Article: Making Public Interest Lawyers In A Time Of Crisis: An Evidence-Based Approach

Article: Richard L. Abel, Catherine Albiston, and Scott L. Cummings, Making Public Interest Lawyers In A Time Of Crisis: An Evidence-Based Approach, (2020). Abstract below:

Now is a critical time to consider the role that lawyers—and the law schools that produce them—can play in movements for social transformation. Over the past half-century, public interest lawyers who represent subordinated communities in the pursuit of equal justice have contributed significantly to such movements: mobilizing law to fight discrimination, expand access to social benefits, promote the inclusion of immigrants and others branded outsiders, and protect the rights of low-wage workers and the unhoused. While some law schools have invested resources to train students seeking public interest careers, most continue to focus on placing students in lucrative law firms: elevating a neoliberal conception of legal education that seeks to maximize return on investment, rather than promoting the professional role of lawyers in democratic society. Even those law schools dedicated to helping students enter public interest careers lack basic information about which interventions are most likely to work. This Article fills that critical information gap by providing the first systematic empirical evidence about what law schools can do to help students build long-term public interest careers. Based on original data collected through a National Science Foundation-funded survey of a decade of graduates from six California law schools, this Article looks beyond the “drift” away from public interest work during law school to analyze the factors that promote what we call “public interest persistence,” or dedication to public interest work throughout one’s career. Using statistical techniques to evaluate the importance of endowment effects—what students bring to law school—and educational effects—what they experience there—we reveal the underappreciated ways that law schools do, in fact, matter in shaping public interest careers. In particular, we find that law schools play a crucial facilitative role: guiding students toward public interest careers through externships, summer jobs, and extracurricular activities that equip students with the tools they need to navigate the public interest job market and pursue social justice over the course of their professional lives. Based on these critical new findings, the Article offers policy recommendations for how law schools can build on current programs in support of public interest careers and urges rethinking what it means to practice public interest law—and advance broader demands for fundamental change—that respond to the urgency of the current crisis.