HLS in Focus

One of the greatest perks of being at Harvard is getting to know the people. I am always amazed when I talk to my classmates about their interests and hobbies. As a 2L it has been especially interesting to talk to other students about what they did with their 1L summer. I recently sat down with a friend and asked him to tell me all about his summer in New York City. During last year’s spring on-campus interview season, he met with recruiters from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. A week after his short interview he got a phone call with an offer. He immediately accepted. As a native of New York, he was excited to be home for the summer and because the internship was unpaid, he was eligible for a Summer Public Interest Fund stipend.

The summer turned out to be a great success. His placement in the civil division involved a lot of legal research and writing. Throughout the course of the summer, he was able to research several different topics including inmates’ rights to counsel and federal tort claims under the Medical Care Recovery Act. His first big lesson of the summer was that, “1L Civil Procedure does matter.” He realized this when his very first research assignment was all about international service of process and personal jurisdiction under New York’s long arm statute. I know all of this is gibberish unless you have taken civil procedure but after a semester in law school, you will understand how frightening those words can be and how great it is to see that you didn’t spend a week studying them for nothing. In addition to writing informal internal memos, he had the opportunity to write first drafts of motions for his supervising attorneys including a motion for summary judgment on employment discrimination under Title Seven.

The summer wasn’t restricted to just research and writing, the internship also came with trips to the courthouse to observe trials in the district court and oral arguments in the 2nd circuit. The office also offered a trial advocacy workshop for its small group of fifteen summer interns. The interns were able to participate in a mock trial at the end of the program and prepare segments of the oral arguments. Last summer there was even the opportunity to have a picture taken with U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder.

In the end, the internship was exactly what he expected. One of the greatest benefits of working in government is that they are often short on resources and really need help from interns. This means that you get real work that the attorneys often incorporate into their final briefs and presentations. There are so many different legal opportunities to take advantage of your 1L summer and I never get tired of hearing about them.

- Elizabeth

By all objective measures, this past Saturday should have been miserable. I spent the afternoon, trudging through random neighborhoods on four hours of sleep, in the middle of a downpour. Given all of these factors, it would probably be a little strange to know that I was actually really enjoying myself.

This past weekend was Fall Fest, a Harvard-wide day of service. Basically, the school organized a bunch of service projects and encouraged students to participate in them. I’m not going to pretend that my initial inkling towards getting involved was completely altruistic. The night of the deadline to sign-up, I got an excited email from a friend of mine saying that our section was four people away from being the section with the most people to participate. The prize for the most well-represented section was a free tab at the bar of their choosing. I figured that if I got to help the community, hang out with my friends, and get a shot at free drinks all at the same event, it probably made sense to give it a try.

I threw my name down on the last activity that still had spots available, Project No One Leaves. I woke up the next morning, bright and early, and headed over to campus to figure out what I would be doing that day. As it turns out, No One Leaves is a group that educates foreclosed homeowners and renters about their options and provides them with free legal advice. I was going to spend the day with a small group of law students, going door to door to homes that had recently been foreclosed on and talking with the residents about their rights. After a training session, we were broken up into small groups and assigned a member of No One Leaves to canvass with.

On the drive over to the neighborhood that we would be canvassing, I started to ask our group leader more about the rights of foreclosed people. She told me a number of things that I had not known about the foreclosure crisis. For one, the banks usually try to undergo “no fault” evictions. They will try to kick renters off the foreclosed property despite the fact that the renters have paid, and would like to continue to pay, their rent. If this doesn’t work they will offer people small, one-time cash sums to get people out of their homes. What is most incredible is that in most instances the tenant has the right to stay in their home, if the eviction is of no fault of their own. The whole situation was something I had read about in the paper and seen on the news, but not something I had been given a chance to interact with firsthand.

As we began canvassing I was surprised by a number of things. At first, I was shocked at how welcoming people were to us. I am not sure why, but I had just assumed that people would be highly suspicious of the random ivy league twenty-somethings that had showed up on their doorstep on a Saturday morning, with fliers in hand ready to lecture them about the law. In actuality, people were just excited to have some reasonable person speak with them about their situations.

The other thing that surprised me, was how I was able to apply what I had been learning in class to what I was seeing that day. In civil procedure, we had learned that before taking away someone’s property you must give them “service of process” or fair notice. But if this were true, why were so many of the people we were speaking with learning of their foreclosure for the first time? In contracts, we learned that in order for a contract to be formed there must be a “meeting of the minds”. But how could the tenants and the banks be on the same page when the tenants were so woefully misinformed about their rights?

