By Allison Torres Burtka
Michigan Law
Through pro bono service, Michigan Law students help address communities’ unmet legal needs.
“Every year, our students pour thousands of hours into serving clients and communities who would otherwise have no lawyer—work they do for no credit and no pay. These awards are the Law School’s way of saying this work matters,” said Amy Sankaran, ‘01, director of externship and pro bono programs and a clinical assistant professor.
This year, six students and one program received Excellence in Pro Bono Service Awards.
One of two students recognized as an Outstanding 3L, Lila Nazarian, ‘26, first got involved with the Sentence Commutation Project as a 1L to gain experience working with clients. She didn’t know then how deeply she’d value the work—or that she’d later stay connected with the client she worked with that year.
“From the very beginning, I really fell in love with the process and what it means to help someone apply for commutation,” she said. In her 2L year, Nazarian joined the project’s executive board and started supervising student teams, and this year she became president and chair of the board.
“We build a really important bridge in connecting students with people who are incarcerated,” she said. Students read cases about people in jail but “get very little about who they are and what their life has been like.”
Through working with these clients, students “develop such a better understanding of what it means for someone to be in prison and what it means for someone to be convicted of a crime,” Nazarian said. “It changes the very one-dimensional way we think about punishment and what it means to send someone to prison.”
Beyond the legal assistance provided, Nazarian said, “Many of our clients are lonely or have lost family, so we are a source of support for them—someone has heard their story, someone cares about them, someone’s checking in on them.”
Nazarian is proud that the program has continued to grow, with 40 to 50 students signing up every fall, she said.
“Lila has been the heart and soul of the organization,” said 2L Jordan Zavareei. “She has consistently led by example through her passion for providing direct services to incarcerated individuals and her diligence in doing so.”
—————
Helping clients respond to immediate threats
Three students—Andrea De Jesús Colón, Zoe Hayes, and Manuel Lewis—received the Outstanding 2L Award. This is the first year three students were chosen for one award, “but we just couldn’t decide among our amazing candidates,” Sankaran said.
De Jesús Colón worked in deportation and detention defense in Vermont—a legal desert for immigrant communities—through Migrant Justice and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, and that experience made the threats that immigrant communities face concrete.
“Immigrant communities are under real, daily threats—detentions, deportations, policy changes that move faster than the courts and attorneys can catch up with,” said De Jesús Colón, who served as pro bono chair of the Michigan Immigration and Labor Law Association.
When De Jesús Colón is able to help someone, she said, “it’s not abstract to me. I’ve sat across from people in detention, and I remember every single one of them.” She is pursuing a dual degree in U-M’s Ford School of Public Policy.
Minnie Boadu-Bennett, who received the Outstanding 1L Award, also appreciated being able to help people facing threats, through OUTreach.
“Right now our trans neighbors are facing so much implicit and explicit hostility, and we’re watching institutions withdraw their support because it might hurt their wallet. In the middle of 1L year, it can feel like these kinds of problems are all over your head and way above your pay grade,” Boadu-Bennett said. But “working with OUTreach provided a consistent reminder that there are big, impactful things we can do for our neighbors, right now, as law students.”
Zoe Hayes, who received an Outstanding 2L Award, came to Michigan Law mainly to work in LGBTQ+ rights and immigration, and her pro bono work includes OUTreach and asylum brief assistance through the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “It’s become the highlight of my week to get to see the OUTreach members and know the work I’m doing directly makes someone’s life easier,” she said.
—————
Standing up for students
The Student Rights Project (SRP) received the Outstanding Project Award. It advocates for K-12 students facing expulsion or long-term suspension to be able to return to school. This year, almost every student the project has worked with has been able to return to school, said 3L Meghan Ward, who has been an SRP board member for three years. “We’ve improved our advocacy by arguing that the schools in many of these cases have failed to provide behavioral supports for students with disabilities, as required by federal law.”
Beyond getting students back into class, SRP has worked with the students, their families, and their schools to provide behavioral support. “And by advocating to keep kids in school at critical phases in their lives, we help disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline,” Ward said.
Brad Gonzalez, ‘26, has served on the project’s board for three years, and he received an Outstanding 3L Award.
“SRP is meaningful to me because it has given me the opportunity to serve families in my community. While much of law school has focused on building a strong theoretical foundation for my future work, SRP has allowed me to provide direct support to people during some of their most difficult moments,” he said.
—————
Creating access for Native communities
“Most Tribes across the country, and many here in the state of Michigan, lack the financial and other practical resources to access legal services,” and so do Native people within those Tribes, said Outstanding 2L award winner Manuel Lewis, a first descendant of the Gila River Indian Community.
“Although the University of Michigan has a treaty obligation to educate Native students and there is a growing Native American Law Students Association chapter at the Law School,” Lewis said, he saw no institutionalized way to provide pro bono services to any of the Native American tribes in the state.
So with help, he created one: a weeklong service trip during spring break, in partnership with Michigan Indian Legal Services and working alongside the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
The students researched potential violations of treaty obligations and supported trust and estate workshops for Grand Traverse Band elders.
As a student, Lewis sometimes feels like his role is solely to learn, but this experience showed him that “I actually have so much to offer the communities that I came to law school to learn to represent,” he said. “I now realize I have already learned so much in my time here, and there are tangible ways to employ that knowledge to help others.”
