Anita Yandle

Anita’s Catalyst Fellowship at Public Justice sits at the intersection of immigrant rights, labor law, and civil rights by focusing on access to justice for migrant farmworkers.The project supports farmworkers facing forced arbitration clauses, Legal Service Corporation funding restrictions, and other barriers to justice through litigation, legislative advocacy, and education while centering racial justice. During law school, Anita spent her summers at the United Nations, including researching access to justice for indigenous communities in Latin America and the Caribbean her first summer — which helped inspire her fellowship project — and on genocide accountability her second summer. She also worked at the ACLU’s National Prison Project on healthcare in immigration detention centers, jails, and prisons; in the Human Rights Clinic, monitoring a trial against Thai dissidents; in both a practicum and externship on capital defense; and through research assistantships on issues of mass supervision, affirmative action, critical race theory, queer rights, and war crime accountability. Before law school, Anita was a public interest lobbyist, focusing on access to justice, workers’ rights, and police accountability. Anita graduated from Columbia Law School as a James Kent and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar with a Certificate of Achievement in International & Comparative Law from the Parker School.

Fellowship type: Justice Catalyst

Organization: Public Justice

Project name: Unearthing Buried Rights: Highlighting, and Combatting, the Power Imbalances that Lead Farmworkers to Submit to Forced Arbitration