The Equal Rights Center seeks a Manager for its Immigrant Rights Program to lead all aspects of the Program’s activities.

The Equal Rights Center (ERC) is a national non-profit civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. With members located in 42 states and the District of Columbia, the ERC works nationally to promote equal opportunity in housing, employment, disability rights, immigrant rights, and access to public accommodations and government services.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of B.S. or B.A. in a related field (included liberal arts, social science, law, psychology, or urban studies) is preferred, a J.D. a plus.
• Minimum of three years experience with issues affecting the immigrant community is required.
• Excellent verbal, written communication, analytical, and presentation skills.
• Bi-lingual (fluent) in English and Spanish, strongly preferred, fluency in another language considered.
• Familiarity with relevant civil rights laws, test coordination, investigation methodologies, and primary and secondary research sources.
• Attention to detail, imagination, organization, reason, timeliness, dynamism and empathy. It is essential the manager be a solid decision-maker who is also a team player.

To view the full job listing, go to PSLawNet (login required).

Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law’s public service community has reached new heights, and it is very excited to have the opportunity to expand our staff to meet the needs of our students and alumni who pursue public service opportunities.

The Assistant Director will:

• Counsel JD and LLM students and alumni on public service job search strategies and career development
• Conduct workshops and individual sessions on resume writing, interviewing and networking, etc.
• Organize and present panel discussions and informational programs on public service topics;
• Assist in the administration of various programs including the Summer Funding Programs, Post-Graduate Public Service Fellowship Program, Loan Repayment Assistance Program, and Post-Graduate Judicial Clerkship Program;
• Assist in developing and managing pro bono and community service projects for students; and conducting outreach to public service employers.

To view the full job listing, go to PSLawNet (login required).

A summer public interest experience can be tremendously influential and educational.  A public interest experience offers you the opportunity to learn how  public interest and pro bono attorneys use the law as an instrument of social justice.  And on a very practical level, you can also cultivate practical skills that are useful in any number of settings.

In light of all these things, we want you to have the best experiences that you can this summer.  So, we consulted with over 25 public defenders and legal services executive directors with programs throughout the country.  We asked them to help us help you.  They gave us concrete tips about how you can succeed during your summer experiences and some pitfalls to avoid.  We also reached out to law school public interest career advisors who routinely counsel students about maximizing their work experiences and asked for the wisdom they’ve collected over the years.  Here are some of their thoughts:

Even before your first day, educate and set goals for yourself.

• Background Reading?

Put your world class Googling abilities to good use.  Being informed and as up to date as possible is always an asset–and it will save everyone’s time!

• Set Professional Development Goals

Whether you’re directly asked about your goals or you take the initiative to articulate what you’d like to gain from your experience, setting goals.  From drafting a motion to participating in client intake, try to think broadly about the skills and writing samples you’d like to come away with!

Be proactive. It’s the best way to engage!

• Ask Questions!!!

Overwhelmingly, supervisor that there is nothing I like more than a thoughtful question. It suggests to me conscientiousness and a commitment to doing good work.

• Proactive, proactive, proactive…

Public interest lawyers can be pulled in many different directions at once.  Rather than slinking into a corner to stay out of the way, ask how you might help.

• Check-in often
  

Communicate with your supervisor about what you’re working on, how you’re doing with your assignments, and how busy you are.  Hopefully you won’t have to take the initiative every time, but if you feel disconnected from your supervisor it’s probably a good time to check in.

More tips to make the most of your summer public interest experience to come!

Americans United for Separation of Church and State seeks an Assistant Legislative Director. This is a management-level position in the organization. The Assistant Director will aid the Legislative Director in planning and implementing Americans United’s entire legislative program; and will represent the organization on Capitol Hill, in coalitions, and in external speaking engagements.

Who’s eligible? Here is what is sought: 5+ years legislative experience, ideally involving church-state separation or other civil rights issues. J.D. preferred but not required. Experience working with coalitions and elected officials necessary.

To view the full job listing, go to PSLawNet (login required).

The good folks at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association put out a short piece this morning explaining how LSC’s FY2011 funding was affected by the shutdown-averting agreement on the Hill last week.  All in all, it could have been a lot worse for LSC; they’ll see a cut of less than 4% between FY2010 and FY2011 funding levels.  From NLADA:

The House and Senate leadership have agreed on an overall spending package for FY 2011 that includes cuts in LSC basic field funding of $15 million plus an additional recision of .2%, bringing the total cut to basic field funding to $15.81 million.  The final FY 2011 overall appropriation for LSC is $404.19 million.  The final appropriation for basic field programs is $378.19 million.  This amounts to a basic field cut of 3.77% for FY 2011.H.R. 1473, the FY 2011 appropriations bill, was released late last night.  The measure contains $38 billion of spending cuts, more than half of which hit programs in education, labor and health.  The LSC cut is significantly less than other cuts in the Justice Department and other functions within LSC appropriations subcommittee. 

