Legal Commentary

The Harvard Law School Guide to Conservative/Libertarian Public Interest Law

By Ilya Somin

In response to my recent post on conservative and libertarian public interest law, various law students and others have e-mailed me to ask whether there is a single comprehensive list of right of center public interest firms. The closest thing I know if the Harvard Law School Guide to Conservative/Libertarian Public Interest Law, available here. It may not be 100% comprehensive, and some information may be slightly dated, because the Guide was prepared in fall 2007. But it does cover all the most important right of center public interest organizations and describes the main areas they work on. It?s a good starting point for libertarian and conservative law students looking for jobs or summer clerkships in the public interest law world.

If anyone knows of a more recent version of the Harvard guide or of a similar publication put out by another institution, please let me know. I would be happy to link to it.

UPDATE: Some commenters make the obvious point that the Guide includes some conservative groups that pursue agendas that libertarians might disagree with (and vice versa). This is true, but it doesn?t undermine the utility of the guide. Very few people are likely to be sympathetic to all the agendas of the different groups listed. Likewise, there is no need to criticize the guide for omitting liberal organizations whose agendas overlap with those of libertarians in some way. These organizations are already well-known to most law students, and law school career centers usually already have information on them. By contrast, many law schools provide less access to information about organizations that are systematically libertarian or conservative.

This is not the post to discuss the broader issue of whether a libertarian-conservative alliance is desirable in this day and age. I think it is for reasons that I outline here. See also this 2006 series of posts.

UPDATE #2: I should mention a genuine weakness of the Guide, which is that it includes too many organizations that don?t actually do much in the way of public interest law and have few or no job opportunities that are appropriate for recent law school grads. For what it?s worth, the leading organizations that actually do libertarian public interest litigation as their main mission are the Institute for Justice, the Center for Individual Rights, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the Washington Legal Foundation, all listed and largely accurately described in the Guide, but not always given as much relative prominence as they probably should have.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on December 12, 2009 (boomark / email).