Vermont Legal Aid is looking for a full-time, one-year contract attorney in their Burlington office to assist in carrying out their anti-discrimination work.

Responsibilities for this position include representing individual and organizational housing discrimination victims in federal and State courts and in administrative hearings; testifying before State and municipal planning and zoning entities; and limited community legal education and committee work.

Vermont’s most common forms of housing discrimination occur on the prohibited bases of race/color, national origin, ethnicity, families with children, and disability. Help Vermont fight housing discrimination!

If you’re interested, check out the listing at PSLawNet!

Government Executive reports that not everyone’s happy with the latest version of USAJobs:

Readers of Government Executive have been less than impressed with USAJobs 3.0. Of the nearly 160 responses to an open-ended query as of Tuesday, only seven praised the website’s Oct. 11 relaunch.

…

The most frequent complaints centered on the site’s search function. Commentators said the tool for filtering search results isn’t working properly — for example, location-based searches return results outside of the specified regions.

Many readers also complained about losing the searches they had saved under USAJOBS 2.0, although OPM had stated on its website and via emails to users prior to the relaunch that no saved searches would carry over.

Bugs in the results pages, login difficulties and long load times also were high on readers’ list of grievances.

The folks at the Office of Personnel Management (which administers USAJobs) are, however, undeterred:

OPM stands by the product, updating the public via daily reports on the site.

“Through refinement efforts, USAJobs 3.0 is continuing to see success, and the most recent testing by OPM shows that the site remains stable and secure, and its capacity is at full strength,” OPM Chief Information Officer Matthew Perry wrote in an Oct. 31 public report. The agency is planning an additional technical briefing on the site for later this week.

by Kristen Pavón

November is National Homelessness Awareness Month and to kick it off, the National Center for Family Homelessness hosted a policy briefing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) here in D.C.

The briefing featured the following panelists:

• Christina Murphy, Director of Campaign to End Child Homelessness, The National Center on Family Homelessness
• Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
• Asa Fanelli, President, Horizons for Homeless Children
• Sarah Bolton, Legislative Assistant, Office of Senator Patty Murray
• Amy Grassette, Consumer Advisory Board Member, The National Center for Family Homelessness

In addition to the program’s panelists, Assistant Secretary of Community Planning and Development for HUD, Mercedes Marquez, gave the opening remarks.

The amount of information given at the briefing was a bit overwhelming but also alarming, inspiring and motivating.

In particular, I was moved by Amy Grassette’s story. She spoke about her family’s hardship after losing their small business after 9/11. Her family experienced homelessness for almost 2 and a half years after losing their business. Amy gave us a great perspective in terms of the services she received while homeless and where she saw room for improvement.

Here’s a hodgepodge of my notes/thoughts/questions from the briefing:

• More than 34% of the homeless population are children (and this statistic is likely a low estimate because of under-reporting).
• For the 2009-2010 school year, there were 1 MILLION homeless youth (and again this number is probably low because some states do not report this data).
• The Opening Doors Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness has a goal to end youth and family homelessness by 2020 by focusing on the following services: access to affordable housing, jobs, mainstream services, and collaboration between agencies.
• The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty takes a human rights perspective to housing, meaning that housing is a basic right.
• There was a 20% increase in family homelessness between 2007 and 2010.
• Oftentimes, it costs less to offer families housing vouchers (so that families can live closer to schools) than provide transportation to school.
• The Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act can allow tenants to remain in their homes longer and more needs to be done to publicize this law.
• While housing is the foundation for a stable community and life, housing alone is not sufficient to end homelessness. Wraparound services are needed to be effective in preventing and ending family homelessness.
• Homeless children are at a higher risk for: physical and mental health issues, hunger and poor educational outcomes.
• One-third of homeless children have been forced to skip a meal.
• 85% of brain’s core structure is developed from birth to age 5, and because of this, it’s important to intervene early and provide mental health services, transitional services and early education childcare.
• There’s room for improvement in these areas: affordable, adequate & accessible housing; transportation services; childcare services; accessible, affordable, adequate healthcare; livable wages; education; and case management services.

On another note, if you’re in DC and a new law grad — you should check these kinds of events out. I learned about it from Twitter — of all places! @HUDnews tweeted about the program yesterday. It was a great networking opportunity — Keep your eyes and ears open!

MADRE offers three PAID internship sessions throughout the year: Summer (June-August), Fall (September-December), and Spring (January-May). These internships take place in Manhattan, NY.

MADRE is an international women’s human rights organization that works in partnership with women’s community-based groups in conflict areas worldwide. Our programs address issues of sustainable development, community improvement and women’s health; violence and war; discrimination and racism; self-determination and collective rights; women’s leadership development; and human rights education.

MADRE provides resources and training to enable its sister organizations to meet immediate needs in their communities and develop long-term solutions to the crises they face. Since we began in 1983, MADRE has delivered over 18 million dollars worth of support to community-based women’s groups in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and the United States.

If you’re interested, check out the listing at PSLawNet!

by Kristen Pavón

The National Law Journal summarized some of the Commission’s findings in an article today.

The last time the Commission took a hard look at mandatory minimums was in 1991. This time around the Commission reviewed over 73,000 cases from 2010 and previous years.

. . . [T]he Commission unanimously believes that certain mandatory minimum penalties apply too broadly, are excessively severe, and are applied inconsistently across the country,” said the Commission Chairwoman Judge Patti Saris in a statement.

