Mark Dawson and Catherine McCulloch awarded Texas Law postgraduate fellowships

The University of Texas School of Law has awarded the 2014 Julius Glickman Fellowship in Public Interest Law to Catherine McCulloch, ’14, and the inaugural G. Rollie White Trust Fellowship in Public Interest Law to Mark Dawson, ’14.

Mark Dawson

Both fellowships will provide $45,000 for full-time legal work for a year on a project sponsored by an existing public interest legal organization and supervised by a licensed attorney.

“Mark and Cat have been outstanding students, and we are pleased to support their work through these fellowships,” said Eden Harrington, director of the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law. “The law school is very grateful to Julius Glickman and the G. Rollie White Trust for creating these fellowships and helping our graduates fulfill their goal of increasing access to justice.”

Dawson will work with Blue Ridge Legal Services in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to provide direct representation and community education on predatory payday and car-title lending and debt collection. He will focus on serving refugees, immigrants and poultry workers with limited English proficiency, a growing and underserved population in the Shenandoah Valley. At the Law School, Dawson participated in the Human Rights Clinic and served as president of the Human Rights Law Society. He interned with the Human Rights Law Network in Mumbai, India and with Blue Ridge Legal Services.

Catherine McCulloch

McCulloch will work with the Youth Law Center in San Francisco to address the problem of youths in foster care becoming involved in the delinquency system. She will work with foster youths living in group homes and group-home staff to reduce referrals to the delinquency system and she will support youths who are detained in juvenile hall. As a law student, McCulloch participated in the Human Rights Clinic, the Juvenile Justice Clinic, the Criminal Defense Clinic and the Domestic Violence Clinic, and served as president of the Public Interest Law Association. She worked for Disability Rights Texas and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas in Austin, and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

The law school began offering post-graduate fellowships to students in 2005 and has previously supported 14 alumni as they embarked on their careers. There have been five prior recipients of the Julius Glickman Fellowship.

McCulloch’s fellowship is funded by generous support from Julius Glickman, ’66. Dawson’s fellowship is funded by generous support from the G. Rollie White Trust. The law school’s Justice Center administers the fellowships, and the recipients were selected by a faculty committee.