Eva Dossier
In August 2005, Eva Dossier was beginning her junior year at Tulane University when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Forced to evacuate for the entire fall semester while the school rebuilt its ravaged campus, Dossier joined a diaspora of Tulane students whose research assistantships and internships were literally washed away in the hurricane’s aftermath. “When I returned to campus for the spring semester, my research assistantships, which would have involved working with convicted felons facing death sentences and with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, no longer existed,” she said.
Instead, Dossier quickly landed an internship with Safe Streets, Strong Communities, an advocacy organization engaged in investigating allegations of abuse and corruption within the New Orleans Police Department and the New Orleans Parish Prison Complex. Over the next year and a half, she interviewed more than 100 individuals about their experiences with New Orleans police and prison complex, and the experience changed her career goal. “I had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience,” she recalls, “but as I worked with Safe Streets, I saw what a tremendous difference a law degree makes in your ability to effect change, and I started to think about becoming a lawyer.”
After earning her B.S. in neuroscience with academic honors in 2007, Dossier took a year off to work for Kaplan as an LSAT tutor, travel and choose a law school. “I visited roughly 20 law schools,” she recalls. “I chose Vanderbilt because of the school’s faculty and its culture. The faculty here not only have strong CVs and an impressive volume of scholarship, but they also have an enthusiastic dedication to teaching. When I sat in on classes at Vanderbilt, I was impressed with how engaged the students and faculty were.”
Dossier’s interest in pursuing a clerkship was confirmed after she interned for Judge Aleta Trauger ’76 on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee during summer 2009. “Working for Judge Trauger convinced me that I definitely wanted to seek a judicial clerkship,” she says. “Her dedication to reaching the correct result made working in her chambers extraordinary. She taught me the importance of precision in both research and writing.” She also served as a research assistant for Associate Dean Lisa Bressman, a nationally renowned scholar of administrative law, and Professor Nita Farahany, whose research focuses on how current discoveries in biological science should impact the law, and served a semester-long externship with the Metropolitan Nashville Public Defender’s Office supervised by Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs Sue Kay.
After taking the Texas bar exam, Dossier will clerk for Judge James B. Loken on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Minneapolis. She appreciated the guidance and assistance provide by Professor Michael Bressman, who heads Vanderbilt’s clerkship program. “Professor Bressman provides students with an extraordinary amount of information on the value of clerking and the details of the application process,” she says. “He is invested in each individual student’s success.” Dossier is hoping to pursue a second clerkship during the 2012-13 term, after which she plans to enter private practice.
Eva Dossier '11
Clerk, Judge James B. Loken
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Minneapolis, Minnesota – 2011-12 term
- John W. Wade Scholar
- Editor in Chief, Vanderbilt Law Review
- Pro Bono Pledge