Finding community at law school is vital, particularly while navigating the rigors of legal study. For a lucky group, a new fellowship is offering both community and exciting scholarly opportunities.
“My favorite part of being a student fellow is definitely my fellow student fellows,” says Catherina Xu, JD ’24, a 2023-24 Rhode Center Civil Justice Fellow.
The program brings together a tightly knit cohort of roughly a dozen second- and third-year law students to spend one or two academic years working on the Rhode Center for the Legal Profession’s core research and policy-making projects. Founded in 2008, the Rhode Center takes a multidisciplinary approach to shaping the future of legal services—and it seeks to make the civil justice system more equitable, accessible, and transparent.
“I am so proud of the many different things the Rhode Center has done over the last few years, but I might actually be proudest of this program,” says David Freeman Engstrom, LSVF Professor in Law, of the two-year-old Fellows Program.
David Freeman Engstrom and Nora Freeman Engstrom have co-directed the Rhode Center since 2021. They created the Civil Justice Fellows program in 2022. “It’s the Center’s jewel in the crown,” David says. “We are creating and nurturing a pipeline of talented young lawyers who care about these important issues.”
An overarching goal of the Fellows’ program, says Nora Freeman Engstrom, Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, is to foster a sense of collaboration and community among the participating students, while encouraging the students’ long-term commitment to ensuring the legal profession lives up to its highest ideals. “We wanted to create a site of multi-generational exchange,” she says. “We wanted to create a mechanism so that students, professors, and the Center’s amazing staff could work side-by-side to advance the Rhode Center’s research and initiatives.”
The Fellows work on all of the Rhode Center’s core projects, including the:
- Filing Fairness Project, an ambitious first-of-its-kind partnership with seven states to help their courts modernize and simplify filing systems;
- Litigation Transparency Project, an empirical research project that leverages machine-learning tools to explore how various mechanisms, such as protective orders and secret settlements, affect the justice system and the public’s right to litigation information;
- Principles Project, under the auspices of the American Law Institute, that seeks to improve courts’ processing of high-volume, high-stakes, low-dollar-value civil claims in areas such as eviction and debt collection;
- Multi-District Litigation project that seeks to make the adjudication of consolidated federal court claims more efficient, equitable, and transparent; and
- Collaboration with the Los Angeles County Superior Court system to help litigants in eviction, debt collection, and family law cases better vindicate and defend their rights.
Leveraging common interests towards a common mission
Being a Rhode Center Civil Justice Fellow is a different experience from working as a research assistant, says 2024 Fellow Jess Lu, JD ’24. “You’re not just supporting an established academic with their research,” she says. “There’s “a feeling of a more equal footing between the students and the professors.”
The connections forged between the Fellows are as important and meaningful as those between students and faculty, adds Kelsea Jeon, JD ’25. “We have this common interest and this common mission to promote access to justice, and I think that really brings us together.”
While each Civil Justice Fellow is charged with a particular project, they are engaged in the full array of research and work handled by the other members of their cohort. They collaborate on projects, edit each other’s work, participate in lively project roundtables and workshops, and often enjoy meals—and happy hours—together. “We are, and we see one another, as teammates,” says Nora. “Building that sense of community was one of the major goals of the program.”
Catherina Xu, JD ’24, puts it simply: “It has been such a wonderful opportunity to get to know students with similar interests in increasing access to justice.”
“This fellowship changed my view of the civil justice system in that it expanded my understanding of what the right path is going forward to address and to resolve the civil access to justice crisis,” Kelsea says. During her fellowship, she has worked with David on research and scholarship centered around how access to justice can be advanced through the responsible relaxation of certain regulations around who can practice law. “A big part of it has been trying to understand what cities and states are doing already, and to highlight their experience on the ground to see if we can shine more light on those practices and recommend them on a broader scale.”
Aaron Schaffer-Neitz, JD ’24, says he benefited from the high level of responsibility and trust afforded to the Fellows. “I think the second or third week that I was working on my project, professors were relying on my opinion on important questions,” he says. “They were allowing me to help shape the direction of our research. And I don’t know in what other context, what other research position, a student would be given so much responsibility so early.”
The faculty co-directors say they gain much more from the fellowship program than student assistance on the Rhode Center’s core projects. “My favorite part of overseeing the Civil Justice Fellows Program is just getting to spend time with the Fellows and getting to know them,” says David Freeman Engstrom. “So many Stanford Law students are just absolutely remarkable people. And until you really get time with them, until you really work shoulder-to-shoulder on a project or share repeated meals, you might not realize just how multifaceted they are, how talented they are, and all of their incredible interests beyond practicing law and trying to improve the legal profession.”
For more information
About the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession
Through a multidisciplinary approach to teaching, research, and policy, Stanford Law School’s Rhode Center works to make civil justice more equitable, accessible, and transparent and to promote the legal profession’s commitment to the public interest. The Rhode Center’s current work focuses on: reforming legal services regulation to increase innovation and access to justice; understanding and shaping the role of technology in law and lawyering; protecting consumers and clients in civil litigation; and building a stronger, more diverse profession. Before her death in 2021, Rhode Center founder Deborah L. Rhode was the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. She was the nation’s most frequently cited scholar on legal ethics and the author of 30 books in the fields of professional responsibility, leadership, and gender, law and public policy.