Bragging Rights

Brisa Franco ’27, a first-year JD student, won her race to become a director on the Forest Grove School Board. She is one of two Latinas on the five-person board, which represents a largely Latinx community. Her campaign team comprised other Lewis & Clark 1L law students.

Nikolis Clark ’25, testified in front of the Oregon State Legislature to support establishing the Oregon Commission on Artificial Intelligence (House Bill 3592). The committee would monitor increasing AI usage statewide and its long-term implications. Clark had been assisting Oregon Consumer Justice with AI policy research as an extern.

Natalie Lerner ’25 won first and Timothy Martell ’25 won second place in the 2025 Davis Wright Tremaine International Law Writing Competition, granting them $2,500 and $1,000 stipends, respectively, for writing the top two international law research papers.

Kiefer Stenseng LLM ’25, had his paper, “The Jurisprudence of Statutory Interpretation: A Framework for the Logical Restraints of Legal Positivism and Textualism,” published in the Nebraska Law Review in the fall, part of his individual research project.

This summer, Danielle Morvan ’25 took the stage at an international conference in South Africa, “Aggregate Litigation—Current Challenges for Civil Justice in the Global Perspective,” hosted by the University of Stellenbosch Faculty of Law. She highlighted how forced arbitration quietly strips vulnerable consumers of their day in court. Jordan D. Schnitzer Professor Robert Klonoff was a co-organizer of the conference.

Grace Elkhal ’27 published her poetry collection, The Sorrows That Bury Us, which explores grief, identity, and resilience amid war and conflict through her experience as a Syrian American.

Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment students Fiona Thayer ’26, Kat Engelken ’26, Sarah Rae ’25, Abigail Dodd ’26, Mikki Ness ’26, and Morgan Oberman ’25, supervised by Professor Erica Lyman, presented research and advocated urgency in a White House call with U.S. negotiators, who will soon finalize the international plastics treaty to regulate the material from production through disposal. The students joined nationwide advocacy groups, including World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.