The Equal Justice Society welcomes Vanessa Holman as our 2024-2025 Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow – a fellowship honoring the first African American woman to serve on the federal bench. Vanessa started at EJS on October 21.
The Motley Fellowship is funded by a generous gift from Elizabeth J. Cabraser. EJS established the Fellowship in 2006 to nurture the talents of a new generation of progressive lawyers to transform anti-discrimination law and policy.
“Our deep and profound gratitude to Elizabeth Cabraser for her generous funding of the Motley Fellowship,” said EJS President Lisa Holder. “Elizabeth’s incredible generosity means that EJS can play an even greater role in fighting the growing forces stripping away our civil rights, democracy, and humanity.”
“We are so fortunate to have Vanessa join EJS as our new Judge Motley Fellow,” said Mona Tawatao, EJS Legal Director. “She has a deep passion for the work and brings substantive experience advocating for marginalized communities and an academic background in mind science. “Dismantling systemic racism requires radical efforts to center the voices of vulnerable populations and to address the legacies of racial terror that have shaped our current economic, education, and health disparities,” said Vanessa. “I was drawn to EJS because it combined nontraditional truth-telling strategies, direct representation, and policy advocacy.”
Vanessa graduated in May 2024 from New York University School of Law, where she has been recognized as a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar and a Filomen D’Agostino Scholar in Civil Rights, Civil Liberties and/or Criminal Justice. She was a member of the Black Allied Law Students Association and Digital Articles Editor and Board Member of the Review of Law & Social Change.
Vanessa brings valuable advocacy experience to EJS. As a student advocate in the NYU Law Juvenile Defender Clinic, she represented juvenile clients accused of crimes in Brooklyn Family Court.
She has also interned at the Federal Defenders of New York, where she assisted in the defense of indigent clients in the Eastern District of New York, and at the NYU Law Racial Justice Clinic, where she worked on parole cases and contributed to the NYPD broken windows reform campaign.
Before law school, Vanessa earned a B.S. in Psychology/Neuroscience from Yale University where she was actively involved in the Black Solidarity Conference and Yale Mind Matters. Her senior thesis explored the long-term impacts of physical, emotional, and environmental traumas and described possible progressive judicial reforms.
Vanessa’s experience also includes positions at the ACLU of Southern California on police practices litigation, at the Center for Court Innovation on alternative to incarceration programs, and at Arnold & Porter as a litigation legal assistant. She has also taught LSAT prep at Kaplan Test Prep.
She is conversational in French and enjoys meditation and long-distance running in her free time. Vanessa also loves to cook and once ran a student pop-up restaurant in New Haven, Conn.
About Judge Constance Baker Motley
Judge Motley (September 14, 1921-September 28, 2005) was the first African American woman to serve on the federal bench and the first African American woman to serve as chief judge. She played a major role in the ongoing effort to end racial injustice in this country. Her incredible life was not only marked by how many barriers she broke on behalf of women and Black Americans but also by the considerable legal skills and talents she brought in numerous cases she filed and won and the numerous cases she heard on the bench. Judge Motley also served as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s associate counsel and participated in writing the briefs for Brown v. Board of Education. She went on to shatter other gender and race barriers as the first African American woman elected to the New York state senate in 1964 and to the Manhattan borough presidency in 1965.