The bill is expected to be taken up in both the House and Senate by the end of this week.  The current Continuing Resolution expires Friday, April 15.

LSC also issued a press release today, including a quote from its board chair:

“Every dollar provided for civil legal assistance helps low-income individuals gain access to our justice system. We are grateful that funding cuts will not be as deep as initially proposed, and we look forward to working with the Congress on Fiscal Year 2012 funding to provide even greater access to justice for the growing number of low-income Americans in need of civil legal assistance,” LSC Board Chairman John G. Levi said.

Assuming that Congress finalizes this compromise and avoids a (ridiculously unneccessary and useless-for-spending-reduction-purposes, but we digress) shutdown, the real battle for LSC will begin when lawmakers get to the FY2012 budget.  A House appropriations subcommittee held an LSC funding hearing last week; we aggregated some hearing coverage in item 3 of last week’s Public Interest Law News Bulletin.

The Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS)’s Housing Defense Project seeks a law student for an unpaid summer 2011 internship.  NDS is a non-profit public law office providing community-based and client-centered legal defense. The Housing Defense Project provides eviction defense services to residents of Harlem and Washington Heights who are threatened with eviction due to a criminal matter, and places special emphasis on women and families facing housing-related collateral consequences.

Activities will include assistance with housing court cases, client intake, legal research on questions of housing /criminal law, and direct representation in New York City Housing Authority hearings.  

A selling point?!  No prior housing experience required.

To view the full job listing, go to PSLawNet (login required).

Check out this opportunity to be a Land Access and Tenure Security Attorney with Landesa Rural Development Institute.

Landesa works to secure land rights for the world’s poorest people—those 3 billion chiefly rural people who live on less than two dollars a day.  Landesa partners with developing countries to design and implement laws, policies, and programs concerning land that provide opportunity, further economic growth, and promote social justice.

Within a context of developing countries around the world, the Landesa Attorney provides legal, policy, and implementation expertise on rural land tenure security, access to land, land redistribution, land privatization, land market liberalization, and land administration (land titling and registration, land use planning and zoning, and dispute resolution). The Attorney conducts legal and social science research (both from the desk and in the field), and prepares and provides analytical reviews, research papers, draft legislation, regulations, surveys, policies, training programs, presentations, and other products.

To view the full job listing, go to PSLawNet (login required).

This week: pay for PA capital punishment counsel is peanuts; Sin City D.A. gambles on refusal to make budget cuts; a wrap-up of LSC funding news from Capitol Hill; speaking of, Idaho Legal Aid Services has a lot riding on a federal government shutdown; a great new transactional clinic at Wisconsin Law; update on state funding of legal services and indigent defense in Minnesota; legal services funding woes along the Iowa/Illinois state line; and legal services funding within the Texas state lines.

• 4.7.11 – Keystone State capital punishment news from the Philadelphia Inquirer: “The amount of public funding paid to Philadelphia court-appointed criminal-defense lawyers is so low that it violates the constitutional rights of indigent people facing the death penalty.  So argues a petition filed Wednesday by a group of Philadelphia court-appointed death-penalty lawyers who told a city judge that the commonwealth should pay them adequately or stop seeking capital punishment…. The gap between the fee schedule and reality has led some Philadelphia criminal-defense lawyers to refuse to accept capital-case appointments.”

• 4.7.11 – from the Las Vegas Sun: “The Clark County District Attorney is refusing to comply with a request from county managers to prepare 9 percent budget cuts for the department.  In a memo to county commissioners and staff dated last week, District Attorney David Roger informed county officials that his department has fewer attorneys than the Public Defenders Office, his staff is overworked and he made big cuts in previous years.”  It’s become a battle of statistics between D.A. Roger and county officials.  The county has cited statistics showing that both the D.A.’s budget and prosecutor compensation has grown recently, but the D.A. disputes that.

