Melissa G. Thrailkill
Melissa G. Thrailkill is currently a civil appellate attorney in the Law Offices of Brandy Wingate Voss, PLLC and who resides in Dallas, TX. Her decision to go to law school was prompted by new laws in Texas attacking reproductive rights. She thought law school would help, so she took the LSAT and after graduating with a History degree from UT-Austin in 2002, she gave UC-Berkeley a try for her legal education. Despite herself, she obtained her law degree in 2006 and became a licensed Texas attorney in November 2006. Melissa then began her legal career in Edinburg, Texas as a family law and housing law attorney for Texas Riogrande Legal Aid. There she came face-to-face with the difficulties and the pleasures that come in serving people living in poverty. She tried environmental law for a little while, too, and managed her own law office for several years in Dallas, TX.
As a volunteer lawyer with Janes Due Process, Melissa helped secure abortion access for dozens of Texas teens. That work has stopped due to Texas’s abortion ban. Melissa also serves as treasurer for Southern Sector Rising, an environmental justice nonprofit based in Dallas, TX that works to undo racist land use and environmental polices that target BIPOC neighborhoods as places for industrial pollution and environmental degradation. Melissa still isn’t sure that law school was the answer, but she hopes to keep finding ways to use her lawyer status to fight the system and the powers that be; to keep asking questions and pushing the status quo; and to keep learning how to be and do better as a lawyer, neighbor, and human.
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