Public Interest Careers Don't Have to Wait

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This is a guest post from Equal Justice Works Board Member Francisco Pardo.  The piece originally appeared on the Forum on Law, Culture & Society at Fordham Law, where Francisco is a 2012 J.D. Candidate.

Many students enter law school with high hopes of engaging in social justice work, indigent legal representation, and other forms of service to the public.  In due course, many of these public-interest minded law students are jolted by the reality that the forgotten signature on the promissory note has transformed into an increasing mountain of debt.  The pressure to repay these loans results in a race to secure high-paying jobs with large law firms.  Where the noble goals such as the defense of civil liberties or legal services for the poor can wait; collection agents won’t, or so the thinking goes.

Few students stop and think that a public interest legal career does not have to be held hostage by debt. Yet far too many prejudge their fate in the rush to secure an elusive payoff:  most law students will not end up at large firms and fewer still will ever reach partnership. Even though many will enter private practice, only a relative few will eventually transition to employment by the government or a non-profit. In the rush to pay off debt, these individuals bargain away the reason for becoming lawyers in the first place.  Their new goal is to become a lawyer that is compensated enough to quickly pay  off the debt of becoming a lawyer.  In this sense, the law can be a crazy-making enterprise.

The law draws in intelligent, well-intentioned people with the promise of being able to “make a difference” only to spit them out into the world of document review.  Thus, the decisions regarding entry into the legal workforce resemble a Kafkaesque nightmare:  the more control a student attempts to exert over their situation, the less control is achieved.  Balancing public interest career goals with the reality of the debt required to tackle society’s problems as a lawyer is, putting it mildly, a frustrating and uncomfortable experience.  The legal profession is set up in such a way as to prevent most newly-minted lawyers from serving the most vulnerable in society or addressing the most pressing problems.  This is a painfully disappointing reality. At its extreme, the law school experience for students with public interest goals is dejecting and dehumanizing in the way it transforms potential public servants into automatons shackled by debt.  Kafka himself could not have produced a more maddening process.

Yet, entering the legal profession does not have to mean postponing a public interest career.  Instead of joining the panicked rush to sign up for law firm interview slots, students should take stock of the various tools available to make entry-level public interest positions a viable and attractive non-bankrupting option.  Loan repayment programs, federal income-based loan repayment, and public service loan forgiveness are a few examples of the programs that are available to encourage law students to enter careers in the public interest and that can dramatically reduce the level and duration of certain kinds of educational debt.  Combined with proactive planning and reflection, a legal education can be financially feasible and can result in a tremendous benefit to society.

Instead of making rash, life-altering decisions, public interest-minded law students should take heed of the ultimate lesson in Kafka’s The Trial: stay true to yourself and to your aspirations, abandoning that in favor of a delusion may just transform you into our own worst enemy.