The Justice First Fellowship scheme is using law to change the world, says Fiona Bawdon
At The Legal Education Foundation’s (TLEF)’s February 2018 Justice First Fellowship (JFF) conference when the 20 newly appointed trainee solicitor and barrister fellows stood up to introduce themselves, two spoke of their personal experience of homelessness. Around half of those applying to the fellowship scheme in 2017 came from families where their parents had not been to university; a quarter of applicants had received free school meals; around half were from ethnic minorities.
The 2017 intake was the scheme’s fourth and largest. Earlier cohorts have included at least one teenage mum; and the first woman from a Roma background to qualify as a solicitor, Denisa Gannon (pictured with chair of TLEF trustees Guy Beringer). In an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, Denisa said it was the discrimination she faced in her native Czech Republic and when she arrived in the UK to work as a cleaner, which inspired her to become a social welfare lawyer. ‘I didn’t know my rights and couldn’t speak good English, so I
