Law School Scholar to Fight for Justice in Alabama Legal System
By Jason Casell
NYU’s motto—“a private university in the public service”—is a charge that the School of Law takes very seriously, especially student Sophia Farber Bernhardt. She is one of 16 Root-Tilden-Kern (RTK) Scholars to graduate this month and is part of the first class of RTK scholars to receive full tuition for all three years of law school in exchange for committing to public interest work following graduation.
“The program helped me meet great people at NYU, it gave me wonderful mentors, and of course it’s helping me enter a public interest career without much debt,” says Bernhardt.
The RTK program, which was founded in 1951, was designed to provide a unique financial, educational, and networking opportunity for students who intend to pursue careers in public service. Many of the most powerful public interest attorneys at work today were RTK Scholars, including Judge Thomas Buergenthal (LAW ’60) of the International Court of Justice, who receives an honorary degree today, and Margaret Fung (LAW ’78), executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Following in those footsteps, Bernhardt has long demonstrated a dedication to public service. After graduating from the University of Chicago, she worked for the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board, where she investigated complaints against members of the New York Police Department, eventually rising to a supervisory position responsible for a team of 15 investigators.
“This brought me into contact with criminal defendants, defense lawyers, prosecutors, police, parole officers, and corrections officers,” says Bernhardt. “I also spent a fair amount of time visiting people in jail, which drove home some of the realities of mass incarceration and the racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in how our criminal laws are enforced.”
Law school naturally followed. During her time at NYU, Bernhardt was involved in the Civil Rights Clinic, assisting attorneys at the ACLU LGBT and HIV/AIDS Project. She also participated in the Children’s Rights Clinic, working with attorneys representing youths aging out of the foster care system. In addition to serving as a teaching assistant and research assistant looking into the collateral consequences of “zero tolerance” policing in New York, Bernhardt even found time to study abroad last fall at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany.
After graduation, Bernhardt will become a fellow at the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, a private, nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair treatment in the legal system. The organization, which is led by NYU clinical professor of law Bryan Stevenson, represents prisoners on death row, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged with violent crimes, indigent people denied effective representation, and others whose trials involved racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct.
Sophia Farber Bernhardt
