Public Service Deserves More

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I was outraged to read in The Crimson that Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark is worried about providing too many litigation services to the poor. The last I heard, low-income Americans were hardly in danger of being over represented in court.

Certainly, we need not worry about too many Harvard graduates glutting the ranks of legal services lawyers. Clark's recent decision to close the Law School's public interest career counseling office forces those seeking nontraditional legal careers to conduct a far-flung, decentralized search for advice.

Clark's purely economic analysis of the disincentives for taking public interest jobs fails to recognize that finding a public interest job opportunity has never been as simple as dropping a resume in a firm's box at the placement office. While the newly established mentor program referred to by Clark will assist those who have come to the law school with a specific interest in legal services, those of us interested in government nonprofit agencies and private public-interest firms no longer have a centralized source of information.

Because students have limited time to pursue job leads, on-campus recruitment becomes the course of least resistance. By eliminating public-interest counseling, Dean Clark guarantees that fewer students will seek out public interest employment.

I came to law school because I viewed the law as a tool I could use to make a measurable difference in the everyday lives of individual people. Contrary to Clark's characterization of student philosophy, I am here to learn how to assess problems and to implement their solutions. Clark may be correct that an "indiscriminate supply of legal services" will not meet all the needs of this nation's poor, just as a steady flow of aid did not end famine in Africa.

But does Clark suggest we stop sending doctors or Peace Corps volunteers to under-developed nations just because we can never do enough to solve all the problems? Would he have us deny legal representation to a battered woman or welfare recipient simply because we are busy working on another, better way to solve the problems of all of the society's disenfranchised?

If Dean Clark has come up with another approach to solve the problems of the disadvantaged and under represented people of this country, we'd all love to hear it. But in the mean time, what purpose has he served by denying us counseling to seek jobs that enable us to make our own contributions to alleviating inequity and injustice? Marilynn Sager   Harvard Law School, Class of 1992