Stein Scholar Anthony Damelio FCRH ’08, LAW ’22 has been awarded a Skadden Foundation Fellowship, which will begin in the fall of 2022. The program, launched by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in 1988, provides two-year-long fellowships to talented young lawyers who want to pursue public interest law on a full-time basis.
This year’s 28 fellows hail from 19 top law schools and will be partnering with legal services nonprofits across the country. They have been selected not only for their academic performance but also the quality of their proposed project, which they have designed with the organizations that they plan to work with over the next two years.
Damelio was elated to learn that he was named a Skadden Fellow and said he is honored to have received the opportunity to work at Catholic Migration Services, in partnership with two worker centers (New Immigrant Community Empowerment and Coalition for Immigrant Freedom). He also thanked the Fordham Law School faculty and administration—particularly Professor Jennifer Gordon and Aisha Baruni, director of public interest scholars and fellowships—for their support of his advocacy thus far.
“Getting the call from Kathleen Rubenstein, executive director of the Skadden Foundation, gave me a great sense of joy and trepidation,” Damelio said. “Joy that the intentional vocational steps I’ve taken at Fordham have made possible something I had dreamed for years of achieving. And trepidation because of how important I think this project is and how seriously I take this advocacy.”
He added, “The Skadden Foundation Fellowship will allow me to begin my legal career doing what I came to law school to do, which is mainly to advocate for low-wage immigrant workers.”
Damelio says that previously working at New Immigrant Community Empowerment from 2017 to 2019 cemented his commitment to low-wage workers and shaped his intentional investigation of interventions that most acutely benefit workers, as well as his own role in the movement for workplace justice. Growing out of that experience and in conversation with former colleagues, he has since conceptualized a project that will become a reality during his fellowship. The fellowship will allow him to educate workers about and bring claims under the HERO Act, a New York State law enacted in 2021 that provides groundbreaking health and safety workplace rights.
“Anthony’s project takes on the gaping holes in workplace safety protections that COVID brought to the fore,” said Professor Gordon. “He is extraordinarily well-equipped to move this important idea forward, hand in hand with immigrant workers themselves.”
Damelio believes that his proposed collaborative model is critical for representing low-wage workers who are often excluded from legal service provision. “I’m so thankful that the fellowship will allow me to lawyer in a way that meets the needs of individual workers and the movement for workplace justice,” Damelio said.