Profile
Ty Parks is a law student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and is originally from West Philadelphia. He graduated from Columbia College in 2019 as Gates Millennium Scholar, and with Bachelors’s degree in History. While at Columbia, he interned for the Columbia Justice Lab, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Defender Association of Philadelphia, and Councilwoman At-Large Helen Gym’s Office in Philadelphia. At the Holder Initiative, he was one of the inaugural members of the Student Advisory Board.
After graduating, Ty began working at Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP as a civil rights paralegal. The firm’s civil rights practice focuses on § 1983 wrongful conviction, police misconduct, and police brutality cases. In addition to working on all aspects of the litigation in these cases, Ty worked closely with the firm’s social worker to connect clients to housing, employment, and other necessary resources.
At Penn Law School, Ty is a Toll Public Interest Scholar, Advocacy Co-Chair of the Black Law Student Association (BLSA), Community Liaison for the Walk-In Legal Assistance Project, and Intake and Communications Coordinator for the Criminal Record Expungement Project. During his 1L summer, Ty interned for the Public Interest Law Center and conducted research for Professor Sandra Mayson at Penn Law. He will be a law clerk at Willig, Williams, & Davidson, a plaintiff-side union law firm, for his 2L fall semester.
Ty intends to work with low-income, Black communities in Philadelphia to secure quality resources and opportunities. He is specifically interested in working with people that have criminal records to overcome the numerous legal barriers that deny them access to such resources. He hopes that his work will contribute to the larger efforts to abolish the prison-industrial complex and establish new networks of care.