HLS in Focus

1L and Co-Chair of the Public Interest Auction Sarah Jelsema recently sat down for a Q & A with us after this yearly highlight of the HLS calendar.

What is the public interest auction?
The public interest auction is a fundraiser run entirely by the 1L class that raises money to support students who do public interest work over the summer. We solicit donations from faculty, staff, alumni, parents, students, firms, and local businesses. Some donate money and some donate things to auction off. We receive all sorts of donations – things like Red Sox tickets, gift certificates to restaurants and salons, lunches and fishing trips with professors, cookies and brownies made by the librarians, and a tour of the Northwest Corner Construction project. The auction is one of the biggest social events of the year. Every year the auction has a theme, and we decorate Austin Hall accordingly. This year the theme was “Bright Lights: Bid City” and so the different rooms were decorated as different big cities – London, Paris, and New York.

What has gone into preparing for this event and what have you gotten out of the experience as a co-chair?
Almost all of the 1L class helps out with the auction. We divide the students up by committees and committees mostly help out either by asking for donations, calling alumni and asking them to donate, emailing firms, going door to door in Cambridge, or by helping process the donations and get them ready to sell, or by helping out on the night of the auction. As one of the auction co-chairs, I had the opportunity to work with a group of amazing people to try to plan and coordinate this huge event – it was definitely a  challenging experience for all of us. From coordinating hundreds of student volunteers to keeping track of hundreds of donations, to making sure everything comes together on the night of the auction, being a co-chair was a lot of work, but it was extremely rewarding. It was also a good opportunity to meet new students.

The event is always a lot of fun for students, faculty and staff. What was your favorite part of the evening? Did anything surprise you?
The event was a huge success. My favorite part of the evening was the live auction. Our auctioneers – this year Professors Elizabeth Warren and Jonathan Zittrain – were auctioning off the “right to be – or not be – in the 2010 parody.” The first bidder was the Dean of Students because they gave her a hard time this year in the parody, but then Professor Mann, who bought this item last year, got in a bidding war with Professor Warren and everyone was laughing so hard!

Why should admitted and prospective students seeking a strong public interest community choose Harvard? Why did you?
I think that students looking for a strong public interest community should choose Harvard because they can go anywhere and do anything with a degree from Harvard Law. We are a bigger law school, but as a result, we have so many more options to pick from than other law schools. Good public interest law jobs are really competitive – and since I want one, I’m glad I chose Harvard. I know that the connections and friends that I will make here, with professors and fellow students, will be of benefit for the rest of my life.

Starting April 15, HLS will begin accepting transfer applications for the fall. Over the last couple of years, there have been increased opportunities for Harvard Law students to study off-campus through joint degree and foreign study programs which make it possible for us to admit more transfer students than ever before.

The question of whether to apply as a transfer student is the right move is up to you, but we think that a little research will show you the vast benefits of transferring to HLS. With 102 full-time professors and more than 300 courses, HLS is home to the most intellectually stimulating legal community in the world. Outside the classroom, there are 14 journals, over100 student organizations, clinical placements in approximately 30 areas of the law, and more than enough opportunities for you to experience the incredible diversity of the HLS community during your second- and third- year. For example, the Harvard Law Review encourages transfer applicants to apply for membership and several past transfer students have been successful in that endeavor.

Bottom line? Whether you are interested in constitutional law or environmental law or human rights advocacy or any number of other areas, the breadth and depth of our offerings is incredible. Whether you want to clerk at the circuit court level, follow the path to academia, or pursue a career in public service, the opportunities presented to our graduates are unsurpassed.

For more details on the transfer application process including eligibility guidelines, deadlines, and application requirements, please visit: http://www.law.harvard.edu/prospective/j…

Also, stay tuned in the coming days and weeks for blog entries of a few students talking about their experience transferring into Harvard Law School!

As the ‘changing of the guard’ continues to take place down in Washington this spring, conservatives and libertarians are seeing their power crumble and their government job prospects evaporate into the ether of political upheaval. Or are they? The Federalist Society recently invited Professor Mark Tushnet and Steven Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, to discuss the fate of the Federalist Society in the wake of 25 years of marked success. Is there still work to be done or will it disappear into an ‘end of history’ haze of obsolescence?

Teles began by framing the Federalist Society in terms of what it does and doesn’t do. “To understand what the Federalist Society doesn’t do,” he said, “it’s important to make a distinction between the Society and the networks created by the Society… much of what people attribute to the Federalist Society are done by members as facilitated by the organization.” At the heart of Teles’ discussion was the notion of direct versus indirect outputs. Direct outputs included the Society’s charter goal of creating a “parallel curriculum” for law schools, most of whom had few to no conservative faculty a couple of decades ago, and through this, to create safe space for conservative dialogue. Indirect outputs included such conceptual goals as the recruitment of members and the provision each of social, human, and cultural capital for the conservative movement. “Conservative lawyers had instincts they weren’t acting on because the social, professional and intellectual network wasn’t there to support them,” he said. “There was also a stigma associated with the brand.”

