Students could organize to pressure all of their law school deans to come together to lobby private law firms to pool funds together for public interest purposes. Law school deans can collectively exercise some power over the private law firm market, since they can control which firms they direct their students to and how accessible they make their top graduates to particular firms. They can create pressure on the private bar to contribute a given percentage of their profits to a pool of money that is allocated for public interest purposes. The fund could function similarly to an IOLTA account, where money from the account is given out to public interest organizations directly. Alternatively, it could supplement existing pools of private money that fund post-graduate fellowships and summer fellowships, such as the Equal Justice Works funds. Law schools could rank firms according to their public interest contributions, or they could decide to make life more difficult for firms that contribute below a given amount of their profits to this public interest fund.
So just to get the comment thread started...
ReplyDeleteI think this is generally a good way of attacking the problem of amplifying the PI job market because it takes something that we potentially have power to influence (law schools) and getting them to get people with resources (firms) to use those resources. As I think I mentioned in the call, I'm unsure at this point how willing schools will be to cooperate. I mentioned this briefly to the head of our public interest career center here at Columbia, and she responded that she just doesn't think the administration will be willing to risk harming relationships with firms in this job market. I know that the person from Boston College had shared the same sentiment.
I do think, however, that this has the potential to be effective, and the PI admin I talked to may be a little too pessimistic. But I also think, that it would really need to start from the top down, with a concerted effort across the top-ranked schools. To be perfectly frank (without, hopefully, being offensive), I think this is an area where the Columbias/Harvards/Yales of the world have a little more leverage to cause change than other schools do. If we could organize across those schools first, they might be the administrations that have the willingness to listen.
So my question is, how would this 'organization of pressure' work? Should we develop some sort of concrete proposal and present to deans across a couple different schools? Does it seem deans at other schools would be receptive to this?