My law school is a rough place to be a law student interested in public interest work. As a student there's not a lot of money available for summer work grants*, and as a graduate there's not a lot of money available to help lighten the enormous debt loads most of us will have when we finish.
* (There's some money, but it comes from the student-run Public Interest Project. Applicants need to do a ton of legwork to even be eligible - mostly in the form of various activities to raise the money - and still there's no guarantee that you'll get any if demand exceeds supply.)
The school recognizes the problem, however, and is working to do something to improve the situation. The alumni office, as one stakeholder, has invited students to suggest ideas for how they might effectively fundraise to provide support for its public interest-minded students.
Towards that end, I'm hoping I can get ideas from others in the blogosphere on how other law schools support public interest legal work. What kinds of programs are offered? Loan forgiveness? Grants? How do these work, and how are the schools able to fund them? What kind of endowment do they need to do this? Do they give money to all the students who need it? How much? A lot to a few, or a little to a lot, or something else?
If you have any answers to the above questions please let me know. I'd like to be able to recommend something to my school so it can better attract and support students interested in these kinds of careers.
Edited 1/30.
Comments (1)
I think that the biggest problem with these programs (at all schools) is that they overpromise and underdeliver.
Typically schools put a huge amount of time into advertising the availablility of a very limited amount of summer job funding (and sometimes debt forgiveness). Tons of students enter the school "planning" to do a public interest carreer.
Then, what the students find is that (i) there isn't much funding out there from the school and (ii) there arn't very many paying public interest jobs out there. The first problem is an annoyance, but the second is a real barrier, since it limits the amount of folks who can actually enter into the public sector. This leads to a whole bunch of folks either becoming disaffected or (more commonly) switching their world view to the private sector.
Thus, I think the problem isn't a lack of law school programs for funding public interest work, but a mismatch of the number of people interested in such work to the number of jobs available for such people.
When all of the law schools spend time competeing to increase the number of public interest-inclinded students they admit (usually through PR campaigns and small loan forgiveness/funding effors) this problem only intensifies. What the legal community needs to do is encourage lawyers to give money to the non-profits that employ public interest lawyers, not encourage the law school space race to develop too many public interest lawyers. That way, the legal community will increase the actual number of public interest lawyers, rather than just increase the already bloated number of idealistic 1L's who will have to change their carrer goals.
Also, what the law schools need to do is learn about the full range of jobs out there, and try to help their students find things that will match their interests. Law school carreer centers tend to know only about (i) big firm jobs, (ii) a few federal government public sector jobs (DoJ, DoS, SEC etc), and (iii) public interest jobs. The first group (big firms) employs a lot of people, but even at a top school like BU, only can take the top 20-30 percent of the student body. The second and third groups (fed agencies and public interest) are relatively tiny market segments that wind up employing five or six students per law school. Law schools need to figure out where the rest of the students are going, and learn (i) how to prepare students for those jobs, (ii) how to help students find those jobs, and (iii) how to present those jobs so that students don't see them as somehow inferior to the other options.
[disclaimer: I entered law school planning to either work in the local government sector or work for a private sector firm with local government clients. This is a sector that has a relative balance of students to paying jobs. Its also a sector that law school carreer centers know next to nothing about]
Mark
Posted by Mark | January 30, 2005 4:30 PM
Posted on January 30, 2005 16:30