Justice 360 is a non-profit organization based in South Carolina that works to reform policies and practices in capital and juvenile life without parole proceedings. Justice 360 achieves its goals through direct representation of death row inmates, the creation of legal resources, policy reform efforts, and public education materials and programming. Justice 360 wholeheartedly believes that justice is not linear and it does not end with a verdict.
The Position
Partnering with Cornell Law School’s Death Penalty Project, Justice 360 seeks a recent law graduate to participate in the two-year Craig N. Yankwitt Fellowship for Death Penalty Advocacy.
This fellowship honors the memory of Craig N. Yankwitt, a Cornell Law School graduate. During his time in law school and in his post-graduate practice, Yankwitt contributed significantly to Cornell’s Capital Punishment and Capital Appeals Clinics.
The Fellow will participate in all aspects of Justice 360’s work. Additionally, the Fellow will work on litigation and academic projects with Cornell Law School Professors Sheri Johnson and John Blume.
The ideal candidate will have experience with capital and/or criminal defense, either through an internship/externship or a clinic.
Family Equality is national non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of legal and lived equality for LGBTQ families and individuals. Family Equality strongly believes that every person deserves the right and opportunity to form and sustain a family without discrimination, no matter the process by which the LGBTQ individuals seek to form their families.
The Position
The organization seeks multiple legal interns for this coming Spring semester to work remotely with the Policy team. These students will advocate for LGBTQ parents and families in the pursuit of legislative, regulatory, and policy goals.
The ideal candidates will have completed their first year of law school before the start of the internship, as well as have a demonstrated interest in LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and social justice.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Photo: Harris and Ewing Collection, Library of Congress
Hello there, interested public! Busy week, both here at NALP and in the world. Thanks to everyone who made it here for the 2019 NALP/PSJD Public Service Mini-Conference. You all make this event what it is, and this year I think it turned out pretty well. Good luck to everyone who has students interviewing at EJW’s CCF this weekend (or who is an interviewing student)!
And now, the news: the Trump administration suffered a pair of high profile court defeats on its immigration policies this week, while in student loan news data indicates student debt is now worth twice as much as the entire housing market and the CFPB has an open call for a task “to examine ways to harmonize and modernize federal consumer financial laws.” In Canada, the Legal Services Society of British Columbia reached an unprecedented bargaining agreement shortly after a unanimous vote to authorize strike action.
As always, these stories and more are available below. But before I go, I’ll leave you with one more, from last spring:
Philadelphia Legal Assistance (PLA) is a federally-funded civil legal aid organization providing free services to Philadelphia County’s indigent community. Their legal services extend to family law, federal taxes, housing, migrant farmworkers, public benefits, unemployment compensation, and more. PLA’s mission is to enforce and protect the rights of all individuals and families by providing accessible, creative, and high-quality legal assistance. PLA also works hard to achieve systemic change to improve the lives of the citizens of Philadelphia.
The Position
PLA seeks a Staff Attorney to join the Unemployment Compensation Unit, where the attorney will fight to provide temporary income replacement to workers who have lost their jobs. The attorney will service as a case advocate and litigator, representing clients in administrative hearings. Additionally, the attorney will work on policy and public education addressing new computer systems evaluations and payment of Unemployment Compensation benefits.
The ideal candidate will have 2 to 5 years of client representation experience and a commitment to workers’ rights and employment law.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Photo: Harris and Ewing Collection, Library of Congress
Hello there, interested public! Hope you’ve had a chance to check out the new face of PSJD.org, which went live yesterday morning. If you haven’t, please do! We’d love to know what you think. Or, drop by the 2019 NALP PSJD Public Service Miniconference (you can still register, here) and let us know in person! Hope to see you next week.
Now, on to the news. It’s been a big week. Rolling Stone reports that ICE has relocated hundreds of women in detention and will not tell their lawyers where they are. Secretary DeVos defied a federal court order to stop collecting student loan payments from borrowers who had been found eligible for forgiveness, and the Cato Institute published a study revealing that “lawyers whose formative professional experiences include serving as courtroom advocates for government[] are vastly overrepresented on the federal bench.”
As always, these stories and more are available below.
In University Park PA, Penn State Law’s Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic released a report on “Detained Immigrants and Access to Counsel in Pennsylvania,” which recommends “that Pennsylvania should fund and implement a public defender-style program for detained immigrants in removal proceedings to improve fairness and due process.”
Day One is a New York-based organization committed to ending dating abuse and domestic violence, particularly among young people. Day One achieves its goals through community education, supportive services, legal advocacy, and leadership development. Day One believes in empowering young people so they can have safe relationships for themselves and their peers. The organization provides counselling and legal services for survivors of relationship abuse, as well implements preventative educational programming about intimate partner abuse and the law. All of the organization’s services are provided to youth for free and in both English and Spanish.
The Position
Day One seeks an attorney with at least two years of experience to further the organization’s mission of promoting healthy relationships among young people. The staff attorney would be expected to represent clients in family and domestic violence courts, conduct trainings on intimate partner abuse and the law, collaborate with social service providers, and coordinate community outreach and awareness activities. The ideal candidate will be Spanish-English bilingual, creative, respectful, collaborative, and committed to empowering youth.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hi everyone!
