Serving the Public Interest

R. Bradley Sears, a student at Harvard Law School, spent last summer working for the ACLU's National Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, researching and eventually writing a brief for a suit against the Boy Scouts for excluding gays.

The second-year student found his work "challenging and demanding," but "thrilling," he says, and closely related to his future plans to become a civil rights litigator.

Sears is one of a rapidly increasing number of Harvard Law School (HLS) students who are chosing public interest jobs for the summer, with this year's cadre the largest the Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA) has yet recorded.

Partially because of a growing number of public service grants available, the number of students working in public interest summer jobs "has been growing exponentially," according to OPIA Director Stacy DeBroff.

A total of 235 students participated in public interest work over the last two summers, but 390 Law School students have already applied to work in such jobs for the summer of 1994.

Public interest jobs are defined broadly by OPIA as government agencies, private public legal services (such, as the ACLU and NAACP) and public interest law firms, which provide student interns little or no pay.

Such jobs are not the routine summer fare for Harvard Law students. Traditionally, the future attorneys spend the warm months working someplace more like "The Firm"'s Bendini, Lambert, and Locke.

These cushy research jobs in elite law partnerships are a recruiting mechanism, part of a mutual wooing-and-schmoozing process.

In recruiting, "they put you up at the Four Seasons, $100 lunches, country clubs, rafting trips...outrageous stuff," says Andy S. Levin, a third-year law student.

The summer jobs match the rest of the treatment: they pay about $1,300 a week on average.

"The biggest reason why people go into the private sector is because it's a cradle-to-grave insurance system," says Levin. The Law School is a "mill churning out corporate lawyers."

Students' reasons for defying the "mill" and choosing lower-paying public interest summer work vary, but most center around a need for hands-on experience and a desire to serve the community.

"People who take public interest jobs do so as a personal choice and not because of market displacement," says DeBroff.

One reason to defy the cushiness is that public interest summer employment is an ideal way of obtaining experience for Law School students.

"There is definitely a pay differential in public interest work, but people get more in terms of life, personal satisfaction and job satisfaction," says X. Carlos Vasquez, a third-year law student and co-chair of LAMDA, the Law School's gay, lesbian, and bisexual student association.

Enu Mainigi, a third year law student and head of the Law School Council, echos Vasquez' sentiments.

"Disillusionment with the private sector--with the hours and the type of work--often make public interest work more appealing as a summer job option," and "the lack of a guarantee of making partner at a firm make the private sector less and less appealing for long term employment prospects," she says.

Students tend to find public interest jobs more meaningful personally because they usually have greater responsibilities gain a broader exposure to the law, and have greater opportunities for client contact, says Deborah Reed of OPIA.

But even students who believe wholeheartedly in public service must support themselves over the summer.

A number of programs at the Law School now help them do so in low-paying public interest summer work.

The largest grant program administered through OPIA is the Wasserstein and Andres summer grant program, which was established in 1992.

It provides up to $2,000 a summer for students who undertake public interest work and allows them to apply for matching funds from their employer.

Approximately 70 students have taken advantage of this grant program since it was instituted.

Other grants are also available to help finance public interest summer jobs.

HLS alumni sponsor $4,000 summer fellowships around the country. Since 1982, HLS students have also participated in Human Rights programs, which pay 80 percent of living expenses in non-governmental or international work.

Federal work study funding is also available to subsidize Law School students' summer work.

About 30 to 35 students benefit from the Federal provision of 60 percent of their summer salaries.

But despite the existence of OPIA, which was praised by one student as a "fantastic resource," finding a public interest summer job is no easy task for those HLS students who want them.

Many of the grants which OPIA administers have waiting lists of students (currently 170 students are on waiting lists) who would like to work in public interest jobs over the summer, but cannot because of a lack of funding.

The Law School also sponsors a program to aid the growing number of students moving into public interest law for a career.

The HLS Low Income Protection Program (LIPP) assists former Law School students in paying off student loans as long as their salary is not over the established ceiling of $42,500 a year.

In the class of 1992, 12 percent of Law School graduates chose public interest careers, the largest number to do so in recent years.

DeBroff links that change with the summer programs, which give students a chance to explore options outside the tempting private sector.

"Most people who do public interest work have a real evolving sense of career path, they have no materialistic push and they integrate their personal values with career goals," says DeBroff.