2025 Rappaport Fellows Announced

Ana Mercado Barahona is a 1L at Boston University School of Law. She is a first-generation immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, and a former DACA recipient from Los Angeles. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Contemporary Latino and Latin American Studies from the University of Southern California. At USC, she organized undocumented students and established a pop-up center to support their specific needs. Before law school, Mercado Barahona spent five years providing direct legal services in family-based immigration, working in nonprofit organizations and boutique law firms. Her own experiences navigating an undocumented status shaped her professional trajectory and fueled her unwavering commitment to social justice. At BU Law, she is dedicated to uplifting first-generation professionals. She will serve as Co-President of BU’s First Generation Professionals and Co-President of the Immigration Law and Policy Society for the 2025-2026 academic year. Mercado Barahona’s legal education is driven by a desire to bridge direct advocacy with public policy, ensuring that her work transcends individual cases to address systemic barriers and create lasting change within immigration law. As a 2025 Rappaport Fellow, she will spend her summer at the Mayor’s Office for Immigration and Refugee Advancement.

Max German is a 1L at Boston College Law School. He holds a BA, magna cum laude, in Political Science from Boston College, where he matriculated upon transferring from Quinsigamond Community College in his hometown of Worcester, MA. At BC, German won several honors, such as being named a Dean’s Scholar, and received a Truman Scholarship. After school, he became engaged in the fight for workers’ rights at the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. As the proud grandson of a Teamsters Local 170 member, German knows the transformative nature of a union job and the security it brings to working families. While at the MA AFL-CIO, he helped fight back against attempts by Uber and Lyft to misclassify their drivers as independent contractors and was a key member of the coalition that blocked their 2022 ballot referendum before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. German also worked as a deputy press secretary at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, where he helped to communicate the work of the AG’s Office to the public with a particular focus on regional and local media sources. As a 2025 Rappaport Fellow, he will intern for the House Ways and Means Committee.

Aryssa Harris is a 2L at Boston University School of Law and is also obtaining a PhD in political science at the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The graduate of Beloit College completed a BA, magna cum laude, in Political Science and Sociology. Following her 1L year, Harris worked as a legal intern for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in the Youth Advocacy Division in their Roxbury office. As a 2L, Harris is co-president of the Black Law Students Association, a Legal Writing Fellow for the 1L writing program, and the Editor-in-Chief for the Boston University Law Review. This summer, she is interning at the Office of the Governor’s Legal Counsel. 

Emma Fraley is a 1L at Boston University School of Law and a recent graduate of Boston University School of Public Health, where she studied health law and policy. She graduated Honors with Distinction from Baylor University as a Science Research Fellow with a minor in philosophy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fraley developed an interest in health policy and a concern for medically underserved populations. She deepened her policy interests by advocating for gender and sexual minority students at Baylor, supporting the creation of an LGBTQ+ student group. Her undergraduate honors thesis, Containing COVID-19: A Case Study on the Oregonian and Texan Government Responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic, was the product of her budding passion for health policy and was awarded Baylor’s highest designation for undergraduate theses. Fraley aims to build a career in health insurance regulatory policy to improve access to care, manage costs, and uphold high healthcare quality. Her Rappaport fellowship will take her to the Division of Insurance this summer.

Katrynna Jackowicz is a 2L at Northeastern University School of Law (NUSL) and a graduate of Baruch College, summa cum laude, where she received a BA in Political Science and Management of Musical Enterprises. During her time at NUSL, she has gained hands-on experience in various legal fields through the Prisoners’ Rights Clinic; an internship with the American Immigration Lawyers Association; an internship with Meehan, Boyle, Black & Bogdanow, and a research position with Professor Sankalp Bhatnagar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Jackowicz currently serves as the Co-Chair of NUSL’s Asian Pacific American Law Student Association and is a Lawyering Fellow in NUSL’s Legal Skills in Social Context Program. In this role, she works with first-year law students as they develop a project for Reproductive Equity Now. In the future, Jackowicz is committed to advocating alongside marginalized communities and promoting greater accessibility to resources. She is particularly interested in the application of legal design to education policy and hopes to explore this area as a Rappaport Fellow this summer. She will do so at the Executive Office of Education.

Devin MacGoy is a 1L and Public Service Scholar at Boston College Law School. He graduated, cum laude, from Georgetown University with a BS in Foreign Service. Before law school, MacGoy was a community organizer with GreenRoots, a community–based organization in Chelsea and East Boston that fights for environmental justice for low-income and immigrant communities. His work centered on building a grassroots movement for energy democracy—the idea that historically marginalized communities should have the opportunity to shape our energy system to narrow economic and health inequalities. MacGoy has also worked as a legislative assistant in the Virginia House of Delegates, a health insurance navigator for a legal aid agency in North Carolina, and an English teacher in Slovakia on a Fulbright scholarship. In his free time, MacGoy loves hiking in the mountains of New England. He will intern this summer with the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities.

