ILR High Road Ithaca Fellowship
Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic

ILR High Road New York is statewide program that aims to teach ILR students practical methods for civic & community engagement and leadership. The High Road Ithaca Program offers students paid community engaged internships with partner organizations committed to social and environmental justice, diversity and equity, access and education in Ithaca and surrounding areas during the fall or spring semesters. Students work 5-10 hours a week and participate in critical reflection activities throughout the semester.

The First Amendment Clinic’s mission is to provide students an opportunity to have a real impact on critical free speech and free press matters of our day, as they hone their litigation and lawyering skills. The clinic’s groundbreaking Local Journalism Project aims to protect, defend, and enable local media outlets and journalists to perform their critical role. At its core, the clinic seeks to further First Amendment rights to foster a better functioning and more robust democracy.
We currently have five full-time employees and three adjuncts.

On a national level, the clinic has taken on matters that enhance the free speech rights of citizens across the political spectrum, including challenging an anti-protest statute in Oklahoma, defending the rights of high school students in Michigan to display conservative political statements on their clothing, and fighting efforts to ban books from school libraries. On a local level, the clinic defends local media outlets in New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont against meritless libel claims intended to suppress their reporting and other efforts by local governments to retaliate for coverage they don’t like. The Local Journalism Project helps local journalists engage in important investigative reporting work by fighting for access to government documents and court proceedings, conducting pre-publication of their stories, and defending them against lawsuits and threats of litigation.

Duties:

The intern will assist in aiding our free press and free speech work. Assignments have not been finalized yet. A prior Ithaca High Road intern conducted research and drafting with respect to seeking access to sealed settlement agreements involving a prison healthcare contractor in wrongful death suits. Two interns this past semester conducted research and drafted public records requests to prisons around the country with the aim of determining what their media access policies are on paper and how they are implemented in practice.

While assignments have not been finalized yet, we expect to need ongoing assistance with the media access to prison project described above. We also regularly have pre-litigation work that we do on behalf of both our free speech and free press clients that we may potentially involve an undergrad intern in. Another project may involve research regarding and advocacy related to ensuring that students can argue in all New York courts. We also regularly have communications work that we could use assistance with, including content creation and contributing to ongoing research.

Required skills:

Successful candidates will be detail-oriented, strong writers, and be interested in expanding their knowledge about free speech and free press issues.