by Cynthia Price
Legal News
It does not take long to figure out what Sarah Pixler cares passionately about.
Almost immediately, Pixler reveals that she cares deeply about human rights, and she is passionate about the battle against human trafficking.
The third-year student at Thomas M. Cooley Law School is this year’s winner of the Melissa Mitchell Memorial Scholarship, an award which recognizes such deep commitment, along with academic excellence and, in particular, litigation skills.
The scholarship, a cash award, is named for a stand-out Cooley 2003 graduate who was tragically murdered just a year after she had moved to California and started a successful criminal defense practice.
Cooley Professor Evelyn Calogero and other professors, along with Melissa Mitchell’s family and some of her friends and classmates, began a scholarship fund in June 2006, just as Mitchell’s murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Calogero says, “After Melissa graduated, I hired her as a junior adjunct professor to help teach one of our moot court classes — she was that bright, that curious, that intelligent. She was also really offbeat, and she loved learning so much that we practically had to kick her out of Cooley because she had so many credits.”
Calogero takes primary responsibility for choosing the finalist. In the past, she has sometimes had to enlist the aid of other professors who knew Mitchell to narrow it down, but “this year it
wasn’t even close; there was no doubt.”
She continues, “It was that commitment — Sarah’s got that same kind of commitment to her cause that Melissa had to criminal defense. If you don’t have that fire in your belly for what you’re doing, you can burn out so quickly.”
What Sarah Pixler would like to do is use the law to eradicate human trafficking from the face of the earth.
It was not until Pixler interned at the International Justice Mission (IJM) in Washington DC in 2009 that she began to feel that passion, as she learned more and more about the horrors of modern-day slavery.
Pixler started out intending to be a Spanish teacher. Originally from Arizona, she attended Arizona State University in Tempe, graduating from the Hugh Downs School of Communication in 2008. During that time period, she also attended Pepperdine University, spending the academic year 2006-2007 in Argentina at Universidad Católica Argentina in Buenos Aires working on intercultural communications, and maintaining a 4.0 grade point average throughout.
Her internship at the IJM opened her eyes to what was happening internationally, to both the widespread problem and the potential solution legal work can offer. “I saw what was happening in South East Asia, Nepal, Bangladesh,” Pixler says. “There were two of us interning, but there were also two legal interns, and I saw that the research they were doing was kind of a step up — I love doing research and writing. So I decided that going to law school would give me an advantage.
“My goal in going to law school is and always was to become an excellent attorney and work against human trafficking and slavery.”
Since that time, Pixler said, she has become more and more fascinated with the domestic human trafficking situation. She became involved with the local chapter of the Not for Sale Campaign, which originates in San Francisco.
That national organization published a paper Pixler wrote during her scholarly writing, called “Freedom’s Sacred Cause: The Importance of Grassroots Abolitionist Advocacy in Modern United States Human Trafficking Legislation,” which can be found at http://www.nfsacademy.
org/whitepapers. “That was exciting,” she comments. (She is also a Senior Associate Editor for Cooley’s Law Review.)
Pixler, the fifth recipient of the Melissa Mitchell Scholarship Award, qualified on several factors in addition to embodying, as Mitchell did, the spirit of Cooley’s motto, in corde hominum est anima legis (“in the heart of man is the spirit of law”).
Calogero and the selection committee also take into account whether the student is of good character and in good academic standing, as well as demonstrating “excellence in litigation skills through participation in the Moot Court or Mock Trial Programs,... a passion for learning and the law, and... a commitment to community or pro bono service.”
Pixler was part of a two-person team participating in the 2012 National Juvenile Law Moot Court Competition in Los Angeles. The team made it to the semi-finals, and Pixler’s brief was named the third-best in the country.
Her love of learning runs parallel with her dedication to human rights. She has received several certificates of merit, in Intra-School Moot Court, Pretrial Skills, and several in Research and Writing alone.
Pixler has also extended her learning opportunities beyond academic work to an aggressive schedule of internships and externships over the years.
In the summer of 2011, Pixler was a legal extern for the U.S. Department of Justice in Phoenix. She followed that with a stint working for The Honorable Robert Holmes Bell at the U.S. District Court. That internship entailed drafting opinions, orders and judgments on prisoner civil rights and habeas corpus motions, which she loved.
In 2012 she has again been interning for the United States Department of Justice, this time at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Grand Rapids. “One of the reasons I was glad to get this spot is that as interns we can appear in court, for anything but a trial,” Pixler says. She has appeared on arraignments, changes of plea, initial appearances, and sentencing hearings.
Her pro bono work and attendant honors make for a lengthy list. She has served as a Cooley Ambassador and the Student Bar Association Class Representative; has worked for the Volunteer Corps and as a Grade Appeals Magistrate and a Teaching and Research Assistant. She has devoted time to Cooley’s Nonprofit Incorporation Project and several other legal clinics, both in and out of Cooley.
In 2011 the Women Lawyers Association of Michigan Foundation named her a scholar, and she has also been honored as Cooley’s Outstanding Woman Law Student.
And what does the future hold for this bright young woman? This fall she will work as a clerk in Portland Oregon’s Immigration Court through the Department of Justice
Honors Program. Pixler says, “I’d also like to clerk in a Federal Court after this, or be an assistant U.S. attorney” — and her eyes light up — “especially if I could be the human trafficking coordinator.”
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