What We DoInner City Law Center fights for housing and justice for low-income tenants, working-poor families, immigrants, people who are disabled or living with HIV/AIDS, and homeless veterans.
NewsThe latest news and success stories about Inner City Law Center’s work to ensure that all Angelenos have a safe, affordable, and health place to call home.
At Inner City Law Center, we believe post-graduate legal fellowships offer wonderful opportunities for law students to enter the public interest arena as well as strong and meaningful ways for our organization to partner with recent law school graduates who want to fight for social justice. We view fellowships as pipelines to other positions at Inner City Law Center and encourage public-interest focused students to apply for one or more of the fellowship opportunities below.
Fellowship candidates should:
Have strong writing, research, and analytical skills,
Be self-motivated and able to manage a variety of tasks,
Have an established knowledge of, or interest in, the proposed practice area,
Be bright, passionate, and a hardworking team player,
Plan to or have taken the California Bar exam, and
Be committed to Inner City Law Center’s clients, mission, and values.
Inner City Law Center’s Housing Justice Fellowships
In 2020, Inner City Law Center established its Housing Justice Fellowships in response to Los Angeles County’s homelessness crisis and the need for a strong and motivated cadre of attorneys dedicated to ensuring affordable housing for all Angelenos. Each winter, Inner City Law Center hires current 3Ls and recent law school graduates to join our fight to end homelessness by applying for a Housing Justice Fellowship. Housing Justice Fellowships are separate and distinct from projects submitted for Skadden, EJW, Soros, and other fellowships.
Housing Justice Fellows engage in fast-paced litigation and/or administrative law work, handle a variety of legal matters including eviction, habitability, citation clearing, immigration, public benefits, and/or financial rights cases, work directly with clients and opposing counsel, handle all stages of cases from pleadings to discovery, motions, hearings, settlement, administrative hearings, and trial, participate in conversations surrounding housing policy in the County, and work with private law firms providing pro bono representation to Inner City Law Center’s clients. Through their work, Fellows keep low-income and vulnerable tenants housed, remove legal and financial barriers to housing, and fight to ensure our tenants’ rights to a safe and stable place to call home.
Interested individuals should send a cover letter, resume, transcript, three references, and writing sample to Vidhya Ragunathan, Director of Pro Bono at Inner City Law Center (vragunathan@innercitylaw.org) using the subject line: Housing Justice Fellowship. Applications will be accepted between December and April and reviewed on a rolling basis.
Skadden, EJW, and Other Externally-Funded Fellowships
Inner City Law Center encourages current law school 3Ls or recent graduates to submit project proposals combining litigation or advocacy with community outreach, public education, and other needed services related to housing and homelessness. ICLC and fellowship candidates will work together to develop and finalize project proposals that will have a meaningful impact on the most vulnerable communities in Los Angeles County. We have successfully sponsored Skadden, AmeriCorps, and Equal Justice Works fellowship candidates with projects related to our core practice areas.
Interested individuals should send a cover letter, resume, transcript, three references, and writing sample to Vidhya Ragunathan, Director of Pro Bono at Inner City Law Center (vragunathan@innercitylaw.org) using the subject line: ICLC-Sponsored Fellowship. Applications will be accepted between April and July and reviewed on a rolling basis.
Our Fellows
Jaqueline Flores-ReyesHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern Law School, Class of 2022
Jaqueline Flores-ReyesHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern Law School, Class of 2022
Jaqueline is a first-generation law school graduate and proud daughter of immigrants. She was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. She holds a master’s degree in History from California State University Los Angeles and her J.D. from Southwestern Law School. While in law school, she was a board member of the Latino/a Law Students Association, the Student Bar Association, and was a fellow for the Judge Harry Pregerson Public Service Fellowship. In 2021, she had the opportunity to work on the Policy Team at Inner City as a summer law clerk. This experience taught her the important connection between policy work and direct services. During her last semester of law school, she had the privilege of being a clinical student in the newly formed Eviction Defense Clinic in conjunction with Inner City, where she dived into learning about housing law and worked with clients. She is excited to return to Inner City as a TDP Fellow and looks forward to continue growing her passion for housing justice.
