New York University's Thomas Fritzsche
New York University's Melissa Navarro
Young lawyers pursue the public interest — tuition debt-free
May 21, 2009
It's one thing to express concern for the plight of migrant farm workers.
It's another to live and toil alongside them and attempt to fully understand the challenges they face, as Thomas Fritzsche has done.
Fritzsche, who graduated from New York University School of Law on May 15, has been advocating for migrant farm workers since he was an undergraduate at Amherst College. The 28-year-old has been a medical translator, a pesticide safety trainer and a farm union organizer and plans to use his new law degree to continue pushing for the rights of migrant workers at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project.
"I felt like a law degree would be a powerful tool to help improve the lives of migrant farm workers," Fritzsche said. "Working in the fields, there is such a sense of despair when it comes to legal rights.
Because they are poor and many don't speak English, many migrant workers don't understand that they have rights, he said.
Fritzsche won't have to worry about paying off a crushing law school loan debt on a public interest salary. Dallas litigation boutique Bickel & Brewer paid for his legal education. The 45-attorney firm, which has been advocating for the low-income clients and the Latino community for more than two decades, founded the Bickel & Brewer Latino Institute for Human Rights in 2005. The institute pays the tuition for two law students at NYU each year, provided they do public interest work in the Latino community for two years after graduating. Fritzsche and classmate Melissa Navarro are the first to complete the program.
Competition for the institute's two spots is stiff. Hundreds of students have applied for the scholarship over the past three years, said Bickel & Brewer partner William A. Brewer III. To qualify, students must gain admission to the law school and explain to an interview panel their interest in Latino issues and career goals.
"The idea is, you give us five years, we'll get you a great law school education and the financial backing to take a job after graduation in the community and work on an issue that's important to you," Brewer said. "Be an important change agent."
Navarro, 25, is heading to the Clark County, Nev., public defender's office in Las Vegas, where she will be one of a handful of attorneys fluent in Spanish. Navarro, whose parents are Mexican immigrants, grew up in Inglewood, Calif. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles, she was struck by the stark difference in the education and opportunities available to the low-income residents in Inglewood compared to those in wealthier parts of Los Angeles.
She initially hoped to address immigrant issues through impact litigation, but after shadowing a public defender as part of a law school clinic she changed direction.
"As a public defender, you have a real impact on a person's life, and that's the difference between a direct services and impact litigation," Navarro said.
The firm, which Brewer founded in 1984 with partner John Bickel, has been providing legal assistance to low-income clients since the late 1980s. The changing demographics of Texas means that much of the need for free legal assistances is in the Latino community, Brewer said.
In 1995, the firm started the Bickel & Brewer Storefront, a separate pro bono office in the largely low-income area of South Dallas. The firm's attorneys and staff are required to donate at least 200 hours of service annually to the storefront.
"We realized that if we weren't actually in the community, we had no chance of identifying the cases that would have the biggest impact," Brewer said. "We've handled hundred and hundreds of cases, and a lot of the work deals with issues in the Latino community."
That approach has led the firm into some hot-button legal cases. For the past two years, Bickel & Brewer has been fighting efforts by the city council in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, Texas, to restrict landlords from renting to illegal immigrants.
"It been a trilogy of cases involving the ongoing efforts by a community to re-engineer the demographics of their population," Brewer said. "The reaction of the elected officials in Farmers Branch to immigrants is troubling, and the Latino leaders came to the storefront and asked us to look into the legality of what was going on."
Bickel & Brewer has filed a series of state and federal lawsuits against Farmers Branch and its elected officials, with some success. The firm is working to get the latest version of the landlord ordinance permanently enjoined.
As for the fledgling Bickel & Brewer Latino Institute for Human Rights, Brewer considers it, too, a success thus far. The firm eventually hopes to expand the program beyond just two students per year.
Navarro and Fritzsche attest that the scholarship made it easier for them to pursue their interest in helping the Latino community.
"I don't have to go to a law firm and spend five years doing something I don't want to do to pay for law school," Navarro said. "I really wouldn't have been able to go into public interest without this scholarship."
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