• 4.6.11 – there has been a good deal of recent news about how budget wrangling on Capitol Hill will affect the Legal Services Corporation.  There are two main uncertainties now.  The first deals with what will happen to LSC’s budget in the very near term as Congress and the president try to reach a funding agreement for the rest of the current fiscal cycle (FY 2011), or face a shutdown.  The second uncertainty deals with LSC funding for FY 2012, the fiscal cycle that is due to begin this October.  There was an appropriations hearing on the Hill this week about LSC’s FY 2012 funding.  Let’s look at news about current funding, then FY 2012 funding:
  • FY 2011 LSC Funding news:
    • 4.4.11 – a current and former LSC board member, who are now law school deans, submitted an op-ed in a Boston Globe blog sharply critical of possible LSC cuts: “Today as the House…calls for cutting $70 million from [LSC funding], many of the 900 [grantee organization field offices] will need to close — 370 staff attorneys will be let go and 162,000 fewer people will be served — just as the recession pushes the highest number of Americans into poverty in 51 years. Such cuts abandon some of the most vulnerable people in our nation.
    • Late last week the Blog of the Legal Times noted that this current week is “crunch time” for LSC funding: “The next week will likely determine whether the Legal Services Corp. is forced to make sharp midyear cuts in its budget, as lawmakers and Obama administration officials attempt to finish negotiations for federal spending through Sept. 30…. As part of a broad Republican plan to trim federal spending, the House in February approved a $70 million midyear cut to the Legal Services Corp., the nation’s largest funding source for civil legal aid to the poor. The proposal failed in the Senate, but a cut could still be part of any compromise.”
    • in late March the LSC board chairman and a former chairman co-authored an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed explaining what’s at stake for legal services providers and their clients if cuts go through: “For the last 36 years, Congress has appropriated funds for civil legal assistance, and the current level is $394.4 million. Now, in the middle of a fiscal year, the House has targeted LSC for a $70 million cut in these funds…. The timing could not be worse. The work of legal aid attorneys has become ever more important since the 2008 recession and the significant rise in poverty across the land. Fifty-seven million Americans qualify for civil legal assistance…”
  • FY 2012 LSC Funding news:
    • 4.5.11 – the Blog of the Legal Times covered a House hearing on LSC’s FY 2012 budget: “The chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee said today that private-sector lawyers aren’t doing enough to help the nation’s poor with legal problems, warning that they might need to make up for expected cuts in federal funding.  U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) is a longtime supporter of funding for civil legal aid, but he said [LSC] still faces proposed cuts from the House’s new Republican majority. LSC and its local partners should turn to resources from large law firms, state bar dues and law schools.”  LSC president James Sandman and board member Robert Grey Jr. both noted that legal services providers already do leverage not only pro bono contributions from law-firm attorneys, but also financial resources.  On the issue of pro bono substituting for, rather than supplementing, legal services attorneys, the PSLawNet Blog is reminded of this recent op-ed from the Pro Bono Institute’s president, which argues that pro bono work can not be efficiently delivered without a well funded legal services infrastructure to guide that work.  (The PSLawNet Blog attended the hearing and we’ll put a larger blog post together in a couple of days.) 

• 4.6.11 – good news and bad news for Idaho Legal Aid Services.  First the bad: Boise’s KTVB television station explores what difficulties may befall the organization (and other LSC grantees) if Uncle Sam closes up shop today.  Idaho Legal Aid Services takes in two-thirds of its funding from federal sources.  “Money for the month of April is guaranteed, but after that they could see a delay, and it would lead to a considerable impact.  ‘If that cut was substantial then it may mean we wouldn’t be able to operate at all. If the cut is something less than that, then we have to look at how big the cut was and determine how many literally how many attorneys how many staff would have to be laid off,’ said [executive director Ritchie] Eppink.  Another noteworthy fact from the story: “Eppink says Idaho is the only state in the country that doesn’t provide state funding for legal assistance programs.”  Regarding state funding, Idaho Legal Aid Services may have a small reason to celebrate.  According to a Greenfield Daily Reporter article that ran earlier this week – and you better believe, cats and kittens, that the PSLawNet Blog reads the Greenfield Daily Reporter religiously – the state house narrowly approved a bill to “help provide free legal counsel to low-income residents in cases involving domestic violence, child abuse, and exploitation of the elderly.”  The bill would authorize revenue generation via a court filing fee.     

• 4.6.11 – the WisLaw Blog reports on Wisconsin Law School’s Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic, which matches low-income entrepreneurs with law students who provide help on transactional matters.  The clinic also enlists the help of pro bono attorneys to supervise the students’ work.  The PSLawNet Blog once had the privilege of helping to start a transactional pro bono program, and we’re big fans of pro bono projects that offer opportunities to advocates who are on business law career paths.  It greatly broadens the pool of pro bono advocates, and there are many nonprofit institutions and micro-entrepreneurs who are doing great work but are unable to afford counsel when needed.

