Two Columbia Law Students Awarded Prestigious Skadden Fellowships

Nathan Porceng ’25 spent three years on a nuclear-powered submarine, but his first project as a lawyer will be focused on energy of a different sort—helping bring solar power to coal country. During his Skadden Fellowship, Porceng will work with community groups in the Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia to create local solar energy nonprofits and cooperatives with the nonprofit Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services.

“There’s a lot of ongoing harm from the fossil fuel industry there, and there’s a lot of influence from the fossil industry. It’s projected to be one of the last regions to transition to renewable power,” Porceng says. His project is aimed at low-income communities of color, where there is a desire “to develop energy systems that they control, that are healthy, that are clean environmentally, and that can help uplift their communities economically.” 

Porceng connected with Fair Shake through Columbia Law’s Office of Public Interest/Public Service Law and Careers, and he worked on a community solar project as a student in the Environmental and Climate Justice Clinic taught by Camille Pannu, associate clinical professor of law. 

Transactional lawyering skills, like those taught in the clinic, are “key,” Porceng says. “If you want to get a bunch of people in a marginalized community together, apply for funding, build solar panels, and distribute the benefits, they need lawyers. And there are just not a lot of environmental lawyers who work in the public interest who are willing to work on transactional issues.”

Porceng believes that a transition away from fossil fuels should benefit individuals directly affected by pollution from coal mining, including those who have faced health issues or lost their jobs. “We’re going to transition to renewable energy because we have to,” he says. The question he hopes to answer is, “How do we do this in a way to uplift the communities that are marginalized under the fossil fuel-dominated infrastructure?”

Porceng knows the region well; he earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. During five years in the U.S. Navy as a submarine officer, he spent much of his time between deployments in the area.   

“Home was Pittsburgh. Home was that part of Appalachia,” he says. “In law school, developing my interest in environmental law and environmental justice, I was really trying to think of ways that I could eventually serve those communities.” Originally interested in immigration work, Porceng decided instead to “leverage my engineering background and my technical experience in the Navy for some positive good,” he says.

He chose Columbia Law because a recent alumna, who was also a Skadden Fellow, recommended the strength of the Law School’s public interest community. She was right, he says. At the first meetup of Berger Fellows, “it was so refreshing being in a room with a bunch of super passionate, super, super smart people who are dedicating themselves to figure out how to solve all these problems with the law and with society,” he says. “It's been a great support network. Even though not many of us work on environmental issues, everyone is interested in things outside of their main issue. We show up for each other’s events.” 

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Malik Sammons ’25 and his family lived with his grandmother, who began volunteering at a homeless shelter after a disability ended her teaching career. 

“Seeing the way that she was able to play a small role in people’s lives but have big implications for them was really moving,” he says. “And it helped me from a young age understand the importance of housing and … how it can be something small in somebody’s life that causes them to be in a situation that is unthinkable.”

With a Skadden Fellowship, Sammons will spend two years helping prevent the unthinkable for New Yorkers whose rent is subsidized through a city program. He will work for the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), focusing on impact litigation relating to New York City’s rent supplement program (CityFHEPS) program and educating the public on the programs in place to assist unhoused families.

Far too often, the city fails to issue rent payments to landlords, and tenants are unaware until they get eviction notices, Sammons says. One of the goals of his litigation will be to require tenant notification when the city has not paid its portion of the rent on time. In addition, he hopes that the litigation will “make the city pay more attention to this area and provide the resources to make sure that [the CityFHEPS program] is running smoothly. And also to make sure that tenants who are bearing the brunt of this problem are helped to the city’s fullest ability.”

Sammons will be providing know-your-rights material and other resources to families facing eviction. “Hanging out in housing court is going to be a big part of my job,” he says. His Skadden project for NYCLU also involves helping rent-stabilized tenants whose landlords undertake major capital improvements—as a rationale for increasing rent—without required review and notification.  

The idea for the NYCLU litigation sprang from Sammons’ work in Columbia Law School’s Community Advocacy Lab Clinic. Ensuring decent, affordable housing is “a telltale sign of how much we respect everybody’s human dignity,” he says. He sees affordable housing as key to ensuring an individual’s full range of civil rights: “access to quality education, whether they live near a food desert, whether they’re being exposed to environmental toxins, whether their communities are policed too much. Seeing the centrality of housing to all civil rights issues helped me to decide where I really want to focus my effort,” he says.

After his 1L year, Sammons interned at the New York Legal Assistance Group Public Housing Justice Project, which sued the city over its failure to publish violations in public housing despite a 2022 law requiring it to do so. He continued to pursue impact litigation through an externship working on voting rights at the Legal Defense Fund (formerly called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund). Both experiences taught him client-centered impact advocacy, “the importance of meeting with your clients and understanding … the needs that they have coming from their mouths—as opposed to our arm’s-length understanding of what’s going on.” 

Those lessons also guided him in pursuing the Skadden Fellowship: “Be true to what you care about,” he says. “And listen to the people who need our services as advocates going forward.”