PIPS Scholar Selected for ‘Legal Peace Corps’ Fellowship

3L and PIPS Scholar Charlotte Tsui, who was selected as one of the 2016 Skadden fellows


3L Charlotte Tsui has been selected for the Skadden Fellowship program, a prestigious two-year opportunity for graduating law students to pursue a self-created project with a public interest organization.

Her project aims to provide transactional legal services to create worker-owned businesses. After graduation, Tsui will join the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, Calif., an organization that combines economic rights advocacy work with direct legal services.

“My field work opened my eyes to a gap,” says the 3L, who hopes to build economic self-sufficiency and solidarity among low-wage immigrants. “Immigrants often find themselves stuck in a cycle of poverty because they lack opportunities for achieving upward mobility and financial stability.” 


Experiences on the Ground

Tsui decided to lobby for change on behalf of marginalized communities after witnessing the disparities first-hand. “I think many of us at American University Washington College of Law are drawn to law school by a deep yearning to do something in response to the brokenness that we see in our system,” she says.

During her three years in D.C., the student continued to work with trafficking survivors as a volunteer for the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, a non-profit organization that provides with legal services to low-income Asian Americans with limited English proficiency. She also clerked for Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach in San Francisco following her second year of law school.

“When I work with clients and listen to the lengths they went through to move to the United States in order to provide for their families,” Tsui says, “I can’t help but think of what it was like for my own mother when she first arrived here.”


Representing the Underserved

Tsui is currently a student attorney at the Community and Economic Development Law Clinic, led by Professors Susan Bennett and Brenda Smith. The student says that the skills she developed at the clinic are directly transferrable to her project for the Skadden Fellowship.

Beyond the fellowship, the 3L plans to continue immigrant rights’ work as well as starting her own socially conscious business.

“I feel incredibly lucky to be where I am now, in law school and with incredible opportunities ahead,” she says. “Doing this work is my way of showing gratitude – that is, sharing the abundance with which I’ve been given with others around me.”