A guest post, by John Bliss , Assistant Professor at Sturm College of Law
Imagine you have just graduated from college and that you are deeply concerned about racial justice, pandemics, climate change, global inequality, or other major public policy challenges. Given these concerns, how do you shape an impactful career of meaningful work?
For many, the answer is: Attend law school. As a law professor, I am perhaps a little biased when I say that this is a pretty good answer. Law schools produce a wide range of graduates at the front lines of social justice and other important causes, including the day-to-day work of proficiently helping clients understand and navigate the law. But legal education also has enormous room for improvement, which has been the focus of my empirical research over the past twelve years.
Using a variety of methods and comparing over time and across national contexts, I have been studying how initially idealistic law students tend to drift away from the public-interest values and career aspirations that drew them to law school. This drift appears to be influenced by a range of factors—among them, financial considerations, law school peer culture, traditional legal pedagogy, the law-firm recruiting process, and the limited availability of jobs in full-time public interest legal practice. Law schools cannot easily control all of these factors, but I do believe that we can develop curriculum to help reduce this drift effect.
Working with The Good Project and law faculty colleagues, I have recently been developing such curriculum in the hope that our students will sustain public-interest values, whether those values lead to careers in the non-profit or private sector. I began these efforts in 2017 while a resident fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. During my fellowship, I became acquainted with Professor Howard Gardner and was introduced to the Good Project team that he leads. With support and collaboration from the Good Project, I piloted workshops at Harvard Law School with first-year students focusing on professional identity and public-interest commitments. In my current position at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, I have been expanding this curriculum in collaboration with Professor Alexi Freeman. Professor Freeman is experienced in activist lawyering, writes extensively about how law curriculum can better address social justice causes, and runs the public interest and externship programs at Denver Law. In the past academic year, we recruited 32 public-interest-oriented students into what we call the “1L Public Good Program.” In addition to community building and professional identity workshops, we required our students to engage in 20 hours of pro bono fieldwork in public service settings.
In our workshops, we introduced The Good Project’s “Good Work” perspective and toolkit as we discussed identity, values, theories of justice and social change, and pathways into public-regarding legal careers. We devoted one session entirely to the “triple helix” or “three Es” of Good Work, which is Excellent, Engaged, and Ethical. Because this session was offered remotely via Zoom in the spring 2020 pandemic context, we developed some interactive online tools, including having students collaborate on a Google spreadsheet to list and categorize the traits of Good Work. Students were quick to recognize interrelationships among the three Es. For example, the Excellence category covered technical proficiency but also passion, dedication, inclusiveness, and responsibility to broader communities. We also had students create a “Mentimeter” word map to describe what Good Work would look like for a lawyer. Some of the largest (most frequently cited) terms in the word map were “moral,” “empathetic,” “altruistic,” and “activist.” This exercise revealed students shared values and aspirations for impactful practice. Students also included the term “innovative,” which sparked a discussion of the need to think proactively and outside the box when seeking to address systemic causes of injustice. Finally, we discussed the long-term challenge of seeking “flow” and the integration of personal and professional identities within legal practice. We reminded students that, as Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon put it in Good Work: When Excellent and Ethics Meet, “rich lives include continuing internal conversations about who we are, what we want to achieve, where we are successful, and where we are falling short. … It takes a lifetime to achieve such an integration.”
Student feedback about our pilot run of the 1L Public Good Program has been overwhelmingly positive. They appreciated the community of like-minded peers and faculty, and the opportunity to start mentorship relationships with Professor Freeman and myself rooted in conversations about public service, social change, and Good Work. The students emphasized that this programming helped them stay focused on public interest goals and values during a stressful first year of law school.
We are in the early stages of developing assessment tools that we will use in the coming years to empirically examine how the Program is impacting students. At this point, I am confident in saying that the Program and the application of Good Work in legal education show great promise. Law is a field with enormous potential to promote Good Work, as it draws students who seek careers of intrinsic motivation (Engagement), professional skill (Excellence), and public service impact (Ethics). As a legal educator, I believe it is my job to foster these commitments and help students reflect on what kind of lawyers they want to be and what kind of impacts they want to have. I would be more than happy to be contacted by anyone in professional schools or higher education more generally who is seeking to integrate The Good Project materials into their teaching and curriculum.