Law School OK's Loans For Low-Paid Students

The Law School faculty voted overwhelmingly last week to subsidize law students who take low-paying summer jobs.

According to the resolution released Friday, the Law School will offer loans of up to $2500 to 50 students next summer.

Law student activists claim that the faculty's 38-1 vote is the direct result of their pressure. "Students thought up the idea, and students brought it to the faculty," said Alexander K. Feldvebel, chairman of the student-run Public Interest Advisory Committee.

In addition to student lobbying, the pilot program stems from longstanding worries in the legal community that too many law students are going directly to high-paying corporate jobs, bypassing other less lucrative options.

"We should help [students] to understand the broad range of alternative careers that lie before them," Law School Dean James Vorenberg '49 told the faculty earlier this fall, "so that they feel they are making choices, not just following a beaten and easy track."

In May, President Bok received national attention for his annual report, which criticized the legal profession and law schools for paying too much attention to the rich. "Beyond education and research, law schools can also help to create new institutions more efficient than traditional law firms in delivering legal services to the poor and middle class," Bok wrote.

But the new program is not expected to lure many law students away from the high-paying summer jobs they can get coming from a top school. It is not certain that all 50 spots will be taken.

"If people have a choice of taking a $7000 job or taking a loan of $2500, you are not going to be able to compete," said Richard M. Brunell, a student member of the Financial Aid Committee, which proposed the experimental program at Wednesday's Law Faculty meeting.

To make the option more desirable, the faculty added two amendments during debate. By a 33-2 vote, it decided to forgive the loans over three years after graduation if the student takes a permanent low-paying job.

Any One

In addition, the faculty voted 27-16 to loan money for any low-paying summer job, not just public sector employment.

The first amendment, the so-called "forgiveness provision," was a subject of intense interest among the student sponsors of the resolution. When the matter was originally brought up by the Law School Council last spring, the program was envisioned as handing out grants.

Vorenberg "really did not go for that," Feldvebel said yesterday, and the program was revised as a system of loans with the forgiveness option. But this fall, the Financial Aid Committee chose to take no stand on the forgiveness provision, neither endorsing nor objecting to it.

Feldvebel, Kent R. Markus, chairman of the Law School Council, and Chai R. Feldblum, president of Student Funded Fellowships, wrote letters to the faculty urging the forgiveness provision, and members of the Alliance for Better Legal Education, another law student group, organized direct lobbying of professors.

Apparently their efforts were successful because Vorenberg endorsed the amendment at the outset of the meeting, and it was passed with little debate.

Similar programs have been instituted on a smaller scale--at the Business School two years ago and at Stanford Law School last year.

Even with the forgiveness provision, though, the program is more of a symbolic gesture than competition for existing job options.

"There are real market forces for students not to do this," Markus said yesterday. He added, however, that "there is a kind of professional moral obligation to do some public interest work, at least for a summer."

"It's basically a fall-back for students who do not get work-study [government loans] or student-funded fellowships," said Feldvebel. Last year over 60 students applied for the 22 student-funded grants, Markus added. Ap- proximately 50 students get work-study each summer.

In theory, the new program is a significant statement by the faculty that it disapproves of the preponderance of corporate position.

"One of our concerns is that there are an awful lot of interesting jobs...with organizations that cannot pay that wage." Secretary to the Law School Faculty Stephen M. Bernardi '52 said last week.

At least one observer cheered the formal statement of this concern.

"I think it is a terrific development. It is a step in the right direction," said Steven Brill, editor of "The American Lawyer," who has written extensively on the subject of law schools" financial aid.

The lone dissenter both in the Financial Aid Committee and in the faculty meeting was Steven Shavell, professor of Law and Economics. "Any money used to support students over the summer would not be available to them during the school year," he said yesterday. "The fact that there was a trade-off was virtually never mentioned.