Gupta Wessler looks for people with exceptional writing ability, the capacity to think rigorously and creatively about the law, strong advocacy instincts, collaborative spirit, and a genuine passion for public interest work. All of our full-time lawyers have served as judicial law clerks and bring a mix of top-flight litigation experience from nonprofit public interest organizations, law firms, academia, and government.
Each year, we hire new lawyers through our fellowship program and law students through our summer program. We also regularly hire talented college grads as legal assistants. We view the training and mentoring of aspiring public interest lawyers as an essential part of our firm’s mission and are proud of our alumni, who have gone on to clerkships and careers in public interest law, legal academia, and all levels of government. We’re always interested in hearing from people who share an enthusiasm for our work and who are interested in joining us.
We welcome and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds and graduates of all schools–including members of traditionally unrepresented groups, first-generation college graduates, and non-traditional candidates.
Gupta Wessler Fellowship in Appellate Litigation
Gupta Wessler PLLC specializes in Supreme Court, appellate, and complex litigation on behalf of plaintiffs and public interest clients. Our cases span a wide range of issues, including consumers’ and workers’ rights, class actions, access to the courts, civil rights, and constitutional and administrative law. We are the go-to appellate advocates for trial lawyers nationwide.
Each year, our firm seeks out new attorneys with exceptional writing ability, the capacity to think rigorously and creatively about the law, strong advocacy instincts, collaborative spirit, and a genuine passion for public interest work. Judicial clerkship experience and experience in both public interest and appellate litigation are preferred.
The fellowship is ideally suited for a current or recent judicial law clerk interested in embarking on a career as a public interest litigator. Fellows are fully integrated into all aspects of the firm’s work and receive significant responsibility for cutting-edge appellate, constitutional, and complex litigation. They are expected to hit the ground running by researching and drafting briefs under close supervision and mentorship by the firm’s attorneys. Fellows may also play a critical role in monitoring developments in the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts, and in analyzing potential new cases for the firm.
We are no longer accepting applications for a 2023-24 fellowship. We expect to begin reviewing applications for 2024-25 in August 2023.
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Steffi Ostrowski
will join the firm as a fellow in fall 2023 after completing clerkships with Judge Michelle Friedland on the Ninth Circuit and Judge Vince Chhabria on the Northern District of California. Steffi previously worked with Gupta Wessler as a summer associate in 2020 and spent her previous summer working on consumer-protection cases at the New Economy Project in New York and the Consumer Financial Protection Unit of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office. In law school, she was a student in the Mortgage Foreclosure Clinic, an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and co-president of the Law and Political Economy Student Group. Before law school, Steffi worked at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center. She was previously a software engineer at Facebook, where she led projects to promote women’s safety and built software to detect impersonation.
Mez Belo-Osagie will join the firm as a fellow in the summer of 2023. Among other things, Mez has worked on criminal-justice impact litigation at Civil Rights Corps, the MacArthur Justice Center’s Supreme Court and Appellate Program, and the Committee for Public Counsel Services. In law school, she was the Supreme Court Co-Chair of the Harvard Law Review, represented indigent defendants as a student-attorney, and, with the Lloyd Gaines Memorial Team, won the Ames Moot Court Competition. Before law school, she worked at a counterinsurgency-focused think tank and at the Legal Defense and Assistance Project, challenging torture in Nigerian prisons. During college, she co-founded the Yale Young African Scholars Program and won the James Gordon Bennett Prize for her senior thesis on the Boko Haram insurgency. Mez is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at Stanford, and plans to combine empirical research and impact litigation to limit the reach, influence, and punitiveness of the carceral state.
