Social Justice Initiatives (SJI) provides career services and programming for students and graduates interested in public interest, international human rights, public service/government, and legal volunteer work. SJI also implements and oversees Columbia Law School’s Pro Bono Program, which connects students with attorney-supervised projects in the public good, as well as the Law School’s Guaranteed Summer Funding Program.
The Position
Columbia Law School is pleased to offer Public Interest and Government Fellowships (“Fellowships”) for J.D. graduates of ABA-accredited law schools interested in beginning their careers in public interest law, including human rights, or in government service. 1 The Fellowships serve two important purposes. First, they allow graduates to gain the experience, skills, and professional networks they need to obtain permanent paid positions in their fields. Second, they enable public interest organizations and government agencies confronting great demand and diminished resources to benefit from the services of talented lawyers.
To be considered for a Fellowship, applicants must first obtain a written commitment by a “qualified host” to provide meaningful legal work and supervision. A qualified host is a public interest organization or government agency (federal, state, local, multinational, or international) that commits, contingent upon the applicant’s receipt of a Fellowship, to:
Provide the applicant with a position for a one-year period that will require the use of his or her legal education
Provide appropriate training and supervision during the fellowship period
Consider the fellow for an appropriate permanent full-time paid position if applicable funding becomes available
The J.D. Public Interest and Government Fellowships pay a stipend of $40,000 for one year of fulltime work. Fellows must commit to work full-time at their host (at least 35 hours per week) for
twelve consecutive months.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Awa Sowe, PSJD Fellow
Hello, interested public! The digest a bit late today, and a bit short, as Awa and I are at NALP’s Annual Education Conference in San Diego. (I couldn’t have completed this edition without the help of Awa Sowe, our 2018-2019 PSJD Fellow. Thanks Awa!) You may hear more about this week, next week.
As for this edition of the digest, highlights include a sweeping new proposal concerning Public Service Loan Forgiveness from Senators Gillibrand and Kaine and a law review article from David Udell summarizing last fall’s A2J Summit in New York City.
And if you’re in San Diego for the conference as well and you haven’t already tracked me down to say hi, you still have a chance. Just sayin’.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! The big news this week is that the Department of Education, in response to questioning from Senator Kaine, revealed statistics concerning the percentage of public servants whose applications for student loan forgiveness have been granted (or, much more frequently, denied). This news, linked below, reinforces the Law360 profile released this week discussing the mounting challenges facing public service attorney recruiting. Also of particular interest is an argument in Mondaq making the case that the 2019 PROTECT Students Act could significantly change the definition of “nonprofit institution of higher education.”
In the good news column, the looming legal aid strike in British Columbia was averted through at least the end of this summer.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! There have been a torrent of stories, again, this week. In addition to the predictably important stories concerning student loans, you may also want to look for the DC Circuit’s concerns about a new attorney fee matrix the federal government is employing to reduce attorney fee awards in class actions, the NLADA’s thoughts on the steady stream of court challenges to Cy Pres awards, and overview articles on the Right-to-Counsel in Eviction and Progressive Prosecutors (two topics I look forward to discussing with those of you able to attend NALP’s Annual Education Conference in two weeks).
The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) is an association of over 2,500 legal career professionals who advise law students, lawyers, law offices, and law schools in North America and beyond. Since 2003, NALP has housed and administered PSJD. PSJD is an online public interest/public sector jobs database for law students and lawyers seeking internships, fellowships, or permanent positions. PSJD offers law students and lawyers the most extensive listing of legal and law-related public service opportunities available anywhere.
The Position
NALP seeks three to four summer project assistants to help update and maintain database content on its PSJD website.The PA team’s main responsibility will be updating and maintaining the PSJD database, employer directory, and resource center. The hourly rate is $11-$13 per hour, depending on experience. A minimum of 8-10 hours per week will be required during office hours (Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM). Work must be performed in our offices; telecommuting is not possible for these positions.
Project assistants receive a comprehensive view of the public interest job market which can be an invaluable tool for their own career roadmap. This position is a great opportunity for law students who will be doing public interest work in DC this summer and are looking for supplemental income.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! Every week I drink from the firehose; this week even more than usual. There are too many highlights below to even list, but one issue does stand out:
This week’s bombshell news was the Executive Order the President signed yesterday, which addresses both student loans and campus speech policy. The bit that’s getting the most attention is its provision that “agencies shall…take appropriate steps…to ensure institutions that receive Federal research or education grants promote free inquiry.” But the order additionally directs the Department of Education to publish more information about loans–both individual data via a “secure and confidential website and mobile application” and “program-level data for each certificate, degree, graduate, and professional program” through changes to the College Scorecard program. (Inside Higher Ed has some thorough reporting on both aspects of the order.) Many, many keystrokes have been entered about this order since it was issued yesterday, especially in relation to the President’s request that Congress cap student loan borrowing earlier this week. I’ll start you off with the resources I’ve linked in this paragraph.
