The first program of its kind at any law school, the fund will be used to offer “seed money” for start-ups of new non-profit ventures, full salary grants to support students who want to work at nonprofits or government agencies that have limited ability to hire or who want to create new projects at existing organizations, and salary supplements for graduating students who have been hired with partial salaries by nonprofits and government agencies in the U.S. and abroad. Students applying for the grants will propose how they will put the money to use after graduating, and the school will assist students in pursuing grants from this fund and other sources.

The new fund will be the successor to the current pilot program that pays the third year of tuition for students who make a 5-year commitment to post-graduate public service. An advantage of the new fund is that it will support students after they graduate in a number of flexible ways. Meanwhile, tuition debt incurred by students who take lower-paying jobs after they graduate will be alleviated by our loan forgiveness program (the Low Income Protection Plan).

To read the full fund announcement, see here.

The new fund complements the recent enhancements to our public service funding that we announced late last year. For more details on that announcement, see: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/admissions/…

The essential takeaways are these:

• HLS announced that it was increasing funding for public interest by ~$2.75M this year

• We have expanded our loan repayment program (LIPP), grown the funding pool for our Summer Public Interest Funding program (guaranteed to all students), and created 12 Holmes Fellowships to add to our existing stable of fellowships that support careers in public interest;

• The Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA) continues to provide an unparalleled breadth and depth of public interest opportunities for all HLS students and alumni.

• Our clinical programs and curricular offerings continue to offer the broadest possible range of opportunities to obtain real public service experience while in law school.

Feel free to contact our office ( jdadmiss at law.harvard.edu, 617.495.3179) with any questions.

The first program of its kind at a law school, the fund will offer “seed money” for start-up non-profit ventures and salary support to students who hope to pursue post-graduate work at nonprofits or government agencies in the United States and abroad.

“This new fund is inspired by our students’ passion for justice,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. “It’s an investment that will pay dividends not only for our students but also for the countless number of people whose lives they will touch during their public service careers.”

The creation of the Public Service Venture Fund is the latest step taken by the Law School to offer new forms of assistance for students who are interested in public service careers. In November, Dean Minow announced an increase in the availability of financial aid overall and a broadening of eligibility for the school’s loan relief program. She also established 12 new Holmes Fellowships for students interested in post-graduate public service work. All told, financial support for students interested in public service has increased by $2.75M this year.

To obtain support from the new fund, applicants will submit proposals explaining how the post-graduate grants will help them get started in public service. Minow said the fund will bolster the creative thinking of publicly spirited law graduates at a time when the legal profession itself is becoming more entrepreneurial.

“The new venture fund is exactly in sync with that,” said Professor David Wilkins, the faculty director of the Program on the Legal Profession and the Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School. “It’s also in sync with the values emphasized in our curriculum, and with our pro bono ethos and our strong emphasis on clinical education, all of which encourage students to think creatively about designing interesting projects and approaches to helping people.”

The new venture fund follows a three-year pilot program covering the third year of HLS tuition for graduates who commit the first five years of their careers to public service. It will offer targeted and flexible support for students who are embarking on public service careers, said Alexa Shabecoff, Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for public service.

“When jobs are especially hard to come by, the fund may provide fellowships in order to create jobs,” Shabecoff said. “It will also supplement salaries for graduates hoping to work for nonprofits that can only afford to pay for part-time positions. In this ever-shifting legal job market, we will offer our students the ability to land the job of their dreams or create it.”

A number of HLS alumni have started nonprofits straight out of law school or soon thereafter, such as Alan Khazei ’87 and Michael Brown ’88, who started City Year, and Jennifer Gordon ’92 who started the Workplace Project and won a MacArthur ‘genius’ award for her work. “The new Venture Fund honors some of our most successful and inspiring alumni even as it plants the seeds for the next generation of public service leaders and social entrepreneurs,” Minow said.

The fund is planned to start with distributions of $1 million annually and to increase as the Law School works to raise additional resources, Minow said.

