Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow (2024-2025)
Vanessa Holman is the Equal Justice Society Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow for 2024-2025. She joined EJS on October 21, 2024.
In May 2024, Vanessa graduated 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.
Before joining EJS Vanessa had already gained valuable experience advocating for marginalized communities. 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.