Arturo GomezHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern Law School, Class of 2021
Arturo GomezHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern Law School, Class of 2021
Arturo joined Inner City Law Center as a Housing Justice Fellow in July 2022. At Southwestern Law School, he served on the executive board of the Labor and Employment Law Association, where he emphasized his support for labor unions and employee-side legal representation. He also served as an intern at Inner City Law Center in 2019, and as a Peggy Browning Fellow at the Wage Justice Center in 2020. Currently, he is a board member on the Elysian Valley Riverside Neighborhood Council, where he advocates on behalf of his predominantly working-class neighbors by building support for expanded public transit routes and food access. He graduated with a BA from the University of California Riverside in Political Science with an emphasis in Law and Society in 2017, and with a JD from Southwestern Law School in 2021. Arturo likes to spend his free time going to both multiplex and independent movie theaters to catch the latest features on the best formats possible.
Peter HortonHousing Justice Fellow UCLA School of Law, Class of 2022
Peter HortonHousing Justice Fellow UCLA School of Law, Class of 2022
Peter joined Inner City Law Center as a Tenant Defense Fellow. After working in education, he went to law school to better address the systemic issues of legally-sanctioned extraction that harm students and families in poverty. In law school, he focused on housing and education, working through internships and clinics with the Tenant Defense Project at ICLC, the Education Equity team at ACLU SoCal, and the Lanterman Education Rights program. He also explored his interest in using technology and public records to support legal advocacy in the Community Lawyering in Education Clinic and the Covid Behind Bars Data Project and by serving as a managing editor of the Journal of Law and Technology. As an undergraduate, he studied Liberal Arts at St. John’s College, and he later earned an MA in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Mississippi and a JD from UCLA School of Law.
Ted LeeNAPABA Law Foundation Community Law Fellow UC Berkeley School of Law, Class of 2021
Ted LeeNAPABA Law Foundation Community Law Fellow UC Berkeley School of Law, Class of 2021
Ted is a NAPABA Law Foundation Community Law Fellow at Inner City Law Center’s Affirmative Litigation team. Having grown up as a low-income, undocumented youth in Koreatown, Los Angeles, Ted is committed to serving those who are most deeply affected and harmed by racial and economic injustice.
Throughout law school, Ted served the community as a clinical student at East Bay Community Law Center’s Consumer Justice Clinic and Consumer Justice Workshop.
In May 2021, Ted received his J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, where he won the Pro Bono Champion Award and the Honorable Mention for the Brian M. Sax Award for Excellence in Clinical Advocacy.
Jeff MartinHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern School of Law, Class of 2022
Jeff MartinHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern School of Law, Class of 2022
Jeff joined Inner City Law Center as a Tenant Defense fellow in September 2022. He is a graduate of Southwestern Law school, where he received his J.D. with a concentration in Public Interest and served as the president of the Homelessness Prevention Law Project, the co-chair of the Public Interest Law Committee, the vice president of the Student Bar Association, and the treasurer of the Southwestern chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Previously, Jeff interned at the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Homeless Youth Project, the Federal Defender’s office in the Eastern District of California, and the Alternate Public Defender’s office. He also participated in Southwestern Law’s Eviction Defense Clinic in the spring of 2022. Prior to law school, Jeff received a BFA in acting from California State University, Fullerton.
