Louis Lin ‘25 awarded the Skadden Fellowship
“Joining the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau has been my best decision at HLS”
Louis Lin ’25 and Tamara Shamir ’25 will soon embark on two-year fellowships pursuing public interest law on a full-time basis as recipients of the 2025 Skadden Fellowship. The Skadden Foundation launched the fellowship program in 1988, in line with their mission aiming to expand the legal services available to economically disadvantaged communities by supporting newly graduated lawyers beginning their long-term public interest careers.
Next year, Louis Lin will be in Pennsylvania, working at Philadelphia Legal Assistance to address displacement in Philadelphia’s low-income Asian American communities by providing comprehensive direct representation to tenants facing evictions and engaging in systemic advocacy to expand tenant protections and advance language access for AAPI and immigrant residents.
Tamara Shaw will spend her fellowship with Mabel Center for Immigrant Justice just across the river in Boston, providing direct representation to prevent wrongful deportations of asylum seekers in accelerated asylum programs, such as the Asylum Processing Rule and Family Expedited Removal Management.
We caught up with the fellows to learn more about their projects and how their public interest law school experiences have influenced their career plans.
Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs (OCP): What drew you to apply for the Skadden Fellowship?
Tamara Shamir (TS): The Skadden Fellowship allows me to dedicate my time to developing a representation model tailored to rapid deportation cases in an increasingly urgent environment. I loved their emphasis on working directly with affected communities; this is not only the most undervalued (and underfunded) type of legal work but also the best place to start a public interest career.
I also liked their focus on creating sustainable projects that uniquely contribute to a nonprofit’s work while building on its expertise. I felt strongly that this was what I had with the Mabel Center.
Finally, Skadden works hard to foster connection between its fellows. I’m excited to connect with other public interest lawyers doing direct service projects in other fields. It’s nice to feel that we’re all pieces of a picture. It helps you stay “undaunted by the enormity of the world’s grief” (to borrow from Rabbi Tarfon).
Louis Lin (LL): I came to HLS knowing I wanted to do public interest work and wanted to specifically serve AAPI and immigration communities. Once I got here, I learned that a post-grad fellowship was the best way for me to not only serve my community but do it in a way that was informed and tailored to the most pressing needs. I was especially drawn to the Skadden Fellowship because it guaranteed two years of funding which helps make a sustained impact and because of the broader community of Fellows. I have had the opportunity to work with and talk to Skadden Fellows during law school, and seeing their projects take shape and the impact they were having made me even more excited about pursuing the Skadden Fellowship.
OCP: Please describe the project you’ll be working on during your fellowship. What inspired you to pursue this work?
TS: I’ve worked at the border and in detention centers and find that I do my best work in emergencies. I want to be where the system moves too fast, where due process protections are weakest, and where very few lawyers go. During the last administration as well as this one, asylum-seekers have been—and are being—deported to the persecution they fled without being given a real day in court. I will be working with asylum seekers in expedited removal programs to make sure their asylum claims are presented, heard, and respected—and hopefully I’ll gum up the deportation machine along the way.
LL: I will be returning to Philadelphia Legal Assistance, a legal services organization in Philly, to work on eviction defense and community displacement impacting low-income Asian American communities. Before law school, I served as the Eviction Diversion Project Coordinator at PLA, so it feels like a homecoming to now serve as an attorney in the program I helped build out and to focus on AAPI communities who have been underserved.
My project is informed by the needs and work of community members and organizations in three AAPI neighborhoods in Chinatown, Northeast Philadelphia, and South Philadelphia. From the threat of major developers in Chinatown to gentrification in South Philadelphia, AAPI residents are facing high rates of evictions and broader displacement. Yet they are underserved by legal aid due to language, culture, education, and trust barriers. Growing up in a low-income, Chinese, immigrant family, I have always been driven to serve immigrant Asian communities, and through my fellowship, I will work to address these gaps and meet a pressing need of AAPI Philadelphians.
OCP: What are some of the challenges facing the clients you’ll be working with, and how will your work address them?
TS: The biggest challenge—aside from the escalating tumult and sheer cruelty of the immigration system—is time. Expedited deportation programs don’t give asylum seekers time to find a lawyer, gather evidence, or even understand the legal standard they need to meet. Many don’t even get translation in their native language. Most nonprofits are reluctant to take on emergency expedited cases because they have full dockets and can’t drop their many commitments to deal with sped-up deportations. Thus, being able to dedicate a project to these cases will be critical.
LL: Most recently, the 76ers had planned to build a new arena in Chinatown which would have displaced Chinatown residents and businesses. After two years of city deliberation and community organizing, this plan fortunately was abandoned in January. The arena is emblematic of the challenges AAPI communities still continue to face in Philadelphia. A third of AAPI Philadelphians have experienced eviction and many experience habitability issues, but they are underrepresented in legal services and housing programs. Right to counsel for tenants, for example, is expanding in Philadelphia, but right now it only includes 8 of the 49 zip codes, none of which include Philadelphia’s major AAPI communities.
My project will address these needs through a couple of methods. First, I will provide comprehensive direct representation to tenants facing evictions. This includes through the Eviction Diversion Program and in court. I will build community partnerships with organizations in each neighborhood to provide in language and culturally informed outreach and education to AAPI communities. I will engage in systemic advocacy to expand tenant protections including for the Eviction Diversion Program and Right to Counsel. Lastly, I will work on language access issues in the city so AAPI tenants can access their rights.
Tamara Shamir ’25
OCP: Tamara, tell us about your clinical experiences with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Clinic; why were you interested in joining this clinic?