Alisa Tiwari joined the firm as a fellow in Fall 2022 following her clerkships with Judge Michelle Friedland on the Ninth Circuit and Judge Vince Chhabria on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. During law school, Alisa worked on affirmative litigation with the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office (where she designed an APA lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s rescission of civil-rights guidance documents); Supreme Court and appellate litigation with Neal Katyal of Hogan Lovells; and criminal law reform litigation at the ACLU. In addition, she published a note in the Yale Law Journal detailing a way to hold police departments accountable for disproportionate racial effects. Before law school, Alisa prepared policy analyses for Vanita Gupta, then-head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, and worked directly with attorneys and investigators to uncover law enforcement misconduct as part of a federal investigation into the Baltimore Police Department. She also worked in the Civil Rights Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Jessica Garland joined the firm as a fellow in 2021 following her clerkships with Judge David Barron of the First Circuit and Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York. She has also accepted a clerkship with Justice Elena Kagan on the U.S. Supreme Court. As a law student, Jessie worked on ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims with the Ethics Bureau, litigated prisoner and immigrant cases in the Second Circuit with the Appellate Litigation Project, and interned for the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York. Before law school Jessie was a Henry Fellow at Cambridge University in England, where she received an M.Phil in Criminology.
Joyce Dela Peña joined the firm as a 2021-2022 fellow after her clerkships with Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and Judge Corinne Beckwith of the D.C. Court of Appeals. Joyce is a 2018 graduate of Georgetown Law and joined the Federal Trade Commission following her fellowship. Before clerking, she was a student in Brian Wolfman’s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic and interned at Public Justice; Relman, Dane & Colfax; the Special Litigation unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service; Equal Justice Under Law; Bronx Defenders; and the Prison Law Office.
Linnet Davis-Stermitz is now an associate at Gupta Wessler. She originally joined the firm as a 2020-2021 fellow following judicial clerkships with Judge Michelle Friedland of the Ninth Circuit and Judge Alison Nathan of the Southern District of New York. Before law school, Linnet spent two years as a paralegal at Relman & Colfax PLLC, where she helped litigate fair housing, fair lending, and disability rights cases, including conducting interviews for what would become the first federal jury verdict holding a bank accountable for reverse-redlining practices. Linnet pursued these interests to the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a Rubenstein Scholar, a Comments Editor for the University of Chicago Law Review, and the head of a student group devoted to Chicago land-use issues. She also worked at a variety of public interest organizations, including Legal Aid Chicago’s Housing Practice Group and the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic, where she managed a first-of-its-kind six-judge evidentiary hearing in the clinic’s pathbreaking selective enforcement litigation and presented oral argument on behalf of a clinic client.
Lark Turner is currently an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission and was the 2019-2020 fellow at Gupta Wessler between her clerkships with Chief Judge Gregory of the Fourth Circuit and Judge Catharine F. Easterly of the D.C. Court of Appeals. During law school, following a career in newspaper journalism, Lark worked at the Appellate Division of the Public Defender Service of D.C., the Southern Center for Human Rights, the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, and as a research assistant to Professor Laurence Tribe.
Alexandria Twinem is currently an Assistant Solicitor General of New York, where she handles a wide range of appellate litigation in state and federal court, and previously worked as a staff attorney at Civil Rights Corps, where she handled criminal-justice-reform litigation. She joined the firm as the 2018-2019 fellow following her clerkships with Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit and Judge Alison Nathan of the Southern District of New York. During law school, Alex was the Managing Editor of the Stanford Law Review, a student in the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, and a law clerk at the Southern Center for Human Rights, Goldstein & Russell, and the public-interest firm of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin.
Daniel Wilf-Townsend was the firm’s 2017-2018 fellow and continued to practice with firm full time from 2018-2020, when he left to pursue a Bigelow Fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School. Danny is now an Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown, where he focuses on civil procedure, federal courts, and consumer protection. He joined the firm following clerkships with Judge Marsha Berzon of the Ninth Circuit and Judge Jeffrey Meyer of the District of Connecticut. He was previously a summer associate at Gupta Wessler and also worked at the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the D.C. Public Defender Service. His writing has been published by the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, Slate, and the American Prospect.
Matthew Spurlock joined the firm as the 2016-2017 fellow following a legal fellowship at the national ACLU and judicial clerkships on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the Connecticut Supreme Court. Following his fellowship, Matt joined the Massachusetts Public Defender Division, where he now briefs and argues appeals as part of the statewide Appeals Unit.
