CHICAGO, July 23, 2024 — The American Bar Association Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity has awarded two law students LGBTQ Public Interest scholarships of $5,000 each. Now in its sixth year, the scholarship program is aimed at law students and/or law school graduates studying for the bar who are either LGBTQ or who will be doing public interest work in the LGBTQ space.
The scholarship provides financial support to work in the public interest arena for the summer/fall of 2024.
The recipients are:
Jordan Cozby, a rising second-year student at Yale Law School, is a member of the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC) and a student research fellow with the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. Born and raised in Alabama, his work focuses on advancing civil rights and economic justice in the South. Before law school, Cozby worked as a legislative assistant for Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and served as co-chair of GLASS, the Senate LGBTQ+ staff association. As an undergraduate at Yale University, he interned for Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Program, the Movement Advancement Project and Global Labor Justice. This summer Cozby is working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Atlanta, and in the fall will be researching legal reforms related to LGBTQ+ elder law for the Solomon Center.
Elaina Jung Hee Vermeulen is a 2024 graduate of the UCLA School of Law in the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. At law school, she served as the chief diversity editor of the UCLA Law Review and held leadership roles within the Law Students for Immigrant Justice and the Womxn of Color Collective. In fall 2024, Vermeulen will begin work as a Skadden Fellow with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, where she will provide direct representation and advance advocacy campaigns led by the California Mandela Campaign to liberate detained immigrants vulnerable to solitary confinement. Vermeulen is drawn to working with immigrants detained in solitary confinement having seen the disproportionate rates at which queer and transgender people are subjected to it.
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