Educating First Year Law Students about Public Defense

• In Event: Data in Indigent Defense: Identity, Culture, and Education: A Focus on the Public Defender

Abstract

A critical component of increasing the pipeline to public defender careers is fostering appreciation for public defense among law school students. A handful of law schools have developed programs designed to support law students interested in pursuing public defense careers, but these programs tend to attract only those students already familiar with public defense. In contrast, I teach at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, our state's only law school, where law students often are unaware of the purpose of public defense and the opportunities to become public defenders. My suspicion is that there are many law students who never consider public defense because they do not have a clear sense of what it is and why it might be fulfilling.

This year, I developed and taught an elective course for 1L law students titled, The Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel and the Role of the Public Defender. In addition to black-letter law on the right to counsel, and the right to effective assistance of counsel, the course explored the role of the public defender through first-person accounts of public defenders, individual interviews with public defenders, court-observations, and multi-media content. To my knowledge, there is no similar course offered at other law schools.

This presentation will describe the design and content of this course and discuss the course's potential for increasing general support for public defense and for increasing the number of students who will make an informed decision about whether to pursue public defender internships and careers. Moreover, by instituting this discussion of public defense as a credit-bearing course (rather than as a extracurricular opportunity), I aim to raise the status and importance of public defense in the estimation of students often conditioned to accept the media narrative that the prosecutor rather than the public defender provides justice and protects the people. This presentation will also include a summary of reactions from the students and the feedback from our local public defender offices regarding whether this course resulted in more students--and better informed students--seeking internships and employment.

This course could be offered at other law schools, especially in states with a shortage of public defenders, and could be taught by a public defender than by a full-time faculty member.

Author

• Eve Hanan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas