Speech at HLS about public interest law
Ralph Nader and I were invited to speak at Harvard Law School about how the school can better live up to its public interest mission.
A video of the speech is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDvJTXlW8LY
The Crimson covered the speech:
Former U.S. presidential candidate and attorney Ralph Nader spoke at the Harvard Law Forum Thursday to discuss the need for more public interest lawyers and his belief in Harvard Law School’s obligation to support public interest careers among its graduates.
Pete D. Davis ’12, the author of “The Bicentennial Crisis,” a book-length report that criticizes the Law School, joined Nader to speak in front of about a hundred people in the Law School’s Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall.
Introduced by Harvard Law Forum President Martin T. Drake, the speakers split the two-hour event to both critique the state of the legal profession in America and call current law students to serve the public.
Public service and its connection to the Law School has been an ongoing discussionover the past year. In February, Davis and four Law professors held a forum titled “Harvard Law and the Public Interest” to debate the school’s perceived disconnect with public service. Nader has been an active participant in the discussion as well — criticizing the Law School for its “corporate” focus at an event last year as well as in an open letter with six other alumni to Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 published in April.
At Thursday’s event, Davis enumerated the history of public interest law participation at the Law School and described his vision of a majority of Law graduates working in public interest careers. The proportion of graduates entering public service law positions stood at 16.87 percent among 2017 graduates.
“Does the mother getting evicted from their house care that we created a bunch of Supreme Court clerks?” Davis said. “Seen through the eyes of America, we risk irrelevance… When our grandkids ask what we did, we want to tell them we advanced the legal interest of the many rather than entrenched the power of the few.”
Davis pointed to the discrepancy between the proportion of students who enter the Law School wanting to work in the public interest and those who graduate with a job doing so.
“Something is changing you while you’re here,” Davis said.
Following Davis, Nader first spoke about lawyers’ need to promote of the rule of law to defend justice. Nader accused the Law School of failing to promote justice in its practices, instead producing graduates who bend to corporate interests.
Read the whole article here.