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Education
Columbia Law School
Stanford University
Bar Admissions
District of Columbia, New York
Sarah Ortlip-Sommers
Justice Catalyst Fellow
Sarah Ortlip-Sommers is a Justice Catalyst Fellow with the Access to Justice Project. Her fellowship focuses on litigating novel tort and statutory claims against the corporations operating for-profit immigration detention facilities in order to expand these critical avenues to redress for detained immigrants. Sarah also litigates other cases with the goal of dismantling the incarceration/detention industrial complex.
In law school, Sarah was heavily involved in the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, where she successfully represented individuals and families seeking asylum, humanitarian parole, emergency release from detention, and other relief. Sarah also was the Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law and a research assistant for the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, contributing to a United States Supreme Court brief concerning the due process rights of noncitizens. She spent her summers at the ACLU of New Jersey and the Center for Reproductive Rights’ U.S. Litigation Program.
Before joining Public Justice, Sarah clerked for Judge Nitza I. Quiñones Alejandro on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and her B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University. Sarah is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and New York.