Melissa Castillo West (JD ’24) Named Equal Justice Works Fellow

Melissa Castillo West (JD ’24) joins 83 other recent law school graduates who will spend the next two years as Equal Justice Works Fellows. During her time with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH), West’s work will provide legal representation, outreach, and advocacy to unsheltered individuals and families in Chicago through a specialized community lawyering service delivery model.

West’s career in public interest began early with an undergraduate internship at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), followed by legislative fellowship work in Denver, where she grew up. “That’s where I feel housing emerged as an area that needs a lot of attention,” West says, having experienced housing insecurity for a time after her family struggled with overwhelming medical expenses. West says that her experiences with housing insecurity give her a particular empathy for her clients and have taught her the importance of attorneys who listen, practice humility, and understand why some community members mistrust the law. “It’s because they’re accessing something they’ve been dispossessed from, disenfranchised from, by a system set up to make them fail, which sucks. I’m just trying to reduce harm, to be honest,” she says.

West says that during her time at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, she was able to stay on track to pursue public interest work thanks to the support from the Public Interest Law Group and Professor Cindy Wilson, who provided helpful advice through West’s practicum with CCH, where she began interning the summer after 1L. West adds that Professor Annalise Buth’s restorative justice seminar and work on campus were “pivotal,” for her, along with a therapist she found through CAPS Northwestern during 1L. “They were crucial to helping me get through law school and stay in public interest work.”

West also did volunteer court watching with the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, which she said gave her formative experience in a court setting and allowed her to learn more about the pretrial justice movement. “Being in law school for some of those major developments and seeing how easily exposed attorneys can be and get their hands dirty, per se, in that work is something I’ll continue to carry with me.” She also says seeing her professors doing public interest work in the community to inform people about changes in the law was inspiring. “It’s nice to know that attorneys can dispel many of these harmful myths and misunderstandings to further justice and also make people more comfortable with changes that, ultimately, are for the better for everybody.”

West’s work will include street outreach and visiting community members who are living unhoused or unstably housed. “It blends being proactive with also being responsive to the realities of homelessness,” she says, citing lack of access to transportation and cell phones as barriers to people being able to access legal aid.

When it comes to legislation, she says, “We have the Illinois Homeless Bill of Rights in our state, thankfully, which does have protections for unhoused folks and their right to their property and protections against their criminalization, but there’s a lot of flux in those areas too.” The fellowship will involve informing clients about their rights, empowering them to self-advocate, and helping with expungement, benefit appeals, income discrimination, and eviction defense.

In a perfect world, West says, that eventually there won’t be a need for her work, but in the meantime, “I’d love to stay with CCH. A lot of their fellows have stayed on as full-time attorneys, and it’s an organization I adore because they blend together so many different advocacy points of grassroots leaders, policy work, and the law. I could see myself still being with them or moving to do more federal work around housing policy.” One of the biggest benefits of attending Northwestern Pritzker Law, West says, was the financial support available for students who pursue work in public interest. “Most people are going into big law, but there are support systems in place and resources for people who are coming to the school on a public interest track,” she says. “People get nervous that they’re going to be broke and all the things, but that’s definitely not my reality going into public interest. Even from a low-income background, it’s accessible and possible.”