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Abstract

In short, as the academy sends more students than ever to corporate law firms, law schools need to do more to cultivate, nourish, and prepare the next generation of public interest lawyers. By making public interest lawyering more prominent in the curriculum, and offering students greater opportunity to work with faculty and students of similar interest on public interest issues, the academy can take an important step forward toward helping students overcome feelings of isolation and survive the formidable obstacles that discourage public interest careers. This article describes one such course, Lawyering in the Public Interest, which is offered as an upper-class seminar. The course uses traditional and innovative group learning strategies to give students a greater understanding of institutional issues that confront full-time public interest lawyers. The course prepares students to be leaders in serving the public interest and, most importantly, to feel empowered to do so despite financial and other obstacles in their way. In addition, it gives students who intend to pursue different career paths a meaningful opportunity to work together in the classroom on collective ways to fulfill the helping functions of the legal profession.

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