Liman at 25 / LSO & YLS’s Clinical Program at 50: An Intergenerational Community of Public Service Lawyering

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law and more than fifty years since the inauguration of clinical education at Yale Law School with the founding of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization (LSO). Since the inception of the Liman Center, more than 160 law school graduates have held Liman Fellowships, several hundred undergraduates have held Liman Summer Fellowships, and many hundreds more students have been part of the clinics. To reflect on those decades and the future, we are convening a colloquium to bring together an intergenerational group of students, faculty, and alumni from these programs, and many others. We aim to explore what inventing these new modalities within law schools has meant for legal education and for the communities that such lawyering seeks to serve. 
 
We do so at a time when, around the world and inside universities, sharp divisions have emerged about how educational institutions participate in and respond to a host of inequalities—in and outside of legal systems. By reflecting on the history, conflicts, modes, and political economy of “public interest” lawyering within and beyond the academy, we endeavor to celebrate what we have helped to institutionalize and to think critically about our roles in these troubling times. 
 
We have much to appreciate. Yale Law School has been a proud innovator of clinical legal education, and the law school helped the Liman Center to pioneer public interest fellowship programs for our graduates. Together, these two programs have been critical sites for public interest law praxis at Yale Law School and have helped to support generations of educators and lawyers. Many of our graduates, moving in and out of the academy, government, and the public and private sectors, are leaders in their fields. We hope during this working symposium to gather together in an effort to understand what we have accomplished and to interrogate what innovative leadership in the academy has and could produce. We do so with a keen awareness that we have much to worry about, given that commitments to egalitarian participation in the body politic are challenged, and divisions are intense.