Allison Elder
Legal Director of Root & Rebound's South Carolina Office
South Carolina
Email Allison
Prior to joining our team, Allison clerked for the Honorable Henry F. Floyd of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She received her J.D. (magna cum laude) and LL.M. in International Human Rights Law with honors from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 2019.
While in law school, Allison interned for Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers at Cabrini Green Legal Aid, and was a five-semester clinic student, working for the Bluhm Legal Clinic Children and Family Justice Center and MacArthur Justice Center’s Jail Suicide and Prisoners’ Rights clinic team each for a full school year, and the International Human Rights Clinic for an additional semester. She stayed on with MacArthur Justice Center as a summer intern, where she worked on both prisoners’ rights cases and other civil rights litigation, such as a class action challenging the constitutionality of Chicago’s gang database. She then served as a solitary confinement research assistant for the MacArthur Justice Center Appellate Program.
During her LL.M. year, Allison explored her interest in the intersection between criminal legal systems and civil rights through an international lens, conducting her senior research on the detention of persons convicted by international criminal tribunals and externing for the Governance and Justice Group, for whom she worked primarily on a Justice Audit of Somalia’s criminal legal system.
In her spare time at Northwestern, Allison was actively involved in supporting other public interest law students as a President and member of the Student Funded Public Interest Fellowship (SFPIF). She also helped found the Incarcerated Women’s Project and represented a client with an indeterminate sentence in his parole hearing.
Allison received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Mandarin Chinese from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, after which she was a Fulbright Scholar conducting public health research in China. She and her family are loving life in the Upstate, where she enjoys hiking in the mountains and cooking with whatever she can find from her local farmstand.
Allison Elder
Legal Director of Root & Rebound's South Carolina Office
South Carolina
Email Allison
Prior to joining our team, Allison clerked for the Honorable Henry F. Floyd of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She received her J.D. (magna cum laude) and LL.M. in International Human Rights Law with honors from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 2019.
While in law school, Allison interned for Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers at Cabrini Green Legal Aid, and was a five-semester clinic student, working for the Bluhm Legal Clinic Children and Family Justice Center and MacArthur Justice Center’s Jail Suicide and Prisoners’ Rights clinic team each for a full school year, and the International Human Rights Clinic for an additional semester. She stayed on with MacArthur Justice Center as a summer intern, where she worked on both prisoners’ rights cases and other civil rights litigation, such as a class action challenging the constitutionality of Chicago’s gang database. She then served as a solitary confinement research assistant for the MacArthur Justice Center Appellate Program.
During her LL.M. year, Allison explored her interest in the intersection between criminal legal systems and civil rights through an international lens, conducting her senior research on the detention of persons convicted by international criminal tribunals and externing for the Governance and Justice Group, for whom she worked primarily on a Justice Audit of Somalia’s criminal legal system.
In her spare time at Northwestern, Allison was actively involved in supporting other public interest law students as a President and member of the Student Funded Public Interest Fellowship (SFPIF). She also helped found the Incarcerated Women’s Project and represented a client with an indeterminate sentence in his parole hearing.
Allison received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Mandarin Chinese from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, after which she was a Fulbright Scholar conducting public health research in China. She and her family are loving life in the Upstate, where she enjoys hiking in the mountains and cooking with whatever she can find from her local farmstand.
Why do you come to work at Root & Rebound every day?
To keep South Carolina families together by helping to reunite those separated by the carceral system and by advocating for long-needed systemic change to break patterns of cyclical familial incarceration in the state.
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