Public Service Law May Experience Increase with Obama in White House

11/12/08

Interviewed by The National Law Journal, Deborah Ellis, an assistant dean at NYU School of Law, said she ''sensed growing enthusiasm for government law jobs during the course of the presidential campaign, when Obama repeatedly extolled the value of public service.''


According The National Law Journal article, students in the New York University School of Law showed a great lack of interest in these types of positions during the Bush administration and that the US Department of Justice seemed to feel the same way granting few of the ''progressive'' students a chance to work in the Department.

As executive director of Equal Justice Works, David Stern works to promote public service law to law students. He told the NLJ that he believed the interest in public service law due to Obama would mimic the influx of interest generated from the Kennedy administration. As a public service attorney himself, Kennedy too encouraged work in the public interest sector of law: ''Years ago, when Kennedy was president, people looked at public service as a noble calling,'' Stern said. ''I think we're going to see a similar resurgence. I think we will see some Big Law attorneys who say, ‘This is my opportunity to do something for the world.'''

The article reports that law school administrators, advocates of public interest law, and others are keeping their fingers crossed that the added surge of public interest law ardor will create more financial backing for those students potentially interested in pursuing the field as a career.

Students interested in pursuing a legal career in the public interest sector are often skeptical and concerned about making a decent living while paying off high student loans. It's widely known that lawyers in the public interest field receive a much smaller paycheck than their counterparts at bigger firms practicing in fields like corporate litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and others.

''In him, I think we have somebody who is a real advocate of public service, and I sense that there is a lot of hope that he will make it easier for people to go into public service law,''' Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School told the NLJ.

Klonoff and Stern both went on in the NLJ article to say that ''they would like to see Obama provide more federal money to help repay the student debt of graduates who go into public interest law.''