2L Trishala Dessai Wins Second Place in NY Bar Writing Competition
March 30, 2021
American University Washington College of Law 2L student Trishala Dessai has won second place in the New York Bar’s 2021 Dr. Emanuel Stein and Kenneth D. Stein Memorial Writing Competition.
The competition, sponsored by the bar’s Labor and Employment Law Section, recognizes excellence among law students writing in the area of labor and employment law, and aims to cultivate the relationship between the Section and future labor and employment practitioners.
“Labor and employment law is a topic I have been passionate about since high school,” Dessai said. “My parents are both immigrants from India and have faced the traditional issues most immigrant workers are subject to such as: wage disparity, lack of workers’ benefits, and discrimination. Their experiences inspired me to pursue labor and employment law in order to remedy worker injustices.”
Dessai – a senior staffer on the American University Legislative Policy Brief and a junior staffer on AUWCL's Arbitration Brief – is the first AUWCL student to place in this competition. Last summer, Dessai worked for Terri Gerstein of the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife program to conduct research on the effect of the pandemic on gig-economy workers and nursing home workers. This research drove her to write a paper which aimed to cure the gig-economy misclassification conundrum by creating a portable workers’ benefits system. During the fall, Dessai worked as a judicial intern for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she learned how to draft summary judgments on complex employment discrimination issues.