Thursday, January 5, 2006
Skadden to Fund Lawyer to Work for Immigrant Farmers in Georgia

Greg Land
Special to the Daily Report

Shivering in snowy Massachusetts, 2005 Harvard Law School graduate Charlotte Sanders said she’s eager to begin her two-year assignment as a Skadden Fellow at the Georgia Legal Services Program in the fall.

"One more Boston winter is about enough for me," said Sanders, who currently is clerking for U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner. Sanders, 27, is one of 29 recipients of this year’s fellowships, funded by New York-based Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The fellowships place young attorneys in programs that work for civil and human rights or help the poor, elderly, disabled and homeless.

"I’m originally from southern Virginia, so I wanted to get closer to home," said Sanders, who interned with Georgia Legal Services in 2002 and spent the next summer working with the Atlanta office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Fluent in Spanish and determined to pursue a career in public service, Sanders was president of Harvard’s Legal Aid Bureau and won the school’s inaugural Andrew

L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award.

Sanders will be working with Georgia Legal Services’ Farmworker Division, which helps immigrant workers in need of legal assistance.

"I got interested in the farm-workers’ program when I was involved in employment law at the Washington Lawyers Council for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs" before entering law school, she said. Immigrant employment "is becoming more and more important in places like Georgia, in the way they’ve been in Texas and California for a long time."

Federal funding rules restrict the office to representing only workers who are in the country legally, usually on temporary visas that allow them to stay for the course of the agricultural season.

"I’ll be working on some pretty run-of-the-mill stuff—minimum-wage cases, workman’s comp for injuries, discrimination, sexual harassment. ... But I’ll also be focusing specifically on retaliation cases—coming up with ways for workers who feel their rights have been violated, but are afraid to come forward."

-- Reprinted/Republished with permission of the Fulton County Daily Report