Amy Walker ’25 has been selected as a recipient of the prestigious Burton Award for Distinguished Legal Writing, making her the fourth Fordham Law student in the last five years to receive the award. The paper was originally submitted as a note for the Fordham Law Review where Walker is also an articles and notes editor and associate symposia editor.
Walker said it was “surreal” to hear that she had been selected. “I was so flattered to be nominated, but I truly didn’t think that I would actually receive it. So it was shocking and very flattering.”
Walker’s paper, titled “An Apt Analogy? Rethinking the Role of Judicial Deference to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Post Kistor,” explores the unresolved question of what level of deference federal judges need to follow when it comes to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s federal sentencing guidelines. Previous Supreme Court decisions suggested that the U.S. Sentencing Commission should be treated like any other administrative agency, but Walker’s paper argues that shouldn’t be the case.
The topic, said Walker, combines two of her favorite 1L classes: Criminal Law and Legislation and Regulation.
“Going into the note writing process, I knew I wanted to do something to do with criminal law,” said Walker. “I was just poking around, and I saw this circuit split, and it really jumped out to me … then the more I looked into it, the more interested I became because it was really the perfect combination of my two favorite 1L classes.”
Her note advisor, Professor Youngjae Lee, selected her work for submission to the Burton Award after observing her excellent legal writing and reasoning skills.
“The topic was a challenging one, as it required Amy to bring together criminal law, sentencing law, and administrative law, at both concrete doctrinal and abstract theoretical levels,” said Lee. “I think the final product is fantastic. Amy gives a thorough and nuanced discussion of all the issues and their difficulties and comes out with a solution that offers a new way out of the problem she identifies.”
Walker grew up in Connecticut and attended Colgate University, where she double majored in history and political science. Before coming to Fordham Law, she spent two years as a litigation legal assistant, and she knew she wanted to pursue becoming a litigator after graduation. But, once in law school, she soon became fascinated by the legal questions surrounding criminal law.
“I’m not sure whether criminal law is something I will practice in my career but that also was part of what prompted me to want to write my note about a topic in criminal law,” said Walker. “I figured that if it wasn’t something I was going to practice, at least I could spend a semester digging into it.”
An awards ceremony for all 15 of the 2025 Burton Legal for Legal Writing recipients will be held on May 29 at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
Previous Fordham Law recipients of the award include Samantha Mitchell ’24, Nadav Ben Zur ’20, Casey Adams ’19, Joshua Liebman ’17, and Anthony Piccirillo ’12.