This summer, 15 law students traded the classroom for ten weeks inside public-interest law. As the 2026 class of Bradley Summer Associate Legal Fellows, they worked inside organizations defending constitutional order, free markets, civil society, and the free exchange of ideas—the same institutions the Bradley Foundation exists to strengthen.
Their placements spanned the country and a wide range of public-interest legal work: the Becket Fund in Washington, DC; the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio; EdChoice Legal Advocates in Indianapolis, Indiana; the Fairness Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Washington; the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Virginia; the Investor Choice Advocates Network in Los Angeles, California; the Liberty Justice Center in Austin, Texas; the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation in Springfield, Virginia; the New Civil Liberties Alliance in Arlington, Virginia; the Pioneer New England Legal Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts; the Public Interest Legal Foundation in Arlington, Virginia; and the Upper Midwest Law Center in Minnetonka, Minnesota.
Individually, those placements gave students an unusually substantive introduction to public-interest practice. Taken together, they were intended to do something more: begin building a community of young lawyers who might spend their careers strengthening the institutions Bradley exists to support.
What the fellows found in those offices wasn’t simply a résumé line. It was a different way of thinking about what a legal career is for.
Law school can make the next credential, clerkship, or job offer feel like the measure of progress. The summer asked a different question—not what a legal career can get you, but what it can be for.
“Something amazing about public interest work, especially what IJ does, is that you’re helping others,” said Mikhal Ben-Joseph, who spent her summer at the Institute for Justice. “It’s actually not about what you’re getting out of it, but what you’re able to put in. That’s a very different orientation for when you get up in the morning.”
By the end of the summer, she had a word for it: “If you’d asked me before the summer whether I’d go into public interest, I probably would have said no. Now I feel very compelled to head in that direction. It’s the best feeling.”
For Jake Dellicker, who spent his summer at the Fairness Center in Harrisburg, PA, that orientation is the whole point of the work. “The law is a service industry. Your job is to represent those who don’t have the time or resources to navigate a complex system that’s supposed to help them,” he said. “Public interest is one of the only ways you can truly help the underserved — you step into someone’s shoes and walk beside them.” At the Fairness Center, he added, “the person is a client first — always.”
Anri Sorel came at it from another angle at the Buckeye Institute in Columbus: the chance to put ideas to work. “What drew me to public interest law was the chance to apply high-minded theory in my everyday work,” he said. “In constitutional law you talk about these esoteric, abstract concepts — and a group like the Buckeye Institute gave me the chance to actually apply that doctrine: writing memos on the cases I’d studied and putting my own analysis on them.”
These weren’t observation posts. The fellows were given substantive work on real cases with real deadlines.
At the Buckeye Institute, Anri had a hand in a document that would climb the full ladder of a legal team on its way to the nation’s highest court. On one of the institute’s cases, the team petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the matter, and Anri wrote the first draft of its amicus brief in support of granting review. From there the draft passed through the whole legal team, revised and sharpened by senior attorneys before it was filed.
“Obviously that went through multiple revisions by attorneys much more capable than I am before it got to the Supreme Court,” he said, “but the fact that I got to work on something that was ultimately seen by the highest court in the land was a very big benefit to me.”
At the Institute for Justice, Mikhal joined a live trial team fighting a Fourth Amendment case against a Texas sheriff’s office — and discovered a side of the law she never expected to love. A former data scientist, she took the lead organizing thousands of pieces of video evidence into trial exhibits.
“I had no idea I was interested in trial. I go to Harvard, and everyone here wants to go into appellate law,” she said. “Now I’m on this trial team, and I don’t know how to explain the adrenaline rush I get every time we meet. You’re really part of a team.”
The autonomy surprised her most: “This would never happen in Big Law — you’d never just have the autonomy to come up with brand-new ideas for a trial demonstrative. What I made is literally going to be on the TV in trial.”
For Jake, the value was seeing the scope of a fight he’d only known from a distance. “It gave me exposure to an area of law I knew existed but hadn’t really seen the scope of — until I got to sit down with people who’ve been doing this for years.”
Between the placements, the fellows came together in Milwaukee — and, to hear them tell it, that convening was as formative as the casework.
The design was deliberate: the fellowship was meant to create a cohort, not simply fund 15 separate summer jobs.
“What made the Bradley program so beneficial was that it was networking-first,” Anri said. “We were given real time just to talk, get to know one another, and connect — and that’s the biggest value-add of any program like this. I appreciate that Bradley doesn’t treat it as an afterthought.”
What that time made possible was a rare kind of depth: “I was surrounded by people who had read the same books I had. We could skip the first fifteen minutes of figuring out who a thinker is and go straight into something deeper.”
Mikhal expected a scholarship and found something closer to a launchpad. “It wasn’t Bradley telling us, ‘You have to go public interest all the way,’” she said. “The advice was super practical: here’s how you actually weave public interest into a productive legal career — and manage your family, your finances, and your dreams. It was a whole-person approach, and I really wasn’t expecting that.” She was struck, too, by who showed up: “I’ve never been at a fellowship where so many alumni, of their own volition, choose to come back. It was very cool to meet generations of people who had been influenced by Bradley and were out doing the thing they’d set out to do.”
For Jake, the takeaway was simpler, and it stuck. “It’s easy to feel like you’re on the outside,” he said. “It’s very refreshing to learn there are principled people who believe what you believe, and who will do everything they can to carry those values forward.”
The fellowship is built to outlast the summer. Scattered across firms and organizations in Washington, Columbus, Arlington, and beyond, the 2026 class is already a network—one its members expect to lean on for years.
“At this super-young stage in all our careers, we actually get together and get to know each other,” Mikhal said, “so when we spread out to our respective future homes, we’ll still have good relationships. There’s something cool about an organizing force this early on.”
She knows exactly why that will matter: “When I’m looking for a job again, there’ll be a lot of voices telling me to go do the Big Law thing. Having a base of people who can remind me how happy I was at IJ will be really grounding.”
As Jake put it, reflecting on what surprised him most: “There are people on your side, and they’re always looking to invest in others who want to push their values and beliefs for America. That’s a pretty amazing thing that often goes overlooked.”
That is the quiet aim of the whole enterprise. The Bradley Foundation doesn’t just fund the organizations defending constitutional order, free markets, and civil society. It invests in the people who will carry that work forward. For 15 law students this summer, ten weeks of substantive legal work made public-interest law something more than an abstraction—and turned a group of summer associates into a community that may endure long after the fellowship itself is over.
Meet the 2026 Bradley Summer Associate Legal Fellows and learn how the program works at bradleyfdn.org/legal-fellows/summer-associates.