Here are a few of the key findings:

• More than 75 percent of offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty were convicted of a drug trafficking offense.
• Hispanic, followed by black offenders accounted for the largest groups of offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty.
• Black convicted offenders are the racial group least likely to earn relief from mandatory minimum sentences for assisting the government.

And a few of the Commission’s recommendations:

• Congress should reassess some statutory recidivist provisions for drug offenses.
• Congress should tailor the “safety valve” relief mechanism (allows sentencing below the mandatory minimum) to include other low-level, nonviolent offenders convicted of other offenses carrying mandatory minimums.
• Re-evaluate and examine “stacking” of mandatory minimum penalties for some federal firearm offenses.

I’m sure there’s more to come from this report… Initial thoughts?

by Kristen Pavón

So, you may know that PSLawNet lists articling opportunities for Canadian law students. Articling is akin to an apprenticeship for law graduates, and it’s a prerequisite for practicing law in Canada.

In Ontario, an articling task force was created in response to a shortage of articling positions, especially those more oriented to social justice.

. . . 12.1 per cent of those [law graduates] seeking articles in the 2010-11 licensing year went unplaced, a big jump from a rate of 5.8 per cent three years ago.

The access-to-justice issue in Canada is twofold: First, sole practitioners, small firms and legal clinics do most of the legal work for low- and middle-income people and they do not have the resources to provide articling opportunities. Second, most articling opportunities are with medium and large firms that do not address social justice issues.

The task force’s final report should be out in June 2012. Read more here.

How would having an apprenticeship system in the U.S. affect our access-to-justice gap? Let me know your thoughts!

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) is seeking applications for a staff attorney position in its Disability Justice (DJ) Program. NYLPI is a not-for-profit civil rights law firm that focuses on issues of racial equality and disability rights. NYLPI pioneered the practice of community lawyering in the five boroughs of New York City.

NYLPI breaks important new ground by drawing on a range of strengths: community trust; proficient organizing; media savvy; established lobbying channels, effective individual representation; and bold, creative approaches to litigation. The work of the DJ Program is founded on principles of equality of opportunity, self-determination, and independence for people with disabilities.

In partnership with individuals and community organizations, NYLPI uses organizing, legislative advocacy and litigation to assert the rights of New Yorkers with disabilities to equal access to a range of programs and services, including education, health care, housing, and police protection.

The DJ staff attorney position will include both systemic advocacy and individual representation, and will focus on the areas of housing, social security benefits, and vocational rehabilitation, among others.

If you’re interested, check out the listing at PSLawNet!

I’ve got another twofer for ya! Happy Friday!

In partnership with Pfizer Inc, Beveridge & Diamond PC, and the American Bar Association Section on Environment, Energy, and Resources, the Environmental Law Institute is looking for law school applicants for two Diversity Program Law Clerk positions for the summer of 2012.

The program’s goal is to encourage additional participation by minority students and students from disadvantaged households in environmental law, policy, and management.

Law clerks work on projects involving both domestic and international environmental law. Subject areas include, among others, wetlands and watershed policy, sustainable land use, biodiversity, environmental enforcement, long-term management of hazardous waste sites, public participation, and international environmental policy.

Law clerks conduct legal and policy research, conduct interviews, attend and report on events, and prepare written materials and scholarly work for publication. Part of a law clerk’s experience includes opportunities to attend ELI seminars on emerging issues in environmental law.

Law clerks may also assist with the editing and production of ELI’s publications, the Environmental Law Reporter (ELR), the National Wetlands Newsletter (NWN), and The Environmental Forum (TEF), as well as various books. Law clerks support editors of these periodicals by conducting research, bluebooking, monitoring and writing summaries of current events, and engaging in various tasks and special projects on an as-needed basis.

If environmental law is your thing, find out more at PSLawNet!

by Kristen Pavón

So, there’s a debate brewing about whether the legal profession should be as heavily regulated as it is. In case you haven’t read the NY Times op-ed and the Atlantic piece, I’ll get you up to speed.

The crux of the argument in the New York Times op-ed is that

the barriers to entry [to law practice] exist simply to protect lawyers from competition with non-lawyers and firms that are not lawyer-owned — competition that could reduce legal costs and give the public greater access to legal assistance.

In the Atlantic’s piece, Jordan Weissmann disagrees with most of Clifford Winston’s arguments for deregulating the legal profession — except that he agrees that non-JDs should be able to own law firms for the sake of technological advances. He argues that

[l]etting more people become lawyers won’t drive down costs in high-flying corporate law. And although it could help control legal fees for the rest of us, we could wind up allowing under-educated people to represent important cases for families who can’t afford the high-flying treatment.

I haven’t formulated a complete opinion on this issue, but I have some questions — how would deregulation affect the access to justice gap? Would there really be a positive change, like Winston envisions, for effectively representing clients who would otherwise a) go pro se to settle their legal issues or b) not do anything to settle their legal issues? How low would legal costs go? Low enough for the poor? Would the public interest law arena remain unchanged?

Thoughts?

by Kristen Pavón

Not sure if a public interest legal career is for you? Not even sure what a public service legal career is? Check out PSLawNet‘s NonProfit PI Careers page.

You’ll find a quick overview of the types of jobs you can have in the public interest legal world and the kind of legal issues you may tackle as a public interest attorney.