I know that the rudimentary grasp of these complex issues I have as a first semester law student probably didn’t allow me to fully understand what I was seeing. However, it wouldn’t take a legal expert to realize that on some level the situations we were confronting were fundamentally unjust. When we were driving back home after our day spent canvassing, I was pretty glad that my friends had managed to convince me to come out. I had spent the day learning about a truly meaningful application of my coursework, placed in a setting that, up until that point, I had only really known from newspaper headlines and talking head segments. I’m not sure if this is a fair barometer of how successful the day was, but I had actually forgotten about the free bar tab that had driven me to help out in the first place, until I wrote about it for this post.

- Anit

Today, HLS announced the creation of 12 Holmes Public Service Fellowships which will fund one year of public service work for graduating students.  This is on top of the already amazing support for public service through other fellowship programs, our guaranteed summer public interest funding, and the Low Income Protection Plan. 

For more information, check out the article on the main HLS page: http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2009/10/23_service.fellowship.html

2L Ayalon Eliach recently e-mailed me about his experience this summer at the Hague:

Prior to arriving at HLS, I spent two years living, working, and traveling abroad.  Whether it was trying to understand how tax treaties between the United States and South Korea affected my earnings in Seoul, taking advantage of the easy access to travel and work visas that I enjoyed as an American, or seeing pictures of President Bush on newspaper covers in almost every country I visited, my experiences overseas piqued my interest in international law and heightened my curiosity about the ways in which the United States’ interests are affected by and pursued through international legal institutions.

When I got to HLS, I began thinking about my 1L summer very early on.  I knew the different elements of what I was looking for but wasn’t sure how to combine them.  I wanted to learn more about international law, better understand America’s role in the international legal order, and contribute what I could to my country.  After speaking to some 1L friends and upper-classmen, it became pretty clear that working for the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser presented the perfect opportunity to combine those interests. 

I quickly learned that the Office of the Legal Adviser’s summer internship is only open to law students who have completed their 2L year.  Luckily, OPIA’s Job Search Database contains profiles of internship opportunities impossible to find anywhere else on the Internet.  A quick search for “U.S. Embassy” led me to an evaluation of an internship with the State Department’s Office of the Legal Counselor in The Hague.  The evaluation was extremely enthusiastic and contained contact information for a State Department attorney who worked in the office.  I emailed her and although she had returned to Washington, she was able to put me in contact with the current Legal Counselor who explained the application process to me.

The internship was everything that I had hoped for and more.  I had the opportunity to directly work for and learn from two brilliant attorneys from the Office of the Legal Adviser stationed in The Hague.  I attended meetings with other states’ legal representatives, trials of alleged war criminals, and readings of legal decisions that impacted countries’ sovereignties and borders.  Being in the world’s capital of international law gave me unparalleled exposure to the issues I was interested in, and researching and writing about those issues deepened my understanding of them.  By the end of the summer, I had done substantive work related to the International Court of Justice, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and other legal institutions. 

The internship brought my 1L Public International Law class to life and enabled me to get out of my 1L summer everything that I had hoped for and more.

I recently sat down with Marissa Vahlsing to talk about her experience this summer at La Asociacion Civil por la Igualdad y la Justica in Buenos Aires:

Marissa Vahlsing podcast

Last year, I began with the intention of finding a private sector job; however, like many 1Ls, I encountered some difficulty, given the economic climate.  By winter, I decided to make an appointment to meet with an OPIA advisor. I was hesitant to meet with them because I wasn’t all that interested in public service, but I needed to get a job. I met with Lisa Williams for about half an hour. When she asked me what areas I was interested in, I explained to her that I didn’t really have any preference and that I just needed an experience that would help me get a job in the private sector later. Lisa showed me the websites of several reputable organizations in Chicago that were interested in taking first year interns to work on legal issues and offices that would offer the kind of work that would be most comparable to what an intern would get in the private sector. She also told me that I should tap into some Harvard connections. I’ve never been comfortable asking people I don’t know for any kind of favors so she also said she would email some of them herself and see what kinds of positions were available. I left her office with a page full of handwritten notes on organizations to contact and tips on how to approach people with my resume and cover letter. Lisa even reviewed my cover letter the very next day.

I sent out application and went home for spring break worried that I wouldn’t get a job. One day in the middle of break Lisa Williams called me to say that she had spoken to a Wasserstein Fellow in Chicago about my resume and interests. He told her that he would hold on to my resume and try to help me out. He then coincidentally ran into some high-ranking people in the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and handed them my resume, which he happened to have printed out and in his briefcase. Lisa was calling to let me know that the AG’s people were very interested in me and that they might be calling me soon so I should get ready for a phone interview at the very least. Instead what I got was an offer to work in the office’s Special Litigation Bureau.

