design global and local challenges for young talent
Maybe one of the best things you can do for young talent is design global and local challenges for them.
Mike Wishnie founded the Workers’ Immigrants Rights Clinic and Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School. I got to serve as a student attorney in the Vets clinic for a couple of years. At the time, Mike structured the docket so that each student in the clinic had two cases: one direct client service case and one impact litigation case. In the direct service case, you were typically filing a VA benefits claim on behalf of one veteran. In the impact litigation case, you were usually trying to shift the nationwide policy of a federal agency (like, you know, the Department of Defense) on behalf of thousands or even millions of veterans.
Mike applied the same scrupulously high standards to your work on both types of cases. The ambitious ones among us weren’t allowed to give the local work short shrift in favor of the shinier global work. The bleeding hearts among us couldn’t shirk the global stuff for the nearer term, tractable rewards of the local work.
Legal practice can lend itself especially well to an explosion (or enrichment) of the global-local binary because of standing requirements. A lawyer can’t bring a suit just because they think a law is dumb or a roughly defined group of people out there are getting a raw deal. The lawyer has to have a client. That client is often an individual person. Hard to get more local than n=1. That client’s case, and the arguments made on their behalf, can implicate more and more global dimensions of the law. Through appeals, the most local complaint can ultimately come before the US Supreme Court, where law gets its most global interpretation and application.
Mike made all this present and urgent for us. In addition to feeling very tired, in his clinics you could feel a little drunk on opportunity. It was hard to be cynical or complacent. Everywhere you look there is a veteran who you have the skills to help get healthcare or spousal benefits or a just, honorable discharge. Everywhere you look, there’s a fissure in the great parching dam of the federal government that can be widened to let justice flow through.
As sophisticated as the legal reasoning and litigation strategy got at times, Mike’s biggest lessons seemed to be simple, in the end:
Get to work.
Treat your clients with the deepest respect.
If you are unclear how to do 2, see 1.
-eric