Emily Philbrook is a 1L at the University of Massachusetts School of Law and a graduate of Plymouth State University where she earned a BA, summa cum laude, in English. Philbrook graduated from Plymouth State in December 2023 and, in January, entered her first solo classroom, teaching sixth-grade English in Franklin, NH. It was a formative experience and inspired her to want to pursue educational law and policy. During her time as a teacher, she advocated for an increased focus on minimizing knowledge gaps in literacy, and student voice in the learning process. Her passion for empowering students and ultimately uplifting communities brought her to the only public law school in Massachusetts, where she has continued to be inspired by the work of public interest advocates who believe in the potential of education as a resource and lifeline for successful individuals and communities. As a 2025 Rappaport Fellow, Philbrook will intern at the Office of Legal Advisor of the Boston Public Schools.

Rishab Ramamurthy is a 1L at Harvard Law School and a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he completed a BA in African/African American Studies. Prior to law school, he worked as an organizer with the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, advocating for affordable homeownership opportunities for Massachusetts residents. His experience in progressive political and economic reform inspired him to learn how he could help advance equity through the legal system. He is currently involved in the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and the South Asian Law Students Association. Ramamurthy will spend this summer with the Open Government Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.

Alex Shura is a 2L at Harvard Law School. He studied economics, political science, and history at the University of Chicago, graduating summa cum laude with an AB in 2021. Committed to the rule of law and the maintenance of public sector institutions, Shura has experience in state and local government, as well as in all three branches of the federal government. Before coming to law school, he spent over two years at the US Government Accountability Office, auditing pandemic stimulus and related programs on behalf of Congress. In law school, Shura has built civil litigation skills through an internship with the US Attorney’s Office in Boston and clinical placements with Protect Democracy and a federal magistrate judge. As a 2025 Rappaport Fellow, Shura will intern with the Constitutional and Administrative Law Division within the Government Bureau of the AG’s Office.

Bridget Silveira is a dual JD/MSW student at Boston College Law School and School of Social Work. While working toward her undergraduate degree in psychology and political science at Swarthmore College, she availed herself of an opportunity to explore the European carceral system while studying at Trinity College Dublin. She later shared a classroom with incarcerated individuals at a Pennsylvania state prison through the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. This led to her working as a mental health case manager in Washington, DC, following graduation, where she became more convinced there is room for improvement at both the policy and direct service levels for individuals with severe mental health and substance use disorders. She frequently saw these issues compound in a legal system where the voices of marginalized communities are often muted. Silveira aimed to attack this firsthand when she interned last year in the Public Defender Division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, where she helped articulate complex mitigation reports for clients to aid in their sentencing proceedings. She will intern this summer at the Executive Office of Health and Human Services.

Jack Slania is a 2L at Suffolk University Law School. Originally from Arlington Heights, ILL, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, magna cum laude, in 2021. While at Holy Cross, he focused heavily on community engagement in Worcester. This included serving on the executive board of Working for Worcester, a student-run 501(c)(3) that invests hundreds of thousands of dollars and mobilizes thousands of volunteers during an annual community infrastructure “Build Day.” Before attending Suffolk, Slania worked as a paralegal at WR Immigration in Boston, where he developed a passion for helping clients navigate the complex world of immigration law. At Suffolk, he has performed pro bono work with local nonprofits such as the Rian Immigrant Center and serves as president of the Immigration Law Association. He is spending his 2L year as a Marshall-Brennan Fellow, teaching constitutional law and coaching moot court at Boston Latin Academy. This summer, he is interning at the Governor’s Office for Refugees and Immigrants.

Emily Wu is a dual JD/MSCJS candidate at Suffolk University Law School. She graduated from Boston University with a BA in Psychology and Political Science, with a minor in Deaf Studies. While at Boston University, she was the only Massachusetts student selected for the Administrative Office of the US Courts’  Model Intern Diversity Pilot Program, through which she interned for the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts and had the opportunity to rotate through seven different units of the federal judicial system. She later interned for the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, focusing on re-entry and medical parole, and the Massachusetts Parole Board, where she drafted memorandums pertaining to executive clemency and parole hearings. Wu’s passions lie within criminal law, criminal justice reform, and equal access to justice, with the main goal being to serve and aid marginalized communities. As a 2025 Rappaport Fellow, she will intern at the City of Boston’s Law Department.