Neil K. Sawhney is now an associate at Gupta Wessler. He completed his fellowship in 2015-2016 between his clerkships with Justice Goodwin Liu of the Supreme Court of California and Judge Marsha Berzon of the Ninth Circuit. In the fall of 2017, Neil moved to New Orleans, where he worked on impact and appellate litigation in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Economic Justice Project before rejoining the firm’s new San Francisco office.
Legal Assistants/Office Managers
One of Gupta Wessler’s former legal assistants has described this job as “an apprenticeship in high-stakes public-interest appellate advocacy.” Our legal assistants handle a very broad range of administrative and substantive responsibilities for a small but busy law firm focused on Supreme Court, appellate, and complex litigation. They’re often the first point of contact for new clients and cases and they oversee the final quality control over briefs filed in the nation’s highest courts. We’re proud that many of our legal assistants have gone on to pursue careers in public interest law.
We are currently hiring for a legal assistant/office manager in our Washington, DC office. More information is available here.
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Mahek Ahmad is a legal assistant and office manager at the firm. Before joining Gupta Wessler, Mahek graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Georgetown University, with degrees in Government, Arabic, and Women & Gender Studies, and received the International Relations Award for most outstanding student in the Department of Government’s international relations program. Mahek wrote her undergraduate senior thesis about a Title VII case pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit en banc, Chambers v. District of Columbia, and participated in a seminar on Supreme Court litigation with Lisa Blatt and Paul Clement. She is a first-generation college graduate and grew up in Los Angeles, California.
Abbe Murphy is a legal assistant and office manager at the firm. Before joining the firm, she worked in public affairs and communications at a top-ten government-relations and communications firm in D.C. and as an intern for the personal office of Barack and Michelle Obama, where she worked alongside top communications staff in the execution of major speaking events such as former President Obama’s endorsement of Joe Biden, his eulogy for late Representative John Lewis, and his address at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Abbe graduated magna cum laude from American University with an interdisciplinary degree in Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government.
Rana Thabata was a legal assistant and office manager at the firm and will be a 1L at the University of Michigan Law School in 2023. Rana is both a Truman Scholar and a Fulbright Scholar, a first-generation college graduate, and a first-generation American. Before joining the firm, Rana spent a year on her Fulbright at University College London, where she analyzed U.K. and U.S. education policies. She graduated magna cum laude from Loyola University New Orleans with degrees in political science and economics and was recognized as the outstanding graduate in both programs. Before joining Gupta Wessler, she interned at the U.S. Department of State’s Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau’s The Collaboratory and as a human rights intern at the Venezuelan American Unit based in Bogota, Colombia. Rana is the daughter of two Palestinian immigrants and grew up in New Orleans.
Sara Evall was a legal assistant at the firm and began studying at Stanford Law School in the fall of 2022. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in Refugee and Migrant Studies. She received distinction for her honors thesis on refugee worker’s rights in Amman, Jordan. At Duke, she worked closely with the local refugee community and worked on queer-inclusive sexual health education and advocacy. After graduating and immediately before joining the firm, Sara worked as a Policy & Program Fellow with the American Constitution Society. She grew up in Los Angeles, California.
Abigail Cipparone was a legal assistant at the firm and is currently serving as Legislative Director to Congressman Kweisi Mfume in the U.S. House of Representatives. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 2019 with a B.A. in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. As an intern at the ACLU, she researched the Customs and Border Patrol’s implementation of the Muslim Ban and worked on Hamama v. Adduci, a suit (on which she later wrote her senior thesis) concerning the detention of Iraqi Chaldean Christian immigrants. Abigail was also part of a journalism team that traveled with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jake Halpern to Lesbos, Greece, where she used her Arabic-language skills to interview refugees living in three camps for an article in The New Yorker. She grew up in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Hilda M. Jordan was a legal assistant at the firm and graduated cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and African American Studies. She previously served as a research intern for the Harvard Law Review, interned at a small civil rights firm, and worked as a research partner to Professor Martha Minow, where she researched the role of forgiveness in the justice system for Professor Minow’s book When Should the Law Forgive? (2019). After graduating, Hilda was awarded the Michael C. Rockefeller fellowship to study in Panama.