The fund will be governed by a board established by the Dean. The board will include senior administrators, faculty members, and alumni from both the private and public sectors. Advisors helping as the school launches the fund include: Susan Butler Plum, director of the Skadden Fellowship Foundation; Alan Khazei ’87, founder and chief executive officer of Be The Change, Inc. and founder and former chief executive officer of City Year; Rebecca Onie ’03, founder and chief executive officer of Project HEALTH, and winner of a 2009 MacArthur ‘genius’ grant; Paul Rosenberg ’79, a partner at The Bridgespan Group in Boston; Ken Zimmerman ’88, a partner at Lowenstein Sandler PC and chair of Lowenstein Sandler Center for the Public Interest; and Alan Jenkins, executive director and co-founder of the The Opportunity Agenda, and former Director of Human Rights at the Ford Foundation, where he managed over $50 million in grants annually in the United States and overseas.

Susan Butler Plum: “This project is simply admirable and inspiring. Harvard Law School sets the national standard for public interest advising and support, and this new approach will enable more graduating students to do more kinds of critically important public service work than ever before.”

Alan Khazei: “In starting City Year, we wanted to make it an ordinary occurrence that all young people would complete at least one year of public service. That program was truly born at Harvard – it’s something we thought about as undergraduates, and then we committed to making a reality after we graduated from Harvard Law School. Through this new venture fund, Harvard Law is moving forward with an idea that I think is absolutely necessary to this nation’s future success – we all need to invest as much as possible in the future of public service. I sincerely applaud Dean Minow and Harvard Law School for making this happen.”

Rebecca Onie: “The Law School’s new Public Service Venture Fund creates powerful incentives and opportunities for HLS students to become public service innovators at a time when our society needs them the most. As an alumna in the field of social entrepreneurship, I see everyday the need for a rich pipeline of new leaders who can identify our society’s most pressing challenges and develop creative, effective solutions for those problems. This Fund breaks new ground in enabling HLS graduates to be great thinkers and contributors not only in traditional legal practice, but also in pursuing multi-disciplinary, unconventional pathways to achieve social justice.”

Ken Zimmerman: “Harvard Law School is once again taking a critically important step to further the next generation of public service leaders. The challenges of public interest service, especially in these demanding times, require the highest level of skill, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Through this fund, the school is making it possible for its students to take on our society’s most significant challenges and reinforcing the school’s long-standing recognition of the importance of public service and public interest work.”

Alan Jenkins: “With this new venture fund, Harvard Law School is putting its money where its mouth is, giving talented new graduates the support they need to be imaginative and inspired new leaders. Having co-founded a public interest organization myself, I know how difficult it can be to put good ideas into practice. We need this fund at this critical time in our nation’s history – to help a rising generation of leaders pursue creative solutions to our society’s most dire problems.”

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My friend and I were both working on our laptops a few days ago and he looked up and asked “Is there any reason I should take wine law?” to which I responded “The more important question is: Is there any reason you should NOT take wine law??” He’s now in the class. I know it probably sounds like a blowoff class, but it’s not — there are actually some interesting constitutional issues around selling wine on the Internet that are a bigger deal than you might think. As you can probably tell from conversations like these, we just passed the first week of classes for spring semester, a time of jostling around, finalizing your class schedule, and fanatically checking MyPlan to see if the gods of the waitlists are smiling down upon you. I got in the class I was waitlisted for, but given my current credit load, I’m not sure yet whether that’s a smile or a thunderbolt from up on high.

I apparently did not get the memo that your 3L year is a time to chill out and wait for graduation. My husband’s third year of law school was marked by a whole two days of classes — Mondays and Tuesdays — followed by five-day weekends during which he and his friend would drive out to Colorado (he went to law school at WashU in St. Louis, so it is ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as driving to Colorado from Boston every week, in case that’s what you were thinking) and drive back on Sunday night, just to repeat it all again.

Maybe I should have set myself up for something like that, but instead I got hit with the panic of “this is my last semester of law school, and if I don’t do it/take it now, it’ll never happen.” What’s wrong with me? It’s not like this is my last chance to learn about something, just the last opportunity to do it as a law student in a formal classroom setting. I know a guy here who worked for Judge Wapner’s Animal Court before he came to HLS, and he knows a lot about leash laws—what happens when your dog or someone else’s dog is not on a leash and something bad happens. Because I am apparently neurotic, when I met this guy and he was telling me about some of the stuff he did, my first thought was “Wow! That’s so cool! I love having classmates who have done such fun stuff!” and my second thought was “Oh my gosh, I want to have a dog someday, and I don’t know anything about leash laws! How am I going to fit animal law into my schedule?”

