Husain Earns Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship for Public Interest Law

Humza Husain CSSH’20 has received New York University School of Law’s Sinsheimer Service Scholarship. This scholarship is one of NYU’s highly competitive Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarships, which cover the full tuition costs of J.D. candidates committed to pursuing careers in public interest law. The Sinsheimer Scholarship is awarded to one outstanding incoming student at NYU Law each year “who demonstrates a strong commitment to providing direct representation in civil legal matters to individuals who cannot otherwise afford such representation.”

A philosophy major at Northeastern, Humza wishes to focus his legal career on advocating for people who have experienced domestic violence. He is particularly concerned with domestic violence in the context of immigrant communities. While at Northeastern, Humza participated in a co-op at Saheli, a community organization based outside Boston that serves immigrant and other survivors of domestic violence within the South Asian community in Massachusetts; this experience underscored for him the ways in which US immigration regulations may serve to disempower immigrant individuals who experience domestic abuse. He explored these and related topics in “Why Are South Asian Immigrant Women Vulnerable to Domestic Violence?,” a paper published in Inquiries Journal last year.

Humza also has a deep interest in the experiences of inmates within the US prison system. While on co-op at the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, he spearheaded an initiative to obtain previously unavailable regulations from county jails using public records requests; he also responded to inquiries from prisoners and assisted law students with research. Humza recently completed a senior thesis related to prisons, “Technology as Dehumanization in the US Prison System.”