• 4.6.11 – the Twin Cities Daily Planet reports on some Minnesota legislative proposals which could have a kryptonite-like effect on legal services providers: “State funding for civil legal services has fallen by 11 percent between 2008 and 2011 and is currently below 2006 levels. The Governor recommends flat funding for these services, the Senate cuts funding by six percent, and the House cuts funding by 17 percent in FY 2012-13 and 25 percent in FY 2014-15. The House proposal also limits the ability of legal aid and similar state-funded programs to lobby the legislature and pursue legal actions against the state and federal government on behalf of their clients.”  Public defenders, which have been victims of past budget cuts, stand to fare better; they may see funding increases.

• 4.4.11 – the Quad-City Times looks at funding troubles which confront Prairie State Legal Services in western Illinois as well as Iowa’s HELP Legal Assistance.  Both organizations have drawn considerably on reserves to make budgetary ends meet.  Prairie State’s reserves are gone, and its executive director reports that “Thirty-five percent of our budget…is at risk.”  The picture isn’t much better for HELP, which is bracing for funding news this spring that will affect the size of its staff going forward.

• 4.3.11 – Two stories involving legal services in the Lone Star State:
  • The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal highlights funding troubles that confront the Legal Aid Society of Lubbock, which devotes a considerable amount of time helping domestic violence victims and others with family-law related problems.  “As officials at all levels of government have tightened the purse strings, Legal Aid has seen cuts in funding, Graham said. She expected total funding to be down 10 percent to 30 percent this year.  And the budget cuts come when the organization has seen a 22 percent increase in clients over last year….  Last year the organization served 1343 clients.  Of those clients, 1100 were women.”
  • And now for some bipartisanship.  Last week a Dallas Morning News editorial urged the state house to pass HB 2174, which would raise some public filing fees to support legal services providers.  “The Texas Access to Justice Commission wants the state to put a small fee on non-judicial documents filed with a county clerk, such as for mortgages. They also want a minor fee put on judicial documents filed with justices of the peace and in municipal courts, such as for misdemeanor cases.  The fees would be paid by users of the justice system, so the money wouldn’t come out of general revenues. And estimates show they could bring in $58 million over the next two years.  Interestingly, liberal lawyers aren’t the only ones advocating this solution. Supporters include Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, arguably the court’s most conservative jurist. Hecht recently told this newspaper, “This is about the rule of law. Access to the courthouse shouldn’t be dependent upon your ability to pay.”  Indeed, HR 2174, which is still in committee, is sponsored by a conservative Republican.

We’ll close by noting, with all due modesty, that the Glorious Philadelphia Phillies Baseball Franchise is 5-1, having absolutely thrashed the hapless New York Mutts last night.  Happy weekend!

In the wake of the recent economic recession and the lumbering recovery,  law students and recent grads attempting to forge public interest career paths have experienced an array of adversities. As is well-known, we as job seekers are all subject to the prevailing economic winds. We can’t control the macro-level economic realities that influence our job markets. However, in the context of the public interest job search, we can control the strength with which they present themselves–in both written and in-person presentation.

Here is an article I recently wrote for the NALP Bulletin that highlights tried-and-true tips and best practices for the postgraduate public interest job search.   The article includes wisdom gathered from Jennifer Thomas, Director of Recruiting at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, as well as Charlene Gomes, Senior Program Manager at Equal Justice Works, and Jarrod Shirk, American University Law’s Public Interest Coordinator.  The advice offered by Jennifer, Charlene, and Jarrod is extraordinarily valuable, and I encourage those who are setting out on public interest career paths to give the article a read.  (Frequent PSLawNet Blog readers will recognize some of these tips from a series of blog posts we did earlier this year for summer job seekers.  This time we’ve retooled the information for those seeking postgraduate jobs.)  The article includes tips on:

• Cover letter and resume drafting;
• Interviewing; and
• Networking.

I hope you find this useful, and good luck in the job search!  We’re doing our best to post as many jobs as we can find on PSLawNet, so that’s a great starting point.  (And note that you can find even more job application guidance on our Job Search Fundamentals page.)

– Steve Grumm

Those interested in working for detainee rights, this job may be right up your alley.

The Florence Project has an opening for a staff attorney on its Eloy team. The staff attorney provides pro bono legal services to detainees held in a 1,500 bed private contract facility near the town of Eloy, Arizona.

The staff attorney will work on a team of three (two staff attorneys and one legal assistant) providing group “know your rights” presentations, individual intakes, group and individual court counseling and prep sessions, and pro se services to immigrants facing removal proceedings before the Eloy Immigration Court. On a limited basis, the staff attorney will also fully represent detainees in merits proceedings before the Immigration Court and Board of Immigration Appeals.

To view the full job listing, go to PSLawNet (login required).