2024 CLEA Awards for Outstanding Clinical and Externship Students: Brooklyn's Shaun Lederman

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 Brooklyn Law School: 

Outstanding Externship Student: Shaun Lederman

This year’s recipient of the BLS Outstanding Externship Student Award is Shaun Lederman ‘24. While at BLS, Shaun completed three semesters of externship work on behalf of three different field placements—Merson Law, PLLC, the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights, and the chambers of the Honorable Marcia M. Henry, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Eastern District of New York.  The diversity of these placements exemplifies the value of externships in training law students across the many dimensions of practice, and Shaun excelled in all: representing injury victims, investigating civil rights violations, and supporting the work of a judicial chambers.  Delivering work of “consistently high quality,” Shaun impressed his supervisors as “diligent,” “eager to learn,” and “an absolute pleasure to work with.”  Supervisors also uniformly remarked on Shaun’s “excellent” research and writing skills. One noted how he “is great at taking a complex legal issue, digesting it, and translating the facts to answer the legal question in a succinct way.”  One supervisor summed it up: “Shaun has the skills and intangible qualities to make a great lawyer.”  Shaun also excelled in the externship program’s corequisite seminars, taking seriously the goal of reflective practice and thoughtful critique of the legal profession and legal institutions. As an emissary to the legal profession, he represented the best of Brooklyn Law School, and we are proud to honor him with this award.