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What's New? | Faculty in the News |  News Archive | News Home
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Second-year student Amber Whitfield was awarded the 2004-05 Joseph L. Brechner Fellowship by the Anti-Defamation League, an internship that is given to only one law student each year who has demonstrated a commitment to First Amendment issues. Whitfield is the first BLS student to receive the prestigious fellowship, which offers eight months of work with the ADL on constitutional law and civil liberties issues and a stipend of $1,000 a month. “My interest in protecting and cultivating First Amendment rights sprang from the lack of regard for those rights in my local community,” Whitfield wrote in her statement for the Brechner Fellowship. In the public schools of Hope Mills, the small town in North Carolina where she was raised, prayers preceded every ball game and Christmas carols were sung at school assemblies. Whitfield said she was disturbed by this blurring of the line between church and state. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she majored in communications with a concentration in the rhetoric of social movements, “to see how people work from both outside and inside the system to change it.” After graduation, Whitfield returned to teach in her old high school for one year. By then the school had grown in size and diversity, and her progressive teaching techniques were supported by the administration. But advocating for social change at a national level had become her primary goal, and she decided to attend law school in New York City. At BLS, where Whitfield is a Richardson Merit Scholar, she has been active with the Brooklyn Law Students’ Death Penalty Project, helping to prepare an extensive database of successful capital habeas appeals. Last summer, she interned in a Columbia, South Carolina firm, Blume and Weyble, working on death penalty cases with Professor John H. Blume, the Director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project. Commenting on her upcoming fellowship this fall Whitfield said, “I want to be involved in the actual day-to-day work that goes into defending the First Amendment. The ADL, with its full docket – religion in the schools, the pledge of allegiance, and other key issues – gives me that chance.”
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