The John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law is the primary contact for all Public Interest and Public Service Employers. Please know that we provide generous summer funding grants and postgraduate fellowships to help our students and alumni work in public service.

SLS provides $7,500 summer grants to 1Ls and $8,500 summer grants to 2Ls working a second summer in public service who commit to volunteering 9 weeks full-time with a nonprofit or governmental agency, provided the student has financial need (i.e., is eligible for Federal Work Study). Each summer we have over 140 students participate in the program.

We fund multiple postgraduate fellowships, enabling alumni to accept positions with a wide array of public interest employers including Natural Resources Defense Council, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, New York Civil Liberties Union, Brennan Center for Justice, Human Rights First, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Bay Area Legal Aid, Alameda County Public Defender’s Office, New Jersey Public Defender’s Office, and the Orleans Public Defender.

Recruiting Stanford Law School students and alumni

While our office does not organize a formal public interest campus interview program, we are happy to schedule employers for a day on campus at your convenience. Public interest employers can schedule an informational lunch talk open to the entire law school student body and then conduct interviews afterward. We can help solicit applications and reserve a conference room.

All employers are welcome to participate in the traditional On Campus Interview Program that our colleagues in the Office of Career Services organize each August and January. For more information about that, please contact the Office of Career Services (OCS) .

You may also post your job announcements recruiting student volunteers or postgraduate hires on our on-line database. We are not 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.

Increase your Organization’s Visibility on Campus

1. The primary way to raise awareness of your organization is to feature your lawyers in campus events. For example, we schedule practice area overviews each Fall to bring lawyers to campus to talk about their work and offer students different perspectives on nonprofit practice, civil and criminal governmental practice, and private public interest firm practice. That’s a great way in which employers are able to raise the visibility of their agencies outside of the formal on-campus interview program offered by the Office of Career Services. We also are willing to host “brown bag lunches” with employers, too.
2. Another option for local employers is to participate in our Mock Interview Program in November. We recruit volunteer attorneys to conduct mock public interest interview with 1Ls each November. Certain agencies participate in this program every year and subsequently hire SLS students every summer. We believe word-of-mouth is the best way to increase an agency’s reputation and students who have a strong summer internship experience are eager to share that with other students. We also maintain an electronic database of past summer evaluations for future students to review. Please contact Melanie Stone if you’d be interested in participating in our Mock Interview program.
3. We also encourage public interest employers to reach out to a student group and ask if they can co-sponsor a talk on a substantive issue. View a complete list of student organizations

Stanford Public Interest Law Foundation (SPILF) Auction

There is the annual auction put on each year in the beginning of March by the Stanford Public Interest Law Foundation (SPILF). It is an opportunity for anyone and everyone to donate items to help fund employment for our students in the public sector. Students, staff, others affiliated with the Law School, and local entities donate everything from weekend getaways, to wine, to memorabilia, to whatever they can think of. It shows both a commitment to public interest work, and to the Stanford community as a whole. Visiting the site will give you donation ideas from last year’s auction, a donation form, and the names of the students to contact if you have any questions.