Stanford Law School (SLS) recently named seven students Sallyanne Payton Fellows. The fellowship, now in its third year, supports SLS students who are contemplating a career in legal academia. The fellowship is named for Sallyanne Payton, JD ’68 (BA ’64), the first African-American student to graduate from SLS.

“By honoring Sallyanne Payton’s achievements and legacy, we aim to inspire and support the next generation of scholars who will shape the future of legal thought and education,” said SLS Dean George Triantis, Richard E. Lang Professor of Law. “This fellowship not only provides resources and mentorship for our students, it reinforces our broader mission to build a legal community where legal scholars with a variety of backgrounds and experiences can make lasting contributions to the field.”

In 2021, the inaugural year of the fellowship, Payton said: “What I cherish the most about my Stanford experience is that its network has created opportunities that may have never occurred to me elsewhere. My hope is that this fellowship will help open doors for other people, and the existence of it will help make Stanford Law School students aware of the breadth of their career possibilities.”

After a trailblazing legal career, holding posts in both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington D.C., Payton went on to become a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law, where she held the L. Bates Lea Chair, until her retirement in 2013.

Payton Fellows commit to drafting three papers for publication during their JD studies. In addition to individual mentorship and guidance, fellows convene with sponsoring faculty to discuss research methods, research design, interdisciplinary approaches to legal thought, present work in progress, and engage in other supportive programming. They are mentored by Greg Ablavsky, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law, and Bernadette Meyler, Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, as well as other faculty and alumni.

The Payton Fellowship is one of two SLS-sponsored programs that honor historic firsts at the law school. The other is a teaching prize recognizing inclusive pedagogy in 1L teaching in honor of the late SLS Professor Barbara Allen Babcock, the first woman member of the SLS faculty.

The 2024 Sallyanne Payton Fellows

Kiran Chawla, JD ’25

Kiran Chawla is also a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Her research interests are at the intersection of climate change and inequality. In addition to her legal training, she brings tools from public and environmental economics and energy systems engineering to understand how climate, environmental, and energy laws can be designed in a distribution-sensitive manner. Before Stanford, Kiran worked at Energy & Environmental Economics (E3) on long-term resource planning and market design issues for high renewable energy systems. She holds a B. Tech in engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, an MS in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan, and an MA in Economics from Stanford University.

Maya Durvasula, JD ’26

Maya Durvasula is also a PhD candidate in Stanford’s Department of Economics. Her research examines how law and policy affect access to medicine. In particular, her dissertation chapters investigate how legal rules and economic incentives “from bench to bedside”—between scientific research laboratories and medical clinics—determine whether a sick patient has access to high-quality medical technology, sufficient trust in health care providers to adopt their recommendations, and sufficient resources to afford medical care. Maya is a Knight Hennessy Scholar, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, and Center for Law and the Biosciences Student Fellow. She graduated from Duke University in 2018 as a Robertson Scholar, with a degree in economics. In 2017, she was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar for the state of New Mexico.

Harith Khawaja, JD ’25

Harith Khawaja, a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. in philosophy and computer science. His undergraduate thesis on the philosophy of artificial intelligence was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. After college, Harith worked as a software engineer at Lyft for three years, building machine learning tools for trust and safety purposes. At Stanford, Harith has served as an Articles Editor for the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and participated in the Immigrants’ Rights and Supreme Court Litigation clinics. He has spent his summers at public interest organizations: first, at the Institute for Constitutional Accountability and Protection, and subsequently at the Constitutional Accountability Center. Harith’s academic interests lie in the governance of technology, broadly construed.

Annelisa Kingsbury-Lee, JD ’26

Annelisa Kingsbury Lee is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. She is originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she studied Environmental Science and Public Policy and East Asian Studies, with a particular focus on energy history. At SLS, her research focuses on transnational environmental and energy law and legal history. She is also interested in federal Indian law, political economy, and modernist literature. She is co-chair of Academic Affairs for the Stanford Law Association, and is a member editor of the Stanford Law Review, and the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.

Josh Petersen, JD ’26 (BA ’19)

Josh Petersen is a concurrent PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Michigan. His doctoral research addresses questions of political philosophy, public law, legal epistemology, and environmental justice. An active member of the graduate student community, Josh has served on the international board of Minorities and Philosophy and as President of SLS OutLaw. Before beginning his graduate studies, Josh was Research Officer at the University Network for Human Rights, where he facilitated human rights research and advocacy on a wide array of issues, including environmental racism, migration, and mass incarceration. His work documenting environmental injustice in Louisiana has received coverage in The Guardian, The New Yorker, ProPublica, and Vice. He holds a BA with honors in Philosophy and German from Stanford, where he was awarded the JE Wallace Sterling Prize for Scholastic Achievement. While in law school, he has enjoyed working as a research assistant for Professors Evelyn Douek and Shirin Sinnar, as well as Professor Sarah Moss at the University of Michigan.

Bojan Srbinovski, JD ’24, (BA ’16)

Bojan Srbinovski is a recent graduate of SLS and the PhD program at Cornell University’s English Department. His work engages historical, substantive, and procedural issues that arise in financial litigation, with a particular focus on economic catastrophe as it gets refracted through legal reform in the long nineteenth century. His latest article, “The Two Poles of Article III: Formalism and Functionalism in Bankruptcy Jurisdiction,” was recently published in the Drake Law Review. Srbinovski also writes in the field of law and the humanities,- and has work forthcoming in a publication of the Oxford University Press. While a student at SLS, he was also Articles Editor of the Stanford Law Review and a member of the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic.

Victor Wu, JD ’25

Victor Wu is also a PhD student in political science at Stanford University. He graduated as valedictorian from Dartmouth College in 2022 with a triple major in government, environmental studies, and quantitative social science.  Wu is the Managing Editor of the Stanford Law Review, Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, and President of the Stanford Environmental Law Society. His student Note, “Watering Down Enforcement: Inadequate Criminal Liability in State Clean Water Act Programs,” received Stanford’s Olaus & Adolf Murie Award for Environmental Law and is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review. While in law school, Wu completed legal internships with Earthjustice, Sierra Club, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Environment Section of the California Attorney General’s Office, and the New York Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Appeals Bureau.

About Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is one of the nation’s leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business, and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, produce outstanding legal scholarship and empirical analysis, and contribute regularly to the nation’s press as legal and policy experts. Stanford Law School has established a model for legal education that provides rigorous interdisciplinary training, hands-on experience, global perspective and focus on public service, spearheading a movement for change.