Two Georgetown Law Students Named 2025 Skadden Public Interest Fellows

Two Georgetown Law students, Riley Dankovich, L’25, and Madeline Sachs, L’25, were named 2025 Skadden Fellows, joining the 28-person fellowship class selected from 18 law schools across the country. The prestigious two-year fellowship supports recent graduates pursuing full-time careers in public interest law.

Dankovich will advocate on behalf of students of color with intellectual and developmental disabilities through strategic impact litigation and community partnership and education efforts at Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit The Arc of the United States. Sachs will join the Legal Aid Justice Center in Falls Church, Va. to advance humane immigration policy through direct representation of immigrant detainees in removal proceedings, appellate representation and community-led policy advocacy.

“The Office of Public Interest and Community Service (OPICS) is excited for Riley and Madeline, both of whom have had tremendous impacts on the Georgetown Law community during their time here. They came to the Law Center to attain the tools to make meaningful change, and we are thrilled to know they’ll be able to launch their careers doing just that,” said Assistant Dean, Office of Public Interest and Community Service Morgan Lynn-Alesker, L’07. “We are not only honored to have two Skadden Fellows in the same graduating class, but are also happy that Riley and Madeline will continue to grow in community together, building on a relationship that originated during their first year as Section 3 classmates.”

Established in 1988 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Skadden, the program has since funded over 900 fellowships for recent law graduates working on a range of civil legal issues affecting people living in poverty throughout the United States. Ninety percent of former fellows remain in public service, and nearly all continue working on the same issues addressed in their original two-year fellowship projects. Dankovich and Sachs are among the more than 30 Georgetown Law graduates who have served as Skadden Fellows since the program’s founding.

“I’ve wanted to work at the intersection of criminal and immigration law since before law school,” said Sachs, a Blume Public Interest Scholar who developed an interest in immigrant and refugee rights and policy during her undergraduate studies at Yale University and subsequent work as a Litigation and Advocacy paralegal at Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles. “To develop my own project, and then have the funding for two years to do that project [as a Skadden Fellow] — I’m very grateful for the opportunity.”

Sachs also points to the range of experiential learning opportunities at Georgetown Law as key to her development as a student advocate: During her second-year fall semester she participated in the Center for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), a clinic in which students represent refugees seeking asylum in the U.S., and she is now working on an immigration case as part of the full-year Appellate Litigation Clinic.

“For somebody who came into law school wanting to take advantage of experiential opportunities, being able to do two clinics has been great,” she said. Sachs also underscores the help and support provided by the OPICS team to students who, like herself, are interested in pursuing public interest careers after graduation, and how much she looks forward to continuing immigration advocacy work full-time as a Skadden Fellow.

“Immigrants in the United States who have even minor interactions with the criminal legal system are subject to a disproportionate system of double punishment,” she said. “This means that when noncitizens are charged with a crime, they are at risk of not only jail time but also deportation, which is often a much more severe consequence. My project seeks to intervene via zealous representation and policy advocacy in Immigration Court, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Virginia State Legislature.”

Dankovich said that the idea of law school first crossed her mind when she was an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University. Frustrated by circumstances related to her own disability, she recalled, she decided to try reading the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act to see if she could find any recourse there. “I remember [thinking], ‘Something is going wrong here’,” she said. She did not go to law school immediately after college, first working in the publishing industry, but her interest returned during the COVID-19 pandemic, as she saw how the rights of disabled people were marginalized in so many policies and practices.

She chose Georgetown Law, she said, in large part for its strength in training students for public interest careers: not only the extensive resources offered by OPICS, but also such programs as the Georgetown Health Justice Alliance (HJA), a groundbreaking academic medical-legal partnership through which students and scholars at the university’s Medical and Law Centers collaborate and learn from one another. Participating in the HJA clinic was one of the highlights of her student experience, said Dankovich, as were professors in several other classes who were excited about her interest in disability rights law and worked with her to incorporate the field into her coursework.

With funding from the Skadden fellowship, Dankovich is excited to join The Arc’s innovative efforts to advocate for inclusion and desegregation on behalf of schoolchildren with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “School should be a place where kids are figuring themselves out and growing into the people, the adults, that eventually they’re going to be. And that’s currently not what we’re providing to students with disabilities, in a lot of contexts,” she said. “This project is very much focused on applying a familiar disability rights legal concept to an environment where it hasn’t had a lot of force so far, but has a lot of potential to make some significant improvements in special education, particularly for students of color.”