Pro Bono Award Winner Sarah Star "” Defending Children and Families and the Constitution
| Jurisdiction | Vermont,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 49 No. 1 |
| Publication year | 2023 |
by Mary Ashcroft, Esq.
Pro Bono Award Winner Sarah Star — Defending Children and Families and the Constitution
Attorney Sarah Star is a solo practitioner in Middlebury, a graduate of the University of Chicago and of Northeastern School of Law. She was admitted to practice before the Vermont Bar in 2006. She is this year's winner of the VBA's Pro Bono Service Award.
When Sarah Star graduated from the University of Chicago in 2002, she earned an unusual degree for a future lawyer—a BA, with honors, in comparative literature -Latin, Greek, and Russian.
How did she get from comparative literature to the law? "I'm married to a classicist, and we had a desire not to become a two-academic household, so one of us had to find something else to do," she said with a chuckle. In 2005, Sarah's spouse was hired at Middlebury College, so the couple relocated to Vermont and Sarah started thinking about a career outside the ivied walls.
She enrolled in Northeastern Law School in Boston. It was not an easy first year. "I really felt lost," she remembers. Then she signed up to intern with the federal public defenders' office in Philadelphia, working on habeas corpus petitions and appeals. Something clicked for her. "I felt like I was using the close reading skills from my undergraduate work and my new law school skills to help people." She liked the work: visiting inmates, framing arguments for the appellate cases, diving deep into case histories. She also interned for William Sessions in the Federal District Court in Vermont, and with Judge Richard Klein in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania before graduating from Northeastern in 2006. She was admitted to the Vermont Bar that same year.
After a single year with a Middlebury attorney, she opened her own law office. Her practice has evolved as criminal, family, and juvenile law, with a strong civil rights advocacy that underpins her work.
"I believe practitioners should think about family law in terms of constitutional law and individual rights and liberties. That drives a lot of what I do. I raise constitutional issues in CHINS cases, in family court cases. We're not there to be therapists — our clients have social workers for that — we are there for due process."
It was her work in Addison Family Division from 2020 through 2022 which
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