News & Commentary written by Samantha Osaki

Back to News & Commentary
A photo of Samantha Osaki

Samantha Osaki

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Equal Justice Works Fellow, Voting Rights Project

ACLU

Bio

Samantha Tañafranca Osaki is an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the ACLU Voting Rights Project, generously funded to support efforts across the nation to end the practice of prison-based malapportionment.

Samantha has an active docket protecting voting rights, combatting voter suppression and criminalization, and ensuring that enacted district maps are fair. She has worked to ensure that lawfully cast votes were counted (Trump v. Boockvar, Hotze v. Hollins) and supported her team in the Supreme Court case defeating the Trump Administration’s unlawful attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census (Department of Commerce v. New York). Current cases she is working on include Luft v. Evers (challenging Wisconsin’s ID Petition Process as unconstitutionally onerous) and Texas v. Crystal Mason (defending Ms. Mason in her appeal of her sentence for allegedly improperly casting a provisional ballot), among others.

Before joining the ACLU, Samantha was a Fulbright Scholar based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and worked at LIFT, a nonprofit providing holistic family and financial coaching services. She received her J.D. from NYU School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar, Editor-in-Chief of The Review of Law and Social Change, and recipient of the school’s Dean John Sexton and Ann Petluck Poses Memorial Prizes. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with a Civic Scholar distinction from the University of Pennsylvania. After her fellowship ends, she is set to clerk for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.