CLP Welcomes 2024-2025 Student Fellows

For the 2024-2025 academic year, the HLS Center on the Legal Profession is thrilled to host five student fellows who will be undertaking a diverse range of empirical projects investigating the legal profession. Learn more below:

Bernadette Blashill

Bernadette Blashill is a doctoral student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research investigates how people care for others in professional and personal contexts. One of her projects examines how people in helping professions navigate the challenges that come with providing services. Specifically, it seeks to understand how immigration attorneys who work on humanitarian-based cases (e.g., asylum) manage moral distress, burnout, and secondary trauma. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, and the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. Her other project, in collaboration with researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, focuses on how to support adult-child caregivers of their parents with cancer. 

Prior to pursuing graduate school, she worked in immigration and disability law in the Bay Area for three years, and after as a Policy and Research Analyst in educational equity for Catalyst California. She also contributed to two UC Berkeley studies investigating economic precarity, race, and the social impact of COVID-19 in California.

She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2019 with a B.A. in Sociology with high honors. In her free time, she loves swing dancing, playing the flute, and spending time with her loved ones. 

Hadley DeBello

Hadley DeBello is a 3L student at Harvard Law School. She holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College and a M.A. in China Studies from Peking University. 

As a fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession, her work tackles the changing political and economic conditions of the legal market, particularly in regards to the globalization of the juris doctorate degree. Prior to law school, her research was published in The Harvard Political Review, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and Axios.  

Richard (Licheng) Hua

Richard Hua is a third year law student and student fellow with the Center on the Legal Profession.  He earned his Bachelor of Laws at Peking University in 2021, and is admitted to bar (not holding active license) in China.  He completed an internship with the Honorable Judge Lewis J. Liman of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  He will join Davis Polk & Wardwell after graduation.
 
With the student fellowship, Richard plans to pursue an empirical study of the racial bias of legal AI by collecting and analyzing federal criminal sentencing and employment discrimination decisions in federal courts.  Previously, he completed an individual writing with Prof. David B. Wilkins on career decision-making of international J.D. students.

Shiv Pandya

Shiv Pandya is a third year law student and student fellow with the Center on the Legal Profession. He completed his B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, from Pomona College in 2020, and worked for two years as a supply chain consultant prior to law school.

At Harvard Law School, Shiv is the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and has been involved in Lambda, SALSA, and the Crimmigration Clinic. With this fellowship, he plans to conduct an analysis into the role of government in legal education in India, specifically by analyzing the impact of rankings on institutional behavior. 

Nicolás Parra-Herrera

Nicolás Parra-Herrera is a doctoral candidate (S.J.D.) at Harvard Law School (HLS). He is also a Visiting Professor at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, where he teaches courses on Dispute Resolution: Negotiation, Mediation, Dispute System Design, Leadership, and Digitizing Justice. He was a former graduate fellow in the Negotiation Program at HLS and a visiting researcher at Pennsylvania State University. 

Nicolas has published books and papers on alternative dispute resolution (ADR), private law, legal history, and legal philosophy. Among his works, he has written “A Road Not Taken in ADR: Mary Parker Follett and the Emergence of Proto-ADR” forthcoming in the Ohio State Journal of Dispute Resolution and recipient of the 2024 Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize at Harvard Law School. He co-authored with Dan Rohde, “Law as Architecture: Mapping Contingency and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Legal Historiography,” published in the Journal of Law and Political Economy (2023), and published “Three Approaches to Proportionality in American Legal Thought: A Genealogy” in the book Proportionality in Private Law, edited by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (2023).  He also co-authored with M.I.T. Professor Lawrence Susskind and Canadian Justice (ret.) William Tilleman the book “Judicial Dispute Resolution: New Roles for Judges in Ensuring Justice” (2023). 

Nicolas teaches and coaches courses on leadership, ethics, and moral practice at Harvard Kennedy School, where received the “Dean’s Award for Excellence in Student Teaching.” He was part of the teaching team that designed and taught the first adaptive leadership course for lawyers. 

Before his doctoral studies, he clerked at the Colombian Constitutional Court and worked in litigation, arbitration, and corporate law at two law firms in Colombia. Nicolas completed his magna cum laude B.A. in Law and Philosophy and cum laude M.A. in Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes. 

Nicolas co-produces with Professor Jorge González-Jácome the first podcast in Spanish on Law, Film, and Humanities, El Derecho por fuera del Derecho.