Meghan Shapiro
"Do not be tricked into thinking you ‘need’ to work in a firm, in the summer or after graduation, for experiential or financial reasons. Publicly funded offices and not-for-profits offer rich experiences and high quality training. And now, the College Cost Reduction Act makes it possible for all law students, even out-of-state students, to pursue a public interest career without exception."
Meghan Shapiro is a Deputy Capital Defender at the Northern Virginia Capital Defender Office in Alexandria, Virginia. She has also worked at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans, representing indigent people indicted for capital murder or on death row in Louisiana and Mississippi, and practiced capital defense trial work in private practice in Virginia. Immediately after law school, she clerked for U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia. Megan is also a graduate of Gideon's Promise (fka Southern Public Defender Training Center); is co-author of an essay in How Can You Represent Those People, eds. Abbe Smith and Monroe Freedman (Palgrave Macmillan 2013); and has published in the Champion, Virginia Lawyer, and the American Journal of Criminal Law.
At Texas Law, Meghan participated in the Capital Punishment Clinic and the Supreme Court Clinic. She volunteered for the Capital Punishment Center, worked as a research assistant to Professor Jordan Steiker, and split her summers between the Texas Defender Service (Houston), the Equal Justice Initiative (Montgomery, Alabama), the Philadelphia Capital Habeas Unit, and the Federal Capital Resource Counsel's office in Richmond, Virginia.