Mariam Elbakr
Skadden Fellow
Mariam Elbakr is a Skadden Fellow with the Debtors’ Prison Project. Her fellowship focuses on challenging an arcane Tennessee law that imposes public defender fees on people who cannot afford to pay.
This is a continuation of her work in law school with the Policy Advocacy Clinic, where she challenged court-imposed monetary sanctions on youth and their families. Her team successfully ran two bills which eliminated fines and fees and put severe limits on restitution for youth in Montana. Mariam spent her summers doing death penalty work at Reprieve and challenging the constitutionality of punitive registration laws at the ACLU of Michigan. In her last two years of law school, Mariam was an Executive Editor on the California Law Review and a judicial extern at the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
Before embarking on her law school journey, Mariam worked at a variety of retail stores including supermarkets, garden centers, and a physiotherapy clinic. Mariam received her B.A. in Psychology with a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from York University. She received her J.D. with a Public Interest and Social Justice Certificate from The University of California, Berkeley.