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schools to gain experience in patent and trademark law while providing legal assistance to inventors, tech entrepreneurs and small businesses. The bipartisan bill, which was signed by President Obama, expanded the program by removing its “pilot” status, making it available to all accredited law schools in the country that meet the program’s eligibility requirements.
keep in close contact with constituents. In January, the Congressman begins each year with a well-attended State of the District Ad- dress. During the spring and summer, he holds “Congress on Your Corner” outdoor office hours throughout the district. At each stop, the Congressman sets up a table in front of a local post office or on neighborhood corners where constituents are able to meet with him one-on- one. He also hosts regularly- scheduled telephone town hall meetings that provide an opportunity for constituents to speak directly with the Congressman about local and national issues. Prior to his election to the Congress, Rep. Jeffries served for six years in the New York State Assembly. In that capacity, he au- thored laws to protect the civil liberties of law-abiding New Yorkers during police encounters, encourage the transformation of vacant luxury condominiums into affordable homes for work- ing families and improve the quality of justice in the civil court system. In 2010, Rep. Jeffries successfully led the first meaningful legislative reform of the NYPD’s aggressive and controversial stop-and- frisk program. His legislation prohibits the NYPD from maintaining an electronic database with the personal information of individuals who were stopped, ques- tioned and frisked during a police encounter but not charged with a crime or violation.
York University School of Law, where he graduated magna cum laude and served on Law Review. After completing law school, Rep. Jeffries clerked for the Honorable Harold Baer Jr. of the United States District Court for the Southern Dis- trict of New York. He then practiced law for several years at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, an internationally renowned law firm and served as counsel in the litigation department of Viacom Inc. and CBS. He also worked as of-counsel at Godosky & Gentile, a well- regarded litigation firm in New York City. Rep. Jeffries was born in Brooklyn Hospital, raised in Crown Heights and is a product of New York City’s public school system. He lives in Prospect Heights with his family.
In the same year, Rep. Jef- fries sponsored and cham- pioned groundbreaking civil rights legislation to end prison-based gerrymander- ing in New York State. This archaic practice of count- ing incarcerated individu- als at the location of their imprisonment, rather than their homes, undermined the fundamental democratic principle of one person, one vote. After passage of Jef- fries’ legislation, New York became the second state to count incarcerated individu- als in their home districts in census calculations. Congressman Jeffries ob- tained his bachelor’s degree in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he graduated with honors for outstanding academic achievement. He then re- ceived his master’s degree in public policy from George- town University. Thereafter, Rep. Jeffries attended New
Rep. Jeffries has been actively involved in the passage of a number of
other key pieces of legisla- tion, including the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 (H.R. 152), a bill that provides billions of dollars in Superstorm Sandy recovery to the Eighth District and other affected areas. The Congressman also sponsored — and passed as part of the National Defense Authoriza- tion package—the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument Preservation Act, which directs the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to study the feasibility of designating the Prison Ship Martyrs’ mausoleum in Brooklyn as a national monument. Con- sisting of a 100-foot-wide granite staircase and a cen- tral Doric column 149 feet in height, the monument in Fort Greene Park houses the remains of 11,500 Revolu- tionary War soldiers who were kept as prisoners of war by the British. While he remains commit- ted to working diligently in Washington on behalf of New York’s Eighth Congres- sional District, Rep. Jef- fries also works tirelessly to
Jeffries is married to Kennisandra Arciniegas-Jeffries. Jeffries and Kennisandra have two sons together. Their son Jeremiah was born in 2010 and Joshua in 2014. The whole family lives in Prospect Heights.
70 | SPRING 2020 ♦ THE JOURNAL
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