I will graduate in a few months without ever having taken animal law, but I’m pretty happy with the final cadre of courses that will constitute my law school career. The good news is that if and when I get a dog, I can always call up this guy I knew in law school and ask him the question that should be on any animal lawyer’s mind: “What would Judge Wapner do?”

– Erin

A prevailing question at this time of year — sometimes up in the air until the first class meeting, sometimes well-known and influential on students deciding what to take — is whether a professor allows laptops in class. The most common answer is yes, which I think tends to set expectations and give professors who don’t allow them a bad rap. I met a few incoming students this year who were instantly disgusted with professors who expected them to take notes by hand and bitterly jealous of friends with different ones.

I got to thinking about this when my Corporations professor, Jon Hanson, discussed his rule against laptops in class this week. He noted that most students admit being really distracted when a neighbor gives in to Google’s irresistible draw. He says he let students vote at the start of a few semesters, and surprisingly many said they’d prefer to eliminate the distraction, but weren’t comfortable imposing that preference on others (which is where he comes in: “I’m a huge fan of paternalism,” he jokes.) And apparently, when he polls again at the end of semesters without laptops, very few students who initially objected are still complaining.

Overall, I think he’s right, and I hope after a semester those doubting incomers I met would agree. All my professors who forbade computers were conscious that their decision slowed students down and seemed to teach accordingly. In fact, I found certain important things easier without a laptop: complex diagrams, abstract conceptual topics, and less doctrinal courses not conducive to outlining (yes, these exist.)

Of course, in a generation totally out of practice with penmanship, there’s concern that we won’t get everything down and our exam performance will therefore suffer. But at the start of 1L year, when you’re slowed down most by still adjusting to longhand, you’re also unsure what is most important in cases and lectures and might not take the best notes anyway. Several of my friends had to redo their earliest briefs come exam time, whether they had typed them or not.

Finally, it’s important – most important, to some people – to remember that any blanket rule maintains an essentially even playing field for finals. Law school operates on a curve, and the peers who partly determine your grade won’t have their computers, either. So don’t worry: in most classes you’ll be free to type to your heart’s content. And in the others, you might just surprise yourself.

– Lea

I am a junk food addict. I think that deep down I am just rebelling against the fact that my mother is a dietitian. After a childhood filled with sliced fruit and whole wheat bread, I love me a good cheeseburger. Since coming to HLS, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that some of the best burgers I’ve ever had are right here in Cambridge. No joke. Here’s a rundown of my three favorite burger joints around campus.

The Druid (Inman Square)

I have been going here all year for Wednesday night trivia (which is awesome by the way). I got one of their burgers a couple months ago and have been hooked ever since. This is a pretty standard Irish pub with a chilled out vibe and absolutely great food. I’ve heard people also give high marks to the Irish stew and the fish and chips, but I’m a burger guy myself. I’m also a fan of the fact that the dude flipping burgers in the back usually taunts the guy running trivia on Wednesdays by yelling out random categories. It’s good times. The only downside is that the burger options are limited to with or without cheese (really, no bacon?).

R.F. O’Sullivans (Beacon Street)

I discovered this place last weekend. A friend of mine boasted that they had the best burgers in Boston. While I would definitely need to do some more research before settling on that conclusion, the burgers were pretty great. My buddy and I went with the “house burger,” which is a cheeseburger topped with bacon and ham. Needless to say we pretty much got carted out of the place, but it was well worth it. Also, O’Sullivan’s has one of the most inviting atmospheres I’ve ever experienced while wolfing down a burger. Wood paneling, fireplaces mounted in the walls, the whole nine yards.

Bartley’s (Harvard Square)

Bartley’s is a Harvard Square landmark. At the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Harvard Street, this burger joint is just across from the undergraduate campus. If you visit Harvard Square around mealtime, it’ll be the place with the line going out the door and up the street. Honestly. I think people come for the history as much as the food, as Bartley’s has been serving Harvard students for nearly 50 years. The place boasts a lengthy burger menu, with sandwich names such as “The Stimulus Package” (BBQ, grilled onions, & bacon) and “The People’s Republic of Cambridge” (cole slaw & russian dressing). Kitsch aside, Bartley’s makes a darn fine burger. One word of caution though — try to avoid the busy times (weekends, holidays) because the place can get cramped and the service starts to dip.