PSJD (formerly PSLawNet) is a unique online clearinghouse for law students and lawyers to connect with public interest job listings and career-building resources. Created in 1989 at NYU Law, PSJD has been maintained by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) as one of its Public Service Initiatives since 2003.
The Position
The PSJD Fellow is the principal manager and administrator of the PSJD.org website. PSJD, a NALP initiative, catalogues thousands of job announcements for public service legal positions each year and curates a directory of civil society, government, and other public-service-oriented employers. The site also publishes a library of professional development and career search resources to assist jobseekers with legal training pursuing public service careers. Law students and alumni from hundreds of law schools in the United States and Canada rely on these materials to help them discover opportunities and make decisions about their public service careers. In addition, the Fellow gains non-profit management and administration experience and has the opportunity to write for publication, speak publicly, and build relationships with public interest organizations across the country.
The Fellow will work at NALP’s Washington, DC office–with some travel required (varying slightly, year-to-year).
In addition to that news, the Trump Administration released a budget packed with changes for the student loan world, the former student loan ombudsman of the CFPB and current head of the Student Borrower Protection Center testified to Congress, Texas attorneys are suing their state bar in objection to the bar’s diversity and immigration-related efforts, under a “forced-speech” rationale, and Civil Legal Aid is making headlines of all kinds in British Columbia, with an upcoming strike of the Association of Legal Aid Laywers leading the bill. You can find all this and more, below.
At the Pentagon, “top uniformed and civilian officials in the Army, Navy and Air Force…propos[ed] a new tenant bill of rights for military families, which would include the ability to withhold payment for housing th
The BC Attorney General released an external report containing recommendations to improve legal aid service, which states that “[y]ears of underfunding and shifting political priorities have taken their toll on the range and quality of legal aid services, and especially on the people who need them.”
Texas Defender Service (TDS) is a non-profit organization established in 1995 by experienced Texas death penalty attorneys.Our mission is to establish a fair and just criminal justice system in Texas.
TDS aims to improve the quality of representation afforded to those facing a death sentence and to expose and eradicate the systemic flaws plaguing the Texas death penalty.
The Position
TDS seeks summer law students for full-time internships in their Austin and Houston offices to assist in all aspects of TDS’s work. Summer law interns must be capable of performing both high-level legal research and briefing along with ground-level intensive investigative work. When possible, students will also attend local trainings, trials and oral arguments. Students will receive training on how to conduct mitigation investigation in capital cases both in preparation for trial and post-conviction briefing. They will receive regular feedback throughout the summer on both written and investigative work.
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! It’s March now, but the last week of February certainly packed a punch. There are two items I want to highlight for you:
First, Brooklyn Defender Services’ Director of Policy took to Twitter yesterday to highlight a two-justice dissenting opinion questioning Gideon v. Wainright. (Link to the opinion available below.) Second, any of you heading to the ABA’s Equal Justice Conference in May may want to check out the Law School Pro Bono Advisor’s Pre-Conference event.
If that isn’t enough, there’s also a legal aid strike brewing in British Columbia, a new FTC task force to police the technology sector, a report from the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing tying housing to the access-to-justice gap, and allegations of infants under one-year-old detained by ICE. As always, details are in the links below.
In a letter to Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and its Inspector General, the American Immigration Council, American Immigration Lawyers Council, and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network alleged that “there are at least nine infants under one year of age detained in the South Texas Family Residential Center (STFRC) in Dilley, Texas, at least one of whom has been detained for more than 20 days.” The letter calls for the release of the infants and their mothers, as well as a “review [of] any written decisions by the Department of Homeland Security to detain the infants,” along with other demands related to their medical care while in custody.
In New York NY, Hotspot Law launched “a new legal technology platform that allows for real-time free phone consultation booking between consumers and attorneys….designed to provide free and simple access to justice for everyone.”
At the 40th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing issued a report on Access to justice for the right to housing suggesting that “the global housing crisis is rooted in a crisis in access to justice because without access to justice, housing is not properly recognized, understood or addressed as a human right.”
In dissent from the Supreme Court’s opinion in Garza v. Idaho, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, argued that:
The right to counsel is not an assurance of an error-free trial or even a reliable result. It ensures fairness in a single respect: permitting the accused to employ the services of an attorney. The structural protections provided in the Sixth Amendment certainly seek to promote reliable criminal proceedings, but there is no substantive right to a particular level of reliability. In assuming otherwise, our ever-growing right-to-counsel precedents directly conflict with the government’s legitimate interest in the finality of criminal judgments.
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