LPS Fellows at Alternative Spring Break

While PILA's Alternative Spring Break program was cut short for many due to COVID-19, our fellows still managed to have valuable experiences volunteering their time with participating organizations. Two of our fellows share their experiences. Caroline Elwig: One of the first things I did after arriving at the ACLU Capital Punishment Project in Durham, NC…

A Week at Public Defender Service in DC

I came into law school completely certain that I was going to be a public service lawyer. I had absolutely zero exposure or experience to public service lawyering, however. Though I had a large collection of community service hours, mostly centered around working with kids in impoverished, inner city communities (my motivation for attending law…

Winter Break Pro Bono: Charlottesville-Albemarle Public Defender’s Office

As fellows in the Program in Law and Public Service, we—Corey Parker and Ray Gans—know that we want to devote our careers to public service. We have also been eager, as 1Ls, to dive in and gain experience in public service. Volunteering pro bono hours with the Charlottesville-Albemarle Public Defender’s Office over this past winter…

Get Out: Becoming a Practice-Ready Lawyer

Law school is an ivory tower. It exists hundreds of miles above our clients’ on-the-ground experiences. We sit in these rooms—divorced from reality—deriving “holdings” from age-old judicial opinions. We theorize, contemplate, and speculate about principles of law from our aerial view. And in the “elevated” exercises of the traditional law school class's Socratic method, we…

The Inevitable Question of Public Defense

Why public defense is a question that I have heard many times during law school, from various sources. It is the first question in every PD interview, and the most difficult one to answer. It is asked to measure commitment and maturity; my answer has always been difficult to form because it derives from an…