Hope DeLap is from San Diego, California. She received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 2018. In 2015, she graduated summa cum laude from The University of California, Irvine with a B.A. in Criminology, Law and Society.
During college, Hope interned for The Justice Policy Institute in Washington, DC, where she collected correctional data and crime statistics for inclusion in impending Justice Policy reports and wrote opinion pieces for the organization’s Just Policy Blog. She also completed mediation training and mediated small claims, civil harassment, and judgment debtor cases in the Orange County courts through an internship with Community Service Programs’ Dispute Resolution Services.
In law school, Hope was a judicial extern for the Honorable John Z. Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Hope also worked as a summer intern for Loevy & Loevy, a civil rights litigation firm in Chicago, where she worked on cases involving police misconduct and prisoners’ rights and drafted two civil wrongful conviction complaints. Hope was a staff member on the Chicago Journal of International Law. Additionally, Hope served as a member of the Independent Review Committee for the University of Chicago Police Department.
During her time at the law school, Hope completed the Pro Bono Pledge. Many of those pro bono hours came from her work as a clinical student in the Exoneration Project. Hope appreciates the opportunity to continue to represent wrongfully convicted persons in West Virginia and is proud to pursue justice in a position named in honor of Justice Franklin D. Cleckley.
Previous Cleckley Fellows
Nathan Maxwell, 2016-18
Italia Patti, 2014-16
Kristen McKeon, 2012-14