– Anit

Enter Leo E. Strine, Jr.– a no-nonsense judge who isn’t afraid to boldly law-down the law yet paradoxically uses humor to illustrate his points and often quotes Southpark’s Eric Cartman (“Class, you know what question to ask first: do they have the authori-tay?”). Rather than teach M&A as a plain series of transactions and lawsuits, Vice-Chancellor Strine illustrated the case history as an epic struggle for control of the corporate world. When referencing terminology in cases like “omnipresent specter” and “corporate bastion,” Vice-Chancellor Strine joked that the Delaware courts play too much Dungeons & Dragons. Other times the Vice-Chancellor kept us on the edge of our seats, like young children listening to a storybook adventure, when he lectured on the infamous “corporate raiders” and hostile takeovers of the 1980’s and the emergence of lá résistance and “takeover defense.” Whether it was Wall Street mergers and buyouts or medieval raiders and pirates, we were hooked.

Once Vice-Chancellor Strine was convinced we had a good foundation of the case law, he began his series of infamous “M&A celebrity panels.” Over the latter part of the course, we were joined by top litigators and deal-makers from the big Wall Street law firms, investment bankers, corporate in-house counsel, renowned professors, and a high-ranking European Union corporate law official. With the help of the panels, our class fleshed out the arguments in the cases and debated the law, equity, and policy goals. I even had the opportunity to discuss my ideas for M&A practice one-on-one with Vice-Chancellor Strine in his office, giving me rare insight into how the courts might treat my ideas in practice.

The course ended with an in-depth look at the differences and conflict between M&A law and practice in the United States and the European Union. Vice-Chancellor Strine left us with the idea that we’re constantly reinventing boundaries and reevaluating how people want to be treated. “The EU fears the same things we do,” the Vice-Chancellor said, “but, we haven’t exactly reached out across the pond and asked them to be a part of the decision-making process.” This idea is a microcosm of the corporate law program at Harvard Law School. Our world is growing more global and internationally focused every day, and the regulation of business and transactions must grow and adopt accordingly. As students at HLS, we’re preparing to address the international challenges of the future to ensure long-term growth and prosperity. Vice-Chancellor Strine’s M&A course, just one of the many courses in the Law and Business curriculum at HLS, was a great example of how we can improve the business world and taught me the importance of legal “equity”– ensuring fairness, equal justice and appropriate judicial remedies in business. And as Vice-Chancellor Strine always said, “Just because you have the authori-tay to do something doesn’t make it equitable.”

– Michael Patrone

Suzannah walked us through the process of researching her own family history in order to demonstrate all the different sources of information that can be used to conduct one’s own family research. Interestingly, most of the documents that genealogists base their research on are legal. I was surprised to see how many public records are now being digitized. Census reports for example, are now available on sites like ancestry.com, which I also learned is the third most subscribed site out there. According to at least one survey, something like sixty percent of the population is interested in their family history.

Genealogists are not just interested in knowing who people’s ancestors are, they also want to know what kinds of lives they lived, who their friends were and what they did for a living. A lot of this research is done through the use of county records. A lot of counties kept stories about their residents documented and they can still be found today. Obviously we don’t do this anymore because there are just too many of us. Perhaps some day people will look back at their ancestors’ facebook pages and twitter feeds to find out what kinds of lives they led. County records are probably as skewed in their perspective on the way people lived as facebook is today but at least they help identify things like profession, friendships and perhaps family ties that aren’t recorded in other places.

Suzannah also demonstrated how useful deeds can be. It was once custom when recording deeds to include along with the deed a great deal of identifying information about the landowners. One example she showed us included where the family had come from, how many children they had, and what their birthdays and ages were.

Another very insightful research instrument is the probate system. Using wills, genealogists can identify how close different family members and friends were, to the extent that wills reflect the truth of these matters, and who depended on the decedent for care, etc.

So what this all tells me is that the legal system is pretty far reaching. Not only does the law have a great deal of influence on how we live our lives from day to day, but it also influences the way that our descendants will be able to find information about us years from now and the kind of picture that these documents will paint for them. I’m interested in seeing just how far back I can trace my family line and luckily, there was a librarian at the talk who mentioned that instead of paying the membership fee for ancestry.com, we could use e-resources (the Harvard Library system’s research sources) to gain access to some of the ancestry.com site’s features.

– Elizabeth

What may be a surprise, however, is that The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is a big fan of HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren, who is Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP. She recently appeared on his show and…let’s just say that he is enamored of her ideas. You can check it out here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-ja….