Shyann MurphyHousing Justice Fellow UCLA School of Law, Class of 2022
Shyann MurphyHousing Justice Fellow UCLA School of Law, Class of 2022
Shyann Murphy is a Housing Justice Fellow at Inner City Law Center. While in law school, Shyann served as a Co-Chair of the Re-Entry Clinic with A New Way of Life, where she worked on expungement petitions for low-income Angelenos and participated in the UCLA Veterans Legal Clinic, performing direct legal services to veterans. Shyann spent her first summer of law school at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, where she worked on impact litigation challenging Los Angeles’ treatment of unhoused individuals, litigation she continued working on through the Human Rights Litigation Clinic in her 2L year. In her second summer of law school, Shyann interned with the ACLU Human Rights Program, where she worked on litigation challenging racially discriminatory criminal sentencing, parole, and probation. A graduate of the Epstein Program for Public Interest Law and Policy, Shyann is committed to a career in public interest. Shyann tries to spend as much of her free time as she can with her cat Poundcake. Shyann holds a B.A. in Gender Studies and Political Science from the University of Southern California and a J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Matthew NussbaumHousing Justice Fellow New York University Law School, Class of 2021
Matthew NussbaumHousing Justice Fellow New York University Law School, Class of 2021
Matthew Nussbaum joined Inner City Law Center’s Preventing and Ending Homelessness Project this year after graduating from NYU Law School. During law school, he co-directed the Prison Teaching Project – a program offering classes on legal research methods to prisoners in Rikers, Taconic Correctional Facility, and Bedford Correctional Facility. He also participated in the school’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, where he worked to contest the deportation of a client, and the Racial Justice Clinic, where he prepared a client for their upcoming parole board hearing. During the summers, Matt interned at Staten Island Legal Services’ Housing Unit and the Public Defender’s Office of Alameda County.
Prior to law school, Matt worked as an assistant paralegal for Fragomen, a law firm specializing in business immigration, and was a member of the Glide Harm Reduction Clinic in San Francisco. Matt received his B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, graduating in 2016.
Benjamin PhillipsHousing Justice Fellow UC Berkeley School of Law, Class of 2020
Benjamin PhillipsHousing Justice Fellow UC Berkeley School of Law, Class of 2020
Benjamin Phillips joined Inner City Law Center in 2021 as a Housing Justice Fellow in ICLC’s homeless veterans project. From 2020-2021, he clerked for Senior U.S. District Court Judge Roslyn O. Silver in Phoenix, Arizona. In law school, Benjamin interned with the United States Department of Justice, Public Counsel, and the Homeless Action Center. He served as a research assistant for Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Prior to law school, Benjamin was an AmeriCorps member with City Year Los Angeles at UCLA Community School, teaching and mentoring ninth grade students. He also clerked for Mental Health Advocacy Systems and taught religious school at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. He earned his B.A. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Southern California and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Haley PollockHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern Law School, Class of 2021
Haley PollockHousing Justice Fellow Southwestern Law School, Class of 2021
Haley joined Inner City Law Center as a Housing Justice Fellow on the Tenant Defense Project in August, 2021. While in law school at Southwestern in Los Angeles, Haley was a board member on the homelessness prevention law project student association, which sparked her interest in pursing a legal career defending tenants from eviction. As a student, Haley worked in family law, immigration, and employment law. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandman University and a Juris Doctorate from Southwestern, where she focused on public interest law. In her free time, Haley enjoys walking around Los Angeles with her two terrier rescues, Vin Scully and Ruth Barker Ginsburg.
Jincy VarugheseHousing Justice Fellow UCLA School of Law, Class of 2022
Jincy VarugheseHousing Justice Fellow UCLA School of Law, Class of 2022
Jincy joined ICLC in September 2022 as a Tenant Defense Project Legal Fellow. Jincy received her J.D. from UCLA School of Law with a specialization in Public Interest Law & Policy. While in law school, Jincy volunteered with tenant and worker’s rights clinics throughout Los Angeles and interned with the California Labor Commissioner, Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action (LACCLA), and the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. Jincy was also an editor for the UCLA Law Review’s online platform, Discourse. In her free time, Jincy enjoys being outside and working as an unpaid, un-hired ice cream taste tester.
