Outstanding Clinical Student Award winner Jamie Dye with Joann Sahl
Each year, Associate Clinical Professor and C. Blake McDowell Jr. Professor of Law Joann Sahl presents the Outstanding Clinical Student Award given by the . This year’s award recipient is Jamie Dye.
“Jamie is deserving of this award for her dedication to helping clients on a variety of levels across multiple clinics and related programs,” Sahl said.
Dye began volunteering regularly at the monthly Akron Law Reentry Clinic at the start of the spring 2022 semester of her first year. She then took Sahl’s Reentry Clinic class that fall, which inspired her to focus her law school experience on clinical work. While in the Reentry Clinic, she assisted clients in the (EPP).
When the position of student director of the Certificate of Qualification for Employment (CQE) Clinic opened up, Dye applied and was selected. She served in that position until graduation. In spring 2022, she also participated in Akron Law’s Civil Practice Clinic.
In August 2022, she took a part-time paid position as director of Akron Law’s Inmate Assistance program, which she continued until graduation. She and a few other students would meet every Friday with inmates at the Summit County Jail who had requested legal research assistance.
“They would have questions about their docket or the Ohio Revised Code,” Dye said. “We also got a lot of questions related to starting a business when they got out. That made you feel good to help them. And we always told them about the expungement and CQE clinics when they would express concern about how to move forward in life with a criminal record.”
“Jamie has a real dedication to making sure people have access to justice. She’s recruited other students to volunteer, served as a mentor to the new recruits, and been an ambassador for the clinics in the Akron community,” Sahl said.
In summer 2023, Dye received a through the Ohio Bar Association to work on an original research project in an area championed by the late Supreme Court of Ohio Chief Justice Thomas Moyer. One of the areas is providing citizens with improved access to the courts.
As Dye and Sahl explained, a 2021 expansion of the Ohio’s record sealing law made pardon recipients who were previously not eligible under prior Ohio law newly eligible to apply to have their pardoned records sealed. Dye researched EPP clients who hadn’t had their EPP pardons sealed as part of the process, as well as clients the Reentry Clinic had represented before EPP existed.
“Jamie tracked down and reached out to all those people with the information, and we did a number pardon sealings here in Summit County,” Sahl said. “They were all very appreciative. We still have a few she’s working on to close the circle, even though she’s graduated. I think her dedication to finishing this project reflects what an asset she has been to the clinic.”