A pro bono life - law school dean Barbara Bader Aldave

Progressive, The, May, 1998 by Colman McCarthy

Stern, a man of natural ebullience, believes that the 1,400 summer public-interest jobs that NAPIL runs are vital for students. "Those jobs are the most important experience they can have," he says. "Whether they continue doing public-interest work or go to a firm, they are much more likely to do some kind of pro bono or public-interest law because of that experience. Our Rural Legal Corps puts ninety students into programs over two summers."

Two former students of my course at Georgetown Law, "Law, Conscience, and Nonviolence," are current NAPIL fellows: Rosemary Dady, with the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation, and Sczerina Perot, with the Washington, D.C., Legal Clinic for the Homeless. I remember each as having a surplus of the talents--moral alertness, low tolerance for cant, follow-up questioning skills--that wouldn't land them editorships on the law review but would keep them committed to careers of restorative justice.

In 1995, Dady wrote a memorable essay entitled "Struggling for a Free Press in Indonesia: Activist Lawyers Defending Independent Journalists." She had secured an internship the previous summer in Jakarta with Lembaga Bantuan Hukum (LBH), the Legal Aid Institute. Coming between her first and second years at Georgetown, the experience energized her to push on.

"After finishing my first year of law school, I was pretty discouraged," she wrote. "Spending a year of my life reading endless cases in which poor people, women, and people of color were frequently defeated by parties with more power left me questioning whether the law could be an effective tool for social change."

That summer, Rosemary Dady worked with LBH Institute lawyers defending a group of anti-censorship reporters and editors who had formed the Alliance of Independent Journalists. In March 1995, three members were arrested for violating Indonesian "Hate Sowing" laws. They were tried and sentenced to terms between two and three years. Later that year, one of the three, Ahmad Taufik, the president of the alliance, received an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists for his work to promote a free press in Indonesia.

In Washington, Sczerina Perot is in the second year of a NAPIL Fellowship. She serves homeless families. "I love what I'm doing," she told me. "Sometimes I lose sleep about my clients. But during the day I have a feeling of being appreciated, and it's always there."

Dady and Perot are fortunate. Georgetown Law is one of the few schools wise enough to have a first-year public-interest program. "First-year students," Stern said, "get all wrapped up in their classes. This year, Georgetown asked its incoming students if they would like to have a public-interest mentor. Well, 105 students signed up."

I've kept copies of all the papers my students wrote--boxes of them. On hearing years later that, like Rosemary Dady and Sczerina Perot, they're using their skills to decrease pain in people's lives and to increase justice, I go back and reread their papers. I can't claim that they are better lawyers for having written about unlawschoolish topics but I will wager a billable hour that they are better people. And what does the law profession need more than that?