2024 CLEA Awards for Outstanding Clinical and Externship Students: WashULaw's Margaret Min and Hillary Ping

Each year, the Clinical Legal Education Association invites law schools to nominate students as their Outstanding Clinic Student or Team and Outstanding Externship student. This series includes submissions from law schools celebrating their outstanding students. 

From Washington University School of Law:

Outstanding Clinic Student: Margaret Min

Margaret Min exemplifies the value of a strong clinical legal education and is the winner of the 2024 WashULaw CLEA Award for Outstanding Clinic Student. Margaret came to WashULaw to gain the hands-on lawyering experience necessary to become a public interest attorney. In the Immigration Law Clinic, she deftly represented three asylum seeking families, utilizing trauma-informed interviewing, affidavit writing, oral advocacy, and persuasive writing skills. After completing the clinic, she carried those skills into her other classes and externships. During her final year, she conducted supervised research that produced a 65-page guidebook on asylum law in the Eighth Circuit, which will be immensely beneficial to future clinic students representing asylum seekers. Margaret plans to continue this work into her public interest career.

Outstanding Externship Student: Hillary Ping

Hillary Ping, J.D. 2024, was honored with WashULaw's Extern of the Year Award for her exceptional work at the St. Louis trial office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Committed to pursuing a career in the public sector, Hillary has dedicated her legal studies and experiential learning to advocating for workers' rights. She began her legal education at WashULaw after studying geological engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines. While in law school, she first gained valuable experience through internships with a fair housing organization and a holistic legal advocacy organization. Then, in her second summer of law school, she was awarded a Peggy Browning Fellowship and worked with Solidarity Law in Portland, Maine, focusing on employment discrimination claims. After graduation, she will continue to serve the public interest through her work with the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project in St. Louis.