In direct response to Teles’ remarks on social capital, Tushnet pointed out that social capital can be destroyed as easily. “One issue for the Federalist Society is how to deal with credibility issues when prominent sources of thought are no longer credible,” he said, alluding to the infamous memos of former DOJ legal advisor John Yoo in which he advocated the possible legality of torture and that enemy combatants could be denied protection under the Geneva Conventions. “Yoo’s memos became associated with conservative legal thought… how does the Society deal with the effects that the Bush administration has had on conservative credibility?”

Regarding human and social capital, Tushnet and Teles explained that the development of the movement has been tied to the existence of Republicans in government. In the absence of a Republican administration, “the Federalist Society has always been dependent on jobs in, big Washington law firms, which are in turn dependent on the existence of an administrative state” said Tushnet. So what happens in periods like the present when this pipeline narrows and this source of jobs dries up? According to Teles, the rational adaptation to being out of government is to “crank up the size of public interest” when your only allies are in the judiciary.

In closing, Teles questioned whether the Federalist Society is a victim of its own success. “There’s not as much need now for a parallel curriculum in law schools,” he said. “The general environment now is not as hostile for conservatives in law schools.”

HLS has commemorated a number of historical milestones in recent months including the 40^th anniversary of Terry v. Ohio, a case which held that ‘stop and frisks’ were not a violation of Fourth Amendment rights where an officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime. Some believed this case to have been wrongly decided, including the man who argued the case before the Court, Louis Stokes. Later in 1968 Stokes was elected to the United States Congress and served 15 consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Stokes was honored at a recent event by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

The case itself involved two men who were stopped, searched, and found to possess guns in broad day on the streets of Cleveland in 1963 by a police officer who claimed the two to be exhibiting suspicious behavior. “I had no idea that Terry would become a landmark case,” said Stokes. “The more I talked to [the suspects, John Terry and Richard Chilton], the more it seemed to me that we might have a possibility of excluding the guns based on the testimony that this event had happened on the streets.” In the wake of such landmark cases as Miranda and Escobedo that succeeded in expanding the rights of the accused, Stokes filed a motion to suppress the evidence. “The officer had no probable cause accosting them,” he said, “They weren’t brandishing guns, running, or doing anything related to a crime.

In spite of the violence and turmoil of American cities in the sixties, Stokes was confident his case would prevail before the Court. “As a black man I understood how black males were stopped in urban settings and if they didn’t have contraband as a result of stopping subjecting them to the indignity of being stopped…they were just told to move on down the street. That’s why I took this case.” Yet in the final analysis the Supreme Court based their decision upon the safety of the police officer and failed to extend Fourth Amendment protections.

“What I say to you as law students is that it pays to think outside of the box as a lawyer,” advised Stokes. “It would have been easy for me to plead them guilty and work out some light sentence. It took more to go against the custom and utilize the Constitution to try to uphold what it means in light of what people are subjected to on the streets in our country.”

Stokes presence moved the audience to emotion. As one student asked, “Did you or your brother Carl, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city ever envision this day [the election of President-Elect Obama]? You must have because surely you paved the way.” Stokes remarked that Obama’s whole campaign reminded him of 1967 when his brother became the mayor of Cleveland. “Carl built coalition in Cleveland of blacks and white. That’s how he won. For many reasons related to what Carl did and my victory as the first black congressman in Ohio the following year, Barack Obama’s meant so much. It reminded me how far we’ve come.”

While at HLS, alumnus Lam Ho was a public interest dynamo. As president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a supervising member of Reaching Out About Depression (R.O.A.D.), and Founder & Coordinator of the Giving Tree, which raises holiday gifts for children of the HLS clinical and student practice organization clients, Lam never shied away from going above and beyond the call of duty… including 60-90 hours a week dedicated to his clinicals.

Lam is currently on a Skadden Fellowship starting a community legal clinic for low income youths and their families in Chicago. Admissions staffer Julia Foresman recently caught up with Lam in the wake of a victory he scored with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. Lam had been trying to get Chicago Public Schools to follow through with the Individualized Educational Plan that CPS and his client Mary Greenlee had put in place for her 6 year old grandson, Rayvaughn.  “It’s been extremely rewarding to educate and empower my clients,” he said.  “… this is what gets me up in the morning.”

