Refining My Ideas About Law School

I just got a sad set of songs. Anyone ever played a Youtube song and then just listened to the next song that comes up underneath the replay buttons? I was on killers and then it went to Plain White T's "Delilah" (love that song), and then Leona Lewis, and then Timbaland (apologize) and then it would offer anything new so I backtracked. I have no idea why I'm writing that right now. Now I'm hearing Bubbly by Colbie Callait. Now Rihanna's "Hate How Much I Love You."

I talked to a good lawyer. Sitting right next to me. Today I refined what kind of law I want to practice and decided I absolutely need to be bilingual in Spanish. So that's something I can work on now, and I guess I could pick up stuff about colleges and also look into what programs are offered where.

I looked up international law and while I care about international issues and the international community, my passions are with the poor. I think I want to be a public defender and I want to change policies in the justice system. The lawyer I talked to said I could possibly look into being a policy lawyer. I asked where I would work and he said, "On the hill." I don't know what sort of capacity. He thought I would get too discouraged by being a PD. He said maybe I could work to change the laws. I told him some of my ideas. He liked them and agreed with them! When he said lawyers had to work for corporations so often because they came out of law school with $90,000 debt, and PD or public interest only paid $30,000-40,000, he said it's tough. I said that's why lawyers who declare an interest in public service, who work for the public interest for at least 5 years, should have full law school loan forgiveness. I brought up to him how teachers who work in some inner city areas or who work at Indian reservations are given this incentive and they have their loans paid in full after a certain number of years of service. I said it should be the same for lawyers and he said they DO have a program where they defer interest and payments for a few years while doing this work. I told him that I wanted a law which gives FULL forgiveness of the loan after anyone completes 5 years of public service work. It is worth every penny. A $90,000 loan divided by 5 in addition to $30,000 or $40,000 should make it more competitive, to even some of the top ranking lawyers, and then frees them up to continue to practice at the lower wages, without worrying about paying rent and bills. This lawyer said it would cost the law schools and they'd probably raise tuition for other students. I said perhaps, but that they could really afford it to begin with and that it was the Bars who are monopolizing everything. I told him if drugs were taken off the list of things to prosecute and litigate and jail, etc, it would free up a massive amount of money to put towards the justice system, for violent offenses. This lawyer was telling me that it was super discouraging in criminal law clinic, because, he said, in D.C. misdemeanors don't get a jury trial and people just get railroaded. He said it's just a ritual now. And once someone is charged with one misdemeanor, it screws up their record for life.

My idea about law school forgiveness is just one idea. There are enough lawyers out there to make this work, who could support the passage of such a law. If the law schools don't pay for the loan forgiveness, or part of it, the government should.

At any rate, my practice of not using a filter and speaking my mind is to strengthen my own moral fibre before going into the justice system empowered. I don't want to find myself in a position of temptation to make deals on the side that serve my own interest, rather than the public interest.

And knowing Spanish is pretty much essential for work in the public interest field. I don't want to have to bother with a translator for everything.

I'd like to take some cases, and work on both setting precedents, actual trial experience (I want that jury) and policy work (to change the laws for the system and also to enforce existing laws or explore ways to enforce existing laws which are ignored in the "practice is different from theory" problem).