Regular readers of our Public Interest News Digest may have noticed that we discontinued our weekly dispatches for a couple months over the summer. Since the Digest made its return this fall, I’ve hinted a few times that big changes were underway for PSJD.org.
I’m excited that beginning tomorrow morning you’ll be able to see where our time has been going in recent months. Visitors to PSJD.org tomorrow will find a whole new layout! Each page on PSJD has been re-designed based on common questions and problems we’ve encountered over the years when working with jobseekers and employers. Our hope is that the new site will feel more consistent, more immediate, and more intuitive for users.
Many things will change. In this post I’ll call your attention to just a few examples.
More Consistent
Throughout the site, we’ve looked at the different ways in which similar features have been presented in the past and worked to provide a single, predictable experience.
On today’s PSJD.org, when jobseekers and school administrators log in they’re able to bookmark the site’s content so that they can refer to it later. This goes for their search results and also for individual job notices, employer profiles, and resources in the resource library. But when you want to create a bookmark in each of these places, the button you need to press has a different label depending on which type of page you’re bookmarking–and is located in a different spot on each type of page as well.
On tomorrow’s PSJD.org, every type of page that can be bookmarked will have a bookmark button in the same place. So once you know where to look, you’ll never have to wonder if you’re missing something.
More Immediate
In the time since PSJD.org was last updated, the web has changed a lot. New options are available that make sites more immediately responsive.
On today’s PSJD.org, if you want to select a city from search returns, you have to scroll down a long list of checkboxes and hunt for it. If you want to reset your password, you visit a separate page from the one you were hoping to access and then must navigate back to where you were.
On tomorrow’s PSJD.org, search results can be refined with select boxes where as soon as you begin typing the option you’re looking for the list of results will narrow to only the possibilities you care about. When you ask for a new password, the form you need will appear in a popup, so you can make your request and then get right back to what you were doing.
More Intuitive
In phone conversations and via email over the years, we’ve developed a pretty good sense of which parts of PSJD do things that our users don’t expect. With this update, we’ve worked to eliminate these areas of confusion wherever possible. We hope the new site will do more to explain what is happening–and why–for users on the platform.
On today’s PSJD, we use icons to communicate concepts, like a rolling deadline or an archival job post.
On tomorrow’s PSJD, whenever you encounter an icon button, you can hover on it (or long-press) to get some explanatory text that will let you know what that button does. Status messages, which before were sometimes buried in the main text of the page in ways that users did not always notice, should be more obvious.
On today’s PSJD, if you want to understand how to use the platform you can download a PDF from the “About PSJD” section and follow along. (Or, of course, send us an email or give us a call.)
On tomorrow’s PSJD, pages will contain an ‘?’ button. When you press it, you’ll get a tutorial on how to use the portion of the site you’re currently viewing that’s specific to your user type (e.g., jobseeker or employer).
So if you load PSJD.org tomorrow and things look a bit different, try the tour! And of course, even though we hope it will be easier for you to find your way around without getting in touch we are still happy to answer your emails and take your calls.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Photo: Harris and Ewing Collection, Library of Congress
Hello there, interested public! Busy days here at NALP, where we’re putting the finishing touches on the 2019 NALP PSJD Public Service Miniconference (you can still register, here) and on the new design for PSJD, which will launch late next week!
In the meantime, though, the news marches on. Lots of big stories this week, including revelations from the National Association of Immigration Judges that judges are making decisions concerning asylum based on a fear of reprisals and a decision by the CEO of the loan servicer responsible for PSLF not to testify before Congress. As always, these stories and more are available below.
If/When/How is a national network of law students and lawyers working to ensure that everyone has the power to determine if, when, and how to define, create, and sustain families with dignity and to actualize sexual and reproductive wellbeing on their own terms. If/When/How uses advocacy, support, and organizing to transform law and policy as well as legal systems and institutions that perpetuate the oppression of sexual and reproductive rights.
The Position
If/When/How is now accepting applications for the 2020-2021 Reproductive Justice Fellowship Program. The Program offers three fellowship opportunities: (1) the RJ Federal Fellow, (2) the RJ State Fellow, and (3) the RJ-HIV Fellow.
The RJ Federal Fellow will be located in Washington, D.C. and will work to further If/When/How’s reproductive justice policy agenda at a federal level. The ideal candidate will be knowledgeable of reproductive rights law and be committed to social justice and racial equality.
The RJ State Fellow will be based in the South and will work for reproductive health policy changes at the local, state, and regional level. The ideal candidate will not only have knowledge of U.S. reproductive rights law, but will also be knowledgeable of critical issues affecting the U.S. South.
The RJ-HIV Fellow will be based in either Atlanta, GA or Oakland, CA. This Fellow will focus their work on policy that will promote reproductive justice for people living with and affected by HIV. Unlike the other two fellowships, the RJ-HIV Fellow’s work will not involve lobbying; rather, the Fellow will provide in-the-field advocacy and education to reduce stigma and empower people living with HIV. The ideal candidate will have relevant experience and a strong commitment to social justice and racial equality.
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