Podcast: Lam Ho (13:09)

Anyone interested in clerking after law school knows how tough clerkships are to clench.  Famous for its attention to top grades, stellar references, and flawless essays (sound familiar?), the clerkship application process can be fiercely competitive.  We figured some words of wisdom from a recent alumnus, Dan Sullivan, might be in order…

What was your background before coming to HLS? I graduated from Williams College in 2001 and worked for three years before attending HLS. Before law school, I worked as an investment banking analyst at a Wall Street firm, a research assistant at a public policy organization, and a legislative aide to a U.S. Congressman on Capitol Hill.

Why law school? I became interested in law school when I was a student at Regis High School, a Catholic high-school for boys in New York City that emphasizes a lot of lawyerly skills, such as reading, writing, and debate. But I put the idea on hold until I began working in Washington, DC after college. In Washington, my interest in law school was re-ignited by working with a number of smart, dedicated lawyers. My experience working with them showed me that a legal education would be great training for a variety of careers, from law and public policy to business and finance.

How did you get your clerkship? What was the process like? I clerked for Chief Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who is an excellent judge and a wonderful person. I formally applied for federal clerkships in August before my 3L year, but I started the application process (e.g., researching judges, asking professors for recommendations) half-way through my 2L year. The application process can be long and cumbersome. But the HLS Office of Career Services (OCS) provides students with terrific, step-by-step information about the clerkship process and critical support throughout the process. Beyond reading OCS’s excellent materials and following its advice, I recommend doing independent research on judges by talking with current and former law clerks, seeking advice from professors, reading articles about and by judges, and looking up federal judges’ bios on the Federal Judicial Center website (www.fjc.gov).

What classes or activities exist at HLS for those students interested in clerking after HLS? Law clerks do a lot of research, writing, editing, and critical reading. Students interested in clerking should do activities that will help them improve those skills, such as working as an editor on the Harvard Law Review or another law journal; working as a research assistant for a professor during the school year or the summer; doing relevant pro bono or clinical work; or writing a significant research paper for course credit. While I was at HLS, I worked on the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and as a research assistant for Professor Mary Ann Glendon, who currently serves as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Both experiences were great preparation for clerking, particularly working for Professor Glendon since she is an outstanding teacher and mentor. In terms of courses, students interested in clerking should definitely take Federal Courts, Constitutional Law, and Evidence. Other good, basic courses that provide a solid foundation for clerking are Statutory Interpretation/Legislation, Administrative Law, Corporations, and Advanced Legal Research.

Alumni advice for the incoming class? Make the most of your time at HLS. Dean Kagan likes to say (and she’s right) that HLS is like New York City because it has so many things to offer. Take advantage of the many opportunities to learn available at HLS both inside and outside the classroom. I recommend becoming actively involved in at least one student organization, such as a law journal or a club. Through your involvement in an organization you will have a chance to befriend and learn from other HLS students, one of the greatest assets HLS has to offer. During my time at HLS, I was actively involved in the Harvard chapter of the Federalist Society, a national organization of conservative and libertarian law students and lawyers that promotes intellectual diversity in the legal profession. My work with the Harvard Federalist Society was one of the highlights of my law school experience because it introduced me to so many students with such diverse interests, experiences, and backgrounds.

… and the season of winter clinicals is well underway!

Admissions staffer Julia Foresman recently sat down with 2L Leslie Lang who is participating in a winter clinical at UNCITRAL in Vienna, Austria. She is working with the insolvency law working group, which is producing a legislative guide that contributes to the harmonization of insolvency laws to facilitate international trade and commerce. Her responsibilities include conducting research to prepare for two experts conferences on corporate groups in insolvency and treatment of intellectual property in insolvency. Prior to attending law school, Leslie worked at the World Bank. Her other international work experience include the African Development Bank, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and an NGO in Beijing.

Have a listen: Leslie Lang (5:40)

Stay tuned for a follow-up with Leslie!

Interested in local government issues such as economic development, urban reform, and charter schools? Want to be inspired by someone who has been committed to public service since graduating from law school? Recently, the Harvard Real Estate Association (HREA) invited Stefan Pryor, Newark’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, to speak about obstacles facing struggling cities and current plans for reform under Mayor Cory Booker. He called on students interested in local government and city planning to join him in his quest to blow the embers on revitalization in Newark, New Jersey.

“This is an exceptional moment for urban life and urban centers in America,” said Pryor, “It’s been a long time since a president-elect has had such an elaborate set of proposals for urban revitalization.” Newark is taking advantage of this moment. As the second fastest growing city in the Northeast behind Boston, the city boasts a number of advantages not the least of which are its quick access to Manhattan and its claims to the largest seaport on eastern seaboard. The city is also a model for efforts to curb crime. “In 2008, Newark has seen a 40% drop in crime… this is the best in U.S.” Dozens of parks and other public spaces across the city are undergoing renovations with better lighting and landscaping. And the sense of safety among residents has begun to pave the way for further investment in commercial and residential space that Mayor Booker is overseeing.