Michigan Law
Through pro bono service, Michigan Law students help address communities’ unmet legal needs.
“Every year, our students pour thousands of hours into serving clients and communities who would otherwise have no lawyer—work they do for no credit and no pay. These awards are the Law School’s way of saying this work matters,” said Amy Sankaran, ‘01, director of externship and pro bono programs and a clinical assistant professor.
This year, six students and one program received Excellence in Pro Bono Service Awards.
One of two students recognized as an Outstanding 3L, Lila Nazarian, ‘26, first got involved with the Sentence Commutation Project as a 1L to gain experience working with clients. She didn’t know then how deeply she’d value the work—or that she’d later stay connected with the client she worked with that year.
“From the very beginning, I really fell in love with the process and what it means to help someone apply for commutation,” she said. In her 2L year, Nazarian joined the project’s executive board and started supervising student teams, and this year she became president and chair of the board.
“We build a really important bridge in connecting students with people who are incarcerated,” she said. Students read cases about people in jail but “get very little about who they are and what their life has been like.”
Through working with these clients, students “develop such a better understanding of what it means for someone to be in prison and what it means for someone to be convicted of a crime,” Nazarian said. “It changes the very one-dimensional way we think about punishment and what it means to send someone to prison.”
Beyond the legal assistance provided, Nazarian said, “Many of our clients are lonely or have lost family, so we are a source of support for them—someone has heard their story, someone cares about them, someone’s checking in on them.”
Nazarian is proud that the program has continued to grow, with 40 to 50 students signing up every fall, she said.
“Lila has been the heart and soul of the organization,” said 2L Jordan Zavareei. “She has consistently led by example through her passion for providing direct services to incarcerated individuals and her diligence in doing so.”
—————
Helping clients respond to immediate threats
Three students—Andrea De Jesús Colón, Zoe Hayes, and Manuel Lewis—received the Outstanding 2L Award. This is the first year three students were chosen for one award, “but we just couldn’t decide among our amazing candidates,” Sankaran said.
De Jesús Colón worked in deportation and detention defense in Vermont—a legal desert for immigrant communities—through Migrant Justice and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, and that experience made the threats that immigrant communities face concrete.
“Immigrant communities are under real, daily threats—detentions, deportations, policy changes that move faster than the courts and attorneys can catch up with,” said De Jesús Colón, who served as pro bono chair of the Michigan Immigration and Labor Law Association.
When De Jesús Colón is able to help someone, she said, “it’s not abstract to me. I’ve sat across from people in detention, and I remember every single one of them.” She is pursuing a dual degree in U-M’s Ford School of Public Policy.
Minnie Boadu-Bennett, who received the Outstanding 1L Award, also appreciated being able to help people facing threats, through OUTreach.
“Right now our trans neighbors are facing so much implicit and explicit hostility, and we’re watching institutions withdraw their support because it might hurt their wallet. In the middle of 1L year, it can feel like these kinds of problems are all over your head and way above your pay grade,” Boadu-Bennett said. But “working with OUTreach provided a consistent reminder that there are big, impactful things we can do for our neighbors, right now, as law students.”
Zoe Hayes, who received an Outstanding 2L Award, came to Michigan Law mainly to work in LGBTQ+ rights and immigration, and her pro bono work includes OUTreach and asylum brief assistance through the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “It’s become the highlight of my week to get to see the OUTreach members and know the work I’m doing directly makes someone’s life easier,” she said.
—————
Standing up for students
The Student Rights Project (SRP) received the Outstanding Project Award. It advocates for K-12 students facing expulsion or long-term suspension to be able to return to school. This year, almost every student the project has worked with has been able to return to school, said 3L Meghan Ward, who has been an SRP board member for three years. “We’ve improved our advocacy by arguing that the schools in many of these cases have failed to provide behavioral supports for students with disabilities, as required by federal law.”
Beyond getting students back into class, SRP has worked with the students, their families, and their schools to provide behavioral support. “And by advocating to keep kids in school at critical phases in their lives, we help disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline,” Ward said.
Brad Gonzalez, ‘26, has served on the project’s board for three years, and he received an Outstanding 3L Award.
“SRP is meaningful to me because it has given me the opportunity to serve families in my community. While much of law school has focused on building a strong theoretical foundation for my future work, SRP has allowed me to provide direct support to people during some of their most difficult moments,” he said.
—————
Creating access for Native communities
“Most Tribes across the country, and many here in the state of Michigan, lack the financial and other practical resources to access legal services,” and so do Native people within those Tribes, said Outstanding 2L award winner Manuel Lewis, a first descendant of the Gila River Indian Community.
“Although the University of Michigan has a treaty obligation to educate Native students and there is a growing Native American Law Students Association chapter at the Law School,” Lewis said, he saw no institutionalized way to provide pro bono services to any of the Native American tribes in the state.
So with help, he created one: a weeklong service trip during spring break, in partnership with Michigan Indian Legal Services and working alongside the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
The students researched potential violations of treaty obligations and supported trust and estate workshops for Grand Traverse Band elders.
As a student, Lewis sometimes feels like his role is solely to learn, but this experience showed him that “I actually have so much to offer the communities that I came to law school to learn to represent,” he said. “I now realize I have already learned so much in my time here, and there are tangible ways to employ that knowledge to help others.”
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