TS: I was drawn to the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Clinic (HIRC) because I knew I wanted to work directly with asylum seekers and develop the skills to be an effective advocate in complex, high-stakes cases. HIRC has the best, kindest clinical staff that truly, truly care about their students. They put everything into supporting clinical students and turning us into the best and most diligent lawyers we can be. My wonderful HIRC supervisor, Cindy Zapata, was not only a constant delight but also provided an incredible model of warm, compassionate, and intelligent client care.
OCP: Are there any projects you’ve worked that stick out as particularly significant in shaping how you think about public service legal work?
TS: In the summer of 2020, when legal service organizations were shutting their doors and adjusting to a new reality, Jill Seeber invited me to join the founding team of Mabel Center (my Skadden host organization)– which would, against the odds, open in the heart of the pandemic, 100% in person. Wary of public transportation, I biked daily to our small office in Arlington, MA, and I remember those long bike rides best of all – earnest and elated affairs, tinged by the sense of building something that every part of me believed in. At that time, we focused on two gaps in the system – last minute pro se asylum applications and full representation for indigent Central American women and families. With two attorneys and two paralegals, we preserved the cases of hundreds of asylum seekers by filing emergency cases, and won every full representation case that reached adjudication.
My time at the Mabel Center generated my understanding of the role of public interest lawyering: providing direct representation in the most deserted and harmful parts of the immigration system can, eventually, shift them. Mabel has kept identifying and filling gaps—the dedicated docket, EAD clinics, massive TPS workshops. It has kept alive, even as it grew, the spirit that years prior had instilled in me such an exhilarating sense of what’s possible—a responsiveness and adaptability and a sense that we can help people navigate the system even at its steepest or cruelest. Mabel’s team has not only helped clients navigate the system, but actually increased what is possible within the system, pushing judges to a broader and nuanced understanding of asylum and setting fairer, more humane norms.
OCP: Louis, please tell us about your clinical experiences with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau; why were you interested in joining this clinic?
LL: Joining the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau has been my best decision at HLS. The two-year commitment to HLAB not only allowed me to gain substantial experience in legal services and build strong relationships with clients but also provided me a home of other like-minded students and clinical instructors. As someone interested in broader immigration rights work beyond traditional immigration law, I knew the wage and hour practice where we serve majority immigrants was the place I wanted to be. HLAB has prepared me to be legal aid attorney post-grad because that is what I have been the last 2 years: from representing multiple clients at a time, negotiating with opposing parties, drafting motions, and arguing in court, HLAB was the perfect place to build needed skills for my work in public interest. The student-run nature of HLAB was also crucial because I got to help run the organization while on the board, shape new initiatives, and learn what it takes to lead legal projects, all of which I will need during my fellowship.
OCP: Are there any projects you worked on in the clinic that stick out as particularly significant in shaping how you think about public service legal work? How did your clinical experiences help shape your fellowship project?
LL: The legal aid focus of HLAB has reaffirmed the importance of serving clients through direct services. It is important to me that attorneys serve clients and understand their experiences before jumping into higher-level advocacy that is often removed from the community being served. Relatedly, HLAB’s community lawyering model has shown me how vital community partnerships and organizers are. HLAB would not be able to do our work without our partnerships with La Colaborativa and City Life, and I will continue to look for ways to integrate community lawyering into my public service legal work.
Two current projects that stick out: I am working on building community partnerships with AAPI organizations in Boston like the Chinese Progressive Association and GBLS’s Asian Outreach Center, and I am also leading HLAB’s Immigration Working Group. These projects are informed by the community lawyering model that has been engrained and are responding to the needs of the communities HLAB serves. I will carry these experiences and directly apply these skills in my fellowship and beyond.
OCP: What advice would you give to students considering a career in public interest after graduation?
TS: First, find the gaps in the system that most people are ignoring. The places where there are no lawyers—those are the places where you can make the biggest difference. Those tend to be direct service spaces, as impact litigation is way more saturated. Also, those gaps are often best filled with small community organizations. Although I’ve loved working at some of the larger immigration organizations and learned a ton, I have always felt most effective and happy in small local organizations which are more integrated into the community, responsive to changes, and open to initiatives. No matter what, you should look for the team that will inspire you and fuel you the most—that makes all the difference.
Relatedly, I’ve noticed Harvard students—perhaps out of a sense of grandiosity, I’m not sure—shy away from direct service work. But I’ve always thought that to really care about a cause, you should know how it’s unfolding on the ground, and connect—or rather, become entangled with the fight of—the people it affects. I think this is what leads to the kind of understanding that allows lawyers to make profound and widely impactful projects later in their careers.
Second, public interest work is always about navigating uncertainty—whether it’s a rapidly changing legal landscape, an underfunded nonprofit, or a case with no clear path to victory. Don’t wait for anything; you’re ready. LIPP will take care of those loans. Now is the best time. Join the fight!
LL: Stick with it and do not give up! A community of public interest students and attorneys is here to support you and cheer you on. There are times when you will face challenges whether it be due to the energy it takes to do the work or the finances of pursuing public interest over big law/private sector work. But stick to your passions, find other public interest students who you can lean on, turn to non-law school friends and family who can keep you grounded, and know that LIPP/PSLF are there to ease with finances. It is possible and you will make a positive impact in the world while doing it. More practically, before graduation take every opportunity to explore different public interest paths to figure out what it is exactly that you want to do. Spend your summers and clinics working on different issue areas or in different modes of lawyers—knowing what you do not like is just as important as finding what brings you joy.