To celebrate the end of winter term and the 1L class we’ve been teaching, Professor Wilkins invited the teaching team — his assistant, me and the other TA, and the firm partner/practitioner — plus significant others to his beautiful Victorian house for a dinner party. Oh man, if there’s any way to go through law school, it’s going to dinner parties at professors’ houses — they really know what they’re doing. Caviar, Dom Perignon (!!), and. . . conversation about Jersey Shore. I kid you not. It was the partner’s wife (also an attorney) who first broached the subject, but after a few minutes of animated discussion we found out that Professor Wilkins, my husband, and Neema (the other TA) were also talking about Jersey Shore on the other side of the table. I think what tipped off the two groups that we were having the same conversation was the repeated use of the word “Snooki.”

It was a fantastic evening — a perfect combination of interesting conversation (over the course of the four hours we did manage to discuss a few things other than Jersey) and all of the finer living type things grad student budgets never allow. At some point in the planning process, I was asked, “What’s your favorite type of caviar?” I was tempted to blurt out “Beluga,” simply because it was the only specific type of caviar I could think of, but thought better of it because there was a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that perhaps the reason I had heard of it was because it was ridiculously expensive (it is, and that is indeed likely the reason I’ve heard of it. Sometimes that nagging suspicion is smart.). Who am I kidding? I don’t have a favorite type of caviar. I’ve had it maybe once before, twice if you count the time we caught a female catfish full of eggs from the pond on my uncle’s farm when I was ten. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think we actually ate that, but I definitely remember my uncle pointing to the eggs as he was cleaning the fish and saying, “That, kiddos, is caviar.”

Whatever type of caviar we had at the party, it was delicious, and the wines really stole the show. The professor had gone to the trouble of choosing a wine for each course that came from a college graduation year of one of the guests, and he dedicated each bottle accordingly. I’m still impressed, even thinking back on it now. I feel like things like this will be some of my favorite memories from law school. Plus, dinner parties always make me feel like such a grown-up. Fist pumps to that.

– Erin

After two installments of this game, I’m not actually certain how outrageous our version is. The rules are typical, about the same as the official kind you can buy at stores. I’m sure that version has a much easier and more G-rated selection of words to draw, but there’s no evidence we are any more outrageous than any other group of America’s best and brightest, most sleep-deprived future lawyers with their hearts set on giving each other a difficult time.

Of course, I have to imagine that our games provide all kinds of dead giveaways that we’re law students. Along with the names of disgraced politicians and characters from Jersey Shore, our clues include a mix of vague concepts like “incompetence” and technical terms like “actuary” and “arbitrary and capricious.” I submitted “Alan Dershowitz” last time, but no one had drawn him yet by the time we called it quits (we tend to get pretty enthused and submit a lot more clues than we could ever use in one night. I was also sad not to see anyone pull “Bristol Palin,” but such is life.)

Sometimes we really stump each other, while other times we surprise ourselves with how easy our shared interests and experiences make certain clues. The first time we played, I must have spent half an hour trying to get my team to guess “boots with the fur” — lyrics to a rap song the entire other team knew, but which nobody on my team knew — but during a more recent game, one of my teammates only had to draw a big television with a football shape near the bottom for me to guess “Family Guy.”

And yes, I did just say half an hour. If ever there was proof that Harvard Law students don’t live up to their reputation for competitiveness, it’s this: we never use a timer, and while we supposedly keep score, it’s always dead even because each team just lets the other keep going until they guess right.

Plus, the game is always a reminder — as if we don’t get enough of these in class — of the stunning resourcefulness and creativity of my peers. For example, when one player’s picture of a man behind bars was not helping his team guess my ingenious contribution of “registered sex offender,” he turned the bars into yard lines on a football field and added arrows pointing toward goal posts to suggest the “offender” part. The rest followed before long, thankfully without getting too explicit (although I can’t say the same for a few choice clues the other team obliged us to guess.)

With the spring semester about to start, it may be a while before everyone has time for another round of Outrageous Pictionary. But it’s fun enough that I’m sure sooner or later someone will insist. Then, when we all graduate and these people become appellate clerks, high-powered attorneys and holders of public office, I’ll always be able to remember the absurd things I’ve seen them draw and heard them shout!

– Lea