The job turned out to be fantastic. I had the opportunity to work with almost every lawyer in my department on a variety of cases. My work included areas like consumer fraud, the Americans with Disabilities Act, arbitration guidelines, and the state’s whistleblower statute. The Bureau Chief took me under his wing after my second week there and asked me to work on some of his most important cases, including the Chicago Parking meter investigation and a couple major settlements as well. Over the course of the summer I got a pretty good feel for what it will be like to work as a lawyer. I researched issues of first impression and wrote memos for the attorneys that asked for my help.

In addition to getting to do substantive work and refine my research and writing skills I was also able to attend all of the workshops and information sessions that the office organized for interns. There was everything from hearing about the various career paths that lead to working as a department head in the Attorney General’s Office to how to prepare a resume that will get you hired. The unofficial outings were the most beneficial to me. On several occasions I was able to sit in on status hearings in the Daley Center and submit orders to the court clerks. I know all of this sounds like it shouldn’t have been exciting but I had never been in a courtroom before this experience so I was enjoying every minute of it. One of the highlights of my summer was when I went to the federal building with a couple other interns and sat in on oral arguments in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. We were all star struck when we realized that the chief judge on the panel was the Honorable Richard Posner. After reading so many of his cases in our 1L classes, it was amazing to see him in action. The summer turned out to be amazing and I have to say I’m somewhat tempted to “switch sides” and work in public interest. We’ll see. 

 - Elizabeth

The cool, sunny peacefulness of this Friday afternoon is misleading: it marks the end of a week so busy I’m having real difficulty choosing any one thing to write about! Instead, I hope a few highlights from my week will reflect the terrific amount there is to do here at Harvard.

To start off, my name is Lea Downey, and I’m a 2L who came straight to HLS after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. How my background at such a large, Southern, public school continues to color my impression of Harvard is something I hope to share frequently in this blog. For now, I think my week may speak for itself!

For instance, Monday was our first day back from “fly-out week,” the break designed for upper-level students to attend callback interviews for summer jobs at law firms. It was difficult getting up for my first morning class after so long, but Catharine Mackinnon, my professor for Sex Equality, soon had us all wide awake with a rousing discussion of affirmative action.

Afterward, I headed to the Tenant Advocacy Project (TAP) offices to make some phone calls for an eviction case I’m handling. I also finished up a short paper for a seminar I’m taking called The Art of Social Change, which was easy with an inspiring recent guest lecture by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative as my topic.

The highlight of Tuesday was my first session of a small, hands-on class called Community Action for Social and Economic Rights. The professor, Lucie White, has set up a stunning range of options for the year-long projects on which we’ll focus. Some of my classmates will be filming documentaries or doing United Nations case studies in Ghana and India, but I’m leaning toward the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights’ program for at-risk Boston teens.

Wednesday was a little quieter, with plenty of television (yes, you still get TV in law school!) But Thursday was my busiest day yet, with Evidence in the morning and an informational phone interview in the afternoon. Alexa Shabecoff at OPIA set this up with a recent HLS graduate working in Austin, where I’m hoping to return after graduation, so I could get a sense of the job market there.

He was so encouraging I could have spoken with him for hours, but eventually I had to leave for this week’s Art of Social Change, where the guests were two lawyers fighting abuse in juvenile detention facilities. Their heartbreaking and inspiring stories were still with me today, Friday, as I moved from another Evidence class to lunch with friends and a study group for Community Action.

You can probably tell I’m very public-interest-oriented, and I’m glad to represent that segment of Harvard students because I’m definitely not alone. I can’t wait to use this blog to share my satisfaction with OPIA, Summer Public Interest Funding, the student practice groups and the real-world preparation emphasized in many of my classes. These are all subjects for another day, but I hope this sampling of “a week in the life” gives a sense of what’s possible with Harvard as your springboard.

- Lea

Great article up on the HLS main page highlighting four students summer experiences:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/spotlight/student-pursuits/25_summer.html

3L Emily Murphy shares her experience from the Health, Disability and Estate Planning Clinic: 

As a 2L, I enrolled in one of Harvard Law School’s clinics, the Health, Disability, and Estate Planning Clinic.  Each week the of fall semester, I would spend each Wednesday and Thursday at the Legal Services Center (LSC) in Jamaica Plain.  Jamaica Plain is a low income, ethnically diverse neighborhood in southwest Boston that few Harvard Law students visit regularly.  At LSC, I represented between fifteen and twenty clients who were applying for Social Security disability benefits.  Most of my clients had lived in Jamaica Plain their entire lives.  Because they had no car, several of my clients had to walk to LSC to meet with me.  Some walked several miles in the middle of winter, despite physical pain from their disabilities.

In my first few meetings with clients, I worked alongside an LSC attorney, Julie McCormack.  Julie has overseen the disability clinic at LSC for many years.  Using her expertise in Social Security law, she assisted me and the two other students working on Social Security cases that semester.  As the semester progressed, Julie left more responsibility to me and my classmates.  I met with clients independently, sent letters to the Social Security office, and initiated contact with my clients’ doctors.  I appreciated the trust that Julie placed in me, and I enjoyed serving as my clients’ primary advocate.