But there are problems. With thousands of foreclosed properties, record high job losses, and frozen lines of credit to small business, Newark might not yet be worthy of Pryor’s rosy outlook. Yet the key to Newark’s silver lining seems to be its real estate potential. “Because Newark is so undervalued in region,” he said, “we think we will become a prime place for investment precisely because we are a lower cost environment in which to produce and lease office space and residential units.” Pryor later said that, over a 10-year period, Newark can save companies currently occupying office space in New York $40-70.

Yet given the current economy, one student asked, can builders get financing to make this stuff happen? Pryor is cautious but remains optimistic. “We brought in 25 banks to see what’s possible… we asked them, in effect, if we underwrite these deals, scrutinize them and establish a scorecard where we formally analyze which projects are most efficient with the least the public subsidy… would they form consortium of lenders? We got a very favorable response.”

When later asked how Newark plans to capitalize on its location without becoming a mere satellite for Manhattan, Pryor acknowledged the risk. “You want people to value their community which requires doing more than plopping buildings down… we need to revitalize streetscape, renovate parks, and the arts community has to be vibrant,” he said. We can capitalize on our assets, on our strategically important position on the eastern seaboard, our waterfront, our access to NYC and our community. I’m hoping we can recruit some of you to help us along the way.”

Anyone interested in working next summer on an inner-city economic development project?

Over the last several years, local government and community economic development programs have been on the rise at law schools. Through the leadership of people like Professors Gerald Frug and David Barron, Harvard has been at the fore of this trend with such courses as the Green Cities Seminar and the Real Estate Clinic that provides legal assistance to entities engaged in residential and commercial real estate transactions and development. We also have tremendous alumni resources for those interested in this area of law, as Leonard Zax HLS/HSD ’75 recently reminded us.

Having spent nearly three decades at two firms in Washington, DC as a partner in their real estate and project finance practices and as a special assistant to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Zax is currently leading the effort to revitalize his home city of Paterson, New Jersey. He is seeking to create a National Historical Park at the site that Alexander Hamilton selected to begin implementing his plan to secure America’s economic independence and provide economic opportunities for immigrants. Indeed for much of the 19^th century, Paterson was a manufacturing powerhouse and an important industrial center.

“Pro-bono, I represented the New Jersey Community Development Corp. (NJCDC), for whom I testified before the Congress to support the creation of the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park,” he said. The project would help resuscitate the economically depressed city and improve the quality of life for its 175,000 predominantly Latino, African American and Muslim American residents. “I had to make the case that this was an issue of national, not just local, significance,” he said. “The New York Times described one of the briefs I submitted to the Secretary of the Interior as a ‘38-page tour de force to argue for adding Paterson’s old industrial heart to the National Park System.’”

“In our research we found that the community as a whole felt this would be good for the city with great benefits,” explained Zax. “Latinos and Muslim Americans saw Hamilton as a primary spokesperson for the strength immigration brings to a country… they saw him as an ally to free Spanish colonies in the Americas. The African Americans in turn saw Hamilton as an ardent anti-slavery advocate.”

When asked by 1L Stephanie Dorenbosch to further explain what the Community Development Corp is doing, Zax said, “We’re going to create this national historical park, that’s the bottom line… hopefully Congress will pass this final piece of legislation. We already have $10 million from state. More importantly we see this as an opportunity to plan for the revitalization of the city.” He said they’re simultaneously working on a plan to reach out to the community to find out what kind of business the city wants to attract. Zax is currently looking for HLS interns to help him next summer to, among other activities, draft a series of agreements among the National Park Service, the City of Paterson and the state of New Jersey.

Sounds like a fantastic opportunity! Those interested, should contact Mr. Zax with a resume and letter at lzax (at) gsd.harvard.edu.

I saw this article in the Boston Globe yesterday and got a kick out of it.  I thought you might find it interesting.  Here’s a passage from the article:

The American, 41, is an unlikely, almost accidental scholar of one of China’s most beloved landmarks, a Harvard Law School graduate who left his job as a consultant and lived off savings to pursue his grand obsession thousands of miles from his Massachusetts roots. Someday soon, he hopes to publish a book on all he has learned.

Without academic affiliation or funding, Spindler has spent 14 years traveling across China and to Japan to review arcane centuries-old texts for firsthand accounts and details. And he has spent more than 830 days clambering over the wall’s far-flung ramparts around Beijing, enough to wear through several pairs of hiking boots.