The Nation on Our Bicentennial Crisis
The Nation just covered Our Bicentennial Crisis, my report on legal inequality and Harvard Law School's public interest mission:
That work became “Our Bicentennial Crisis: A Call to Action for Harvard Law School’s Public Interest Mission,” an exhaustively researched report written by Pete Davis, a third-year HLS student who throws down the gauntlet to his school as it enters its third century to live up to its mission statement’s promise to educate leaders who contribute to the “advancement of justice.”
Eminent law professors like Randall Kennedy, Carol Steiker, Todd Rakoff, and Duncan Kennedy joined a roundtable discussion last month at Harvard that Davis led to discuss the report and its implications—and the obligations demanded. The students, faculty, staff, and clinic leaders that filled the Weissman Campus Center were deluged with facts, delivered with a touch of humor (in his opening, Davis relayed a story of when he asked a powerhouse firm’s rep if he could do pro bono work to unionize Walmart employees. Came the reply: No, they’re one of our clients).
Over two hours in Cambridge and over the 176 pages of his treatise, Davis challenged the nation’s law schools—most especially his own—to resist the temptation to churn out corporate lawyers (just one reason among many why public-interest lobbyists are outnumbered in Washington by corporate lobbyists 34 to one) and instead advance the public interest. He methodically picked apart excuses both tired (even Goldman Sachs has a right to a lawyer) and more reasoned (Harvard as a stepping stone to the upper class) for not doing so and, while strenuously reserving judgment about paths law graduates take, set a moonshot of 51 percent of Harvard Law grads to pursue public-interest work. To do this, HLS students may utilize the Low Income Protection Plan, where graduates working in public-interest law pay a limited portion of their income toward their loans, while LIPP covers the rest. Other schools offer a loan-assistance repayment program for those pursuing careers in public service.
Read the whole article here.