Sophie Thackray, SJP Fellow/Staff Attorney, Joins the SJP Team

March 2022

Sophie joined the School Justice Project team in March 2022 following a year and a half of defending tenants in DC Landlord and Tenant Court. Sophie graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2020, where she focused on juvenile justice and special education law. While in law school, Sophie interned at Children's Rights, the National Center for Youth Law, and Advocates for Children of New York. She also participated in Georgetown's Innovative Policing Practicum, where she worked with DC's Metropolitan Police Department to train officer recruits and research policing reform. During her final year of law school, she served as a student attorney with Georgetown's Juvenile Justice Clinic representing youth charged with delinquency.

Prior to law school, Sophie served with City Year AmeriCorps at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Washington, DC and then as a legal assistant for the DC Tenants' Rights Center. She received her bachelor's degree in Spanish and Art History from the University of Oregon's Clark Honors College. While at the University of Oregon, Sophie participated in the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program, a national educational model that brings college students together with incarcerated individuals to study as peers in a seminar behind prison walls. She also volunteered at the Lane County juvenile detention and treatment facility with "SUP DAWG" (the Serbu-University Partnership Discussion and Workshop Group).

In addition to access to education and criminal legal system reform, Sophie is also passionate about bike infrastructure and diversity in music genres. She recently published an article in Arizona State University's Entertainment and Sport Law Journal entitled: Can't Nobody Tell Him Nothin': "Old Town Road" and the Reappropriation of Country Music by the Yeeha Agenda." Sophie is an attorney licensed to practice in the District of Columbia.