One of my clients, who I will call Marisa, is particularly memorable.  Marisa is from Cape Verde and lives in Jamaica Plain with her three-year-old daughter.  She experiences symptoms of fibromyalgia and severe back pain.  Her hands are deformed from many years of heavy manual labor.  She also possesses an IQ that qualifies her as mentally disabled.  She had applied for Social Security disability benefits three times and had been denied each time.  When she came to LSC, I explained to her through a translator the steps we would take to complete her Social Security appeal.  She gave me the names of her doctors—sometimes remembering only the doctors’ first names and the general location of their offices.  After some research, I tracked down her doctors and requested copies of her medical records.  I asked her doctors if they would write letters in support of Marisa’s application for Social Security.  The night before Marisa’s hearing, I stayed up until 2 AM revising her hearing memorandum and preparing documents for submission to the court.

On the chilly morning of the hearing, I met Marisa outside LSC.  She had arrived almost an hour before we had scheduled to meet, and the cold had caused the fibromyalgia to freeze the muscles in her arms and hands. I carried her shivering child and the court documents to the nearest taxi and ushered Marisa in the backseat.  For Marisa, this taxi ride was a rare luxury.  She spent the ride gazing out the back window at the Boston skyline.  By the time we arrived at the courthouse, we had only ten minutes to prepare ourselves before entering the courtroom.

I was so proud to see how well Marisa handled herself in front of the judge.  We had rehearsed the questions the judge would ask her and practiced her answers.  She remained strong as the judge challenged her claims of disability and did not flinch as the judge inquired into her mental aptitude.  After the hearing, Marisa felt relieved, confident, vindicated.  She was happy that a judge had heard her grievances.  She hugged me and repeated “God bless you” in my ear.  I warned her that the judge may not award her benefits, but she was unconcerned.  She had faith in God and wanted no more than to have her voice heard.

Happily, Marisa won her case.  She now receives over $1000 each month in Social Security disability benefits and received a substantial amount of back benefits for her previous months of disability.  These benefits more than doubled her monthly income. 

While I enjoy my hours in the classroom, classroom hours cannot provide the same gratification that I received from my work in the clinic.  Marisa and my other clients had fallen through the cracks of a Social Security system that is less receptive to unrepresented applicants.  With only a few hours per week and the support of Julie, I could help my disabled clients access funds that enabled them to avoid hunger and homelessness.  For the first time, I found real-world value in my legal training.

2L Bryson Morgan just e-mailed me about his summer experience.  I think its a great illustration of both the resources we have here to help students break into the world of public interest law and of the opportunities to blend practical experience with relevant coursework:

I studied voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance, and government ethics and lobbying reform in college.  Like many HLS students, I came to law school so that I could continue pursuing these interests, not step away from them. 

When it came time to think about what I wanted to do during my 1L summer, I went online and made an appointment to speak with Joan Ruttenberg and Alexa Shabecoff at the Office of Public Interest Advising.  I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do – in fact, I arrived at my advising appointment with a list of about 15 organizations that I was interested in working for.  As I went through my list one by one, I was amazed and excited to find that Ms. Ruttenberg could name recent HLS grads at each of the organizations off the top of her head.  When I mentioned an interest in working for the newly-established Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), Alexa Shabecoff told me that a recent HLS graduate and Heyman Fellow had just been selected to head the OCE, and that he was going to be visiting HLS two weeks later.  Perhaps I could interview with him then, she suggested. 

It was that easy – I left my OPIA advising session with the names and contact information of several recent HLS grads doing amazing work in my areas of interest.   Two weeks later I met with Leo Wise of the OCE, and shortly thereafter my summer was set. 

The OCE was everything I hoped it would be and more…and since the OCE investigates Members of Congress, I was expecting a very interesting summer!  It exceeded my expectations.  You will be surprised at how substantive a role you can play with just one year of law school under your belt.  This was not the undergraduate DC internship I was used to!  From reviewing allegations against Members, designing investigations with the OCE’s small team of four lawyers, drafting requests for information, pouring through documents, interviewing Members of Congress, their staff and potential witnesses, and drafting reports for public release, I assisted with every stage of several investigations of Members of Congress.  While I can’t reveal the specifics of any of these investigations yet, you’ve likely been reading about several of them in the press! 

Returning to HLS this year, I will be following up on my summer experience with substantive coursework.  I will be taking a course on White Collar Criminal Law & Procedure from John Savarese this fall, and a course on Institutional Corruption from Lawrence Lessig and a clinical on Law and the Political Process from Lani Guinier in the spring.    I plan on returning to the OCE for a few weeks next summer, and perhaps after law school.