What does it mean to be a “legal fellow”? Career public interest lawyers, stuck in the pre-”3 to 5 years” experience range, often gain positions as fellows. But increasingly, the term also applies to volunteer attorneys who may only stick around until the economy rebounds.

I realized I had absolutely no advice about job negotiations — I’ve never negotiated a position. Even this year, as for the first time I have been in a position of not-exactly-groveling, I find myself unable to ask my kindly employers for anything.

To be anything but awkward seemed presumptuous, sometimes. What makes me good enough to be a friend, what entitles me to something beyond a professional relationship? In Waston’s (questionable) parlance, why do I get to have my own liberation, just because I’m working with you on yours?

In this hyper-impossible job market, is there ever a reason to leave a job? Or decline a job offer? The uncomfortable reality is that to walk away from a job or job offer means to seek another – to run to another, and five cover letters in, it starts to feel like any new job will do.

South Asian-American women social justice lawyers are perched firmly on the cutting-edge, pursuing some of the most innovative litigation and advocacy on immigrants’ rights, counterterrorism abuses, and workers’ rights known to Man. How’d that happen?

In my nightmare, I got fired.
My boss confronted me: I had been getting into the office late and leaving early. It was clear that I had no passion for my job.
And if I did have passion, it was of the despairing variety. I was part of The System, but I sure as hell [...]

For public interest job-seekers, the rigid regulation of law firm hiring is bizarre, and pretty much irrelevant. But it shouldn’t be. Thanks to the lack of formal regulation or self-regulation of the public interest legal world, public interest job-seekers lack even basic details on jobs.

“You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” the title of historian and activist Howard Zinn’s memoir, has struck me as axiomatic since I first read it years ago.
I put it on a flier I designed to publicize a speech by Zinn at Northwestern University. The flier was unnecessary. It was late fall 2003, [...]

Word on the street is that major international human rights research NGOs are shifting management and financing strategies. Rather than hole up together in a New York or D.C. office – or even a Geneva or Brussels office – NGOs are hiring home-grown researchers to cover regional beats.
Will mega-”headquarters” or “secretariat” offices eventually will [...]

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. It is the day before George Washington’s birthday. It is two days after Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. It is Valentine’s Day, too.
You should be out. You should not be reading this. You should not be sitting at a computer. You should not be scrolling your way [...]