I agreed to try my hand as a guest on this blog because of my interest in offering a dissent. I am frustrated by how the media has framed a one-perspective, evil, legal education monolith. In my perhaps distorted dean mind, I am imagining The Death Star of Star Wars fame somehow viewed only in one dimension.
I make no promises about my ability to successfully ingratiate an alternative narrative, and I worry that blogging might humble me in the way athletics did when I was younger. But I will try this one time, see how it goes, and, with luck, I will get feedback that guides me (and the editors of this blog) as to whether I should ever blog again.
Today, I hope to tell a story that adds a second dimension, our students. This dimension might be headlined, “Law Students Provide Critical Value to Our Communities.”
Students serve our communities through our public service externships (working for judges, government agencies, prosecutors, public defenders, and non-profits), our legal clinics, and our pro bono programs. I recently calculated an estimate of the number of hours students attending my law school, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H Bowen School of Law, contributed between August 1, 2014, and July 31, 2015. The number: more than 20,000 hours. In one year. Multiply that number by 205 law schools, and you can estimate that law students provided more than 4,000,000 hours of public service last year.
According to Independent Sector, the latest estimated hourly value of volunteer time is $23.07 per hour. Surely, law students volunteering their time in legal settings cannot be worth less per hour. At $23.07 per hour, UALR Bowen’s students contributed an estimated $461,400 worth of volunteer service to Arkansas last year, and all law schools contributed an estimated $92,280,000 worth of volunteer service throughout this country.
The service our students provide has become critical to our underfunded legal system. For example, in Arkansas, judges, prosecutors and public defenders in areas near the state’s two law schools have plenty of access to research support for their work. For all the other judges, prosecutors, and public defenders, particularly those who work in rural parts of the state, support is uneven at best and non-existent most commonly. UALR Bowen recently created new practica courses in which our students will work for the underserved judges, prosecutors, and public defenders using distance technologies and under the supervision of a judicial clerk, prosecutor, or public defender here in Little Rock. This change allows us to ensure that all our students, even our night students, are able to complete our experiential learning requirement while also serving the state. How many judges, prosecutors, and public defenders are law students supporting nationally? I would be excited to know.