The John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School serves as the hub of all public interest programs at the Law School. Levin Center staff work with students and alumni to develop summer and long-term job searches at public interest organizations, government agencies, as well as at private public interest law firms.

We can help you clarify your professional goals, identify a timeline that makes the most sense for your particular job search, review resumes and cover letters, offer mock interviews, and consult with you as you evaluate offers. We also administer public interest scholarships, summer internship funds, and postgraduate fellowships. Current students are invited to attend the workshops, panels, substantive skills trainings, and other activities we sponsor throughout the year.

We urge you to review our Public Interest Job Search Resources before meeting with a Levin Center advisor. To schedule an appointment, please contact an advisor directly via email. We welcome current students and alumni to set up an appointment.

How can you connect with others who share your interests? We rely on faculty, alumni, and upper-class students to provide guidance and help mentor incoming students through our Public Interest Mentoring program.

Please note that the Office of Career Services (OCS) works with students and alumni pursuing summer and long-term job searches with private sector employers including traditional large law firms, corporations, investment banks and consulting firms. OCS also assists students seeking judicial externships and clerkships.

It is not uncommon for a graduate committed to achieving a career in the non-profit or government sectors to spend some time at a private law firm at the beginning of their career. Economic, personal, and other reasons may dictate this path for some. We work with our graduates of all experience levels who request help creating a career plan, evaluating options and possible timelines for transition, ensuring that pro bono remains a constant part of their work, and thinking through the issues that will need to be addressed to achieve their long-term goals.

Schedule an appointment
The Levin Center remains a resource for alumni after graduation. Whether you’re seeking a public interest position after a judicial clerkship, hoping to move from the private sector into a public sector position, or transitioning to a different public interest job, please contact one of the Levin Center advisors directly to schedule an appointment.

Sign up for job bulletins
We can help identify prospective employers, connect you with alumni practicing in the same field, review resumes and cover letters, and help you prepare for interviews. We also publish a weekly e-bulletin of public interest job announcements which you can sign up for on the LinkedIn Stanford Law School group page. Once your request to join the SLS page has been approved, please subscribe to the subgroup, Postgraduate Public Interest Job Announcements.

You may also contact the Office of Career Services for access to on-line job announcements, assistance in seeking reciprocity from another law school’s career services office, and general job search assistance for private sector job searches.

Serve as a Public Interest Alumni Mentor
Finally, if you are not already serving as a public interest alumni mentor, please consider joining. We maintain a list of alumni across the country who are willing to provide mentoring to public interest students on a one-on-one basis, typically in the form of phone calls but sometimes in-person meetings when students are visiting or interning in a city. Students interested in particular fields, geographic areas, or in speaking to alumni from similar backgrounds make use of this network to ask questions about career planning, fellowship and clerkship applications, and how to make the most of their law school experience. Simply email Levin Center staff if you’d like to participate.

Post a job announcement
If you have any internship, fellowship, or employment opportunities, please upload them to Symplicity first. We aren’t allowed to post it for you because employers must affirmatively agree to the nondiscrimination statement. You can create an employer account on Symplicity and upload your announcement for free. Once it has been uploaded to Symplicity, we can include it in our weekly postgraduate fellowship/entry-level Government Honors bulletin (which is published throughout the year) or the internship bulletin for students (which is published from fall to spring when our students are most actively looking for such opportunities).

Update your alumni directory profile
Lastly, if you haven’t already, we encourage to sign up on the alumni directory, which now allows for joining and posting to groups such as your class year group. It also allows you to create your own group and invite others to join.

A different kind of public interest practice focuses on using litigation—-the outcome of which will have a broader impact than on just the individual client in an individual case. This can be accomplished through class action lawsuits as well as through individual cases that challenge a government policy or administrative process that, if successful, could result in broad-based change.

Some examples of this kind of practice are:

• Litigation that seeks to stop implementation of an initiative that would prohibit undocumented immigrant children from attending public schools
• Litigation that establishes a national class of women who claim they have been discriminated against by Wal-Mart and seek damages as well as policy changes
• Litigation against the federal government for failing to implement sections of the Clean Water Act

Examples of Employers: Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Brennan Center for Justice, Natural Resources Defense Council, Legal Momentum, Legal Assistance Centre (Namibia)

You are likely most familiar with this type of law practice. Lawyers may work on the local, state, federal, or international level when engaging in criminal prosecution or criminal defense practice. Counties and states have criminal prosecution agencies and often have criminal defense agencies (although many smaller jurisdictions rely on a panel system where private attorneys are appointed to represent indigent clients). There are also federal prosecutors and defenders. In international settings, lawyers may work at criminal tribunals or in the criminal policy departments of intergovernmental agencies. This type of practice primarily involves individual client representation or prosecution. On the federal level, however, it may include broad-based prosecution of an entire industry.

Examples of Employers: Federal Defenders of San Diego, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, International Criminal Court

Virtually every legal topic–from commercial law to intellectual property law, from public health law to national security law–has international aspects. In many instances there are public international law regimes that govern certain aspects of the field. In addition, focused comparative law analysis of foreign legal systems can be an important dimension of the field and practice.

It is difficult to cover all possible career options here. If you are considering practicing in the international arena, it is critical that you connect with advising at the Levin Center (contact Kevin Lo) as well as engage in further research and reflection to focus your training and the scope of your job search.

Some examples of international public interest legal practice include:

• International legal work for the US government
• Domestic or international legal work for a foreign government
• Legal counsel work at an intergovernmental organization such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund etc. which regularly addresses both public international law and comparative law questions
• Human rights monitoring, litigation and advocacy work at a non-governmental organization
• Litigation, advocacy and capacity-building work at a non-governmental organization that works in transitional societies advancing rule of law and human rights

Examples of Employers:
US State Department, US Treasury Department, Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Relations, Chilean Ministry of Finance, The Supreme Court of Rwanda, the United Nations, The World Bank, The International Finance Corporation, Human Rights Watch, Center for Justice and Accountability, PILNet, American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative