justice. Gracen is a member of the Tenants’ Rights Workshop, where she conducts intakes with low-income tenants, and of Berkeley’s Ecology Law Quarterly. Before law school, Gracen was a project assistant at Sanctuary for Families, where she advocated for survivors of domestic violence on matters related to housing, public benefits and education. In her free time, Gracen bakes too much dessert, enjoys the outdoors and watches bad TV.

Jaden Lajyll Zwick (she/her/hers) proudly hails from the city of Federal Way, Washington and the greater Seattle region. Having watched her older brother be criminalized and disenfranchised from a young age, Jaden is motivated by her belief that everyone deserves fair access to an equitable education, rather than discriminatory discipline. Her work with the Spokane NAACP, Seattle Human Rights Commission, Community Leadership Institute civic fellowship, and non-profit college access networks have all shaped her commitment to community-based solutions. She plans to pursue a career in movement lawyering as a nexus between her passion for community engagement and legal advocacy. Orienting her work around her values of faith, liberation, and solidarity, Jaden Zwick is a rising 2L at UCLA School of Law in the Epstein Public Interest Law and Policy Program, as well as the Critical Race Studies Program.

Maen is a second-year student at UC Davis. Leading up to law school, Maen worked on the “We are all Students” project for the inclusion and representation of formerly incarcerated students. Maen was also a member of a research team for Californians for Safety and Justice conducting research at the intersection of law and sociology. On the more instructional side, Maen has two years paraprofessional experience with the Woodland Joint Unified School District’s special education program and Instructed sociological research methods at Woodland Community College (Yuba). In Maen’s first law school summer, Maen interned at California Lawyers for the Arts doing alternative dispute resolution and mediation related work.