Friends,
It's incredibly hard to believe that we're already in December - and not just that, but today is the day we open applications for our FOURTH cohort of IfRFA fellows! That means it’s over three years since IfRFA was
announced, and that means we have
three cohorts of incredible students who we’ve gotten to work with, many of whom are now well on their way to world-changing careers across a variety of different fields, including First Amendment law.
In honor of that milestone, I wanted to share some reflections that Alyssa Morones, a member of our first cohort, offered about the role of IfRFA in her life:
The Initiative for a Representative First Amendment has helped make my legal career aspirations a reality. Having spent some time working in journalism before law school, I saw first hand the importance of First Amendment protections and government transparency, and the impact that both these things often have on other areas of civil rights law that I found interesting and important. However, the possibility of practicing First Amendment law as a career seemed daunting—it was my understanding that only a lucky few got to practice in this area. And I wasn’t sure if I could fit into what seemed, from the outside, to be a somewhat homogenous area of practice. However, over the course of my fellowship with IfRFA, my career aspirations began to feel achievable. As a fellow, I had the opportunity, with my co-fellows, to explore First Amendment issues in new and interesting ways, through different points of view, and often through the lens of other social and legal issues that, it seems, often go under-discussed in the wider First Amendment space.
Through IfRFA, I was placed at the Cornell First Amendment Clinic for my 2L summer, which gave me the opportunity to work on interesting and challenging press freedom and government transparency matters, and to complete substantive research and writing assignments. My experiences with IfRFA and the Cornell Clinic helped lead me to my current fellowship with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, where I have had the opportunity to do the kind of work and practice the kind of law that I very much hoped to do, but wasn't sure would be possible: I get to work on a variety of First Amendment and government transparency matters, and get to think about these issues in novel and creative ways, often incorporating other civil rights and larger social realities.
Furthermore, IfRFA has helped connect me to a group of students, scholars, and practitioners that think about the First Amendment outside of the more traditional, absolutist First Amendment mold. And it helped make me aware of the many different paths available to practice First Amendment law, and helped me see, and continues to help remind me, how my own unique experiences and perspective cannot only exist in the First Amendment space, but can be valuable to this area of practice.
Thank you Alyssa! ❤️
When we first were dreaming up IfRFA, we hoped, but weren't sure that we could pull off the vision of finding ways to support folks who couldn't quite see themselves in the First Amendment. It's humbling to think that only a couple of years (and a global pandemic later), we're finding out that the bet paid off.
So thanks for being here, with us, and if you're as moved by Alyssa's words as we are, do us a favor and share the IfRFA application with any law professors or law students in your lives who you think might be interested?
The nitty gritty details: Applications will close on January 9th at 11:59pm ET. Applicants can find out more at our website. For your perusal, the application questions can be found here. To apply, students must submit: this form.
Thanks, as always,
Kendra and Jasjot