Why go to law school?
For activists, a legal career might help change the world.

By Lauren Gelman

A FEW MONTHS before I matriculated at Georgetown University as a law student, a good friend and recent graduate gave me some advice over a few beers at a Washington, D.C., pub.

He had graduated from Georgetown first in his class and had gone on to clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, so he arrived for his first day as an associate at a prestigious D.C. law firm feeling cocky. Then a partner assigned him the project of writing a contract for one company to license a piece of technology to another. He walked back to his office, booted up his computer, and stared at the blank screen for hours. He knew from his contracts class at Georgetown how to resolve whether a contract was valid and what to do if one party breached. But he had never actually seen a contract, much less written one.

His advice? As soon as you accept that your education won't teach you how to practice law, you'll find yourself liberated. You'll be free to pursue your interests. You'll learn how to research and, most important, how to think.

So I took as many constitutional law and criminal procedure classes as I could find. I took every class taught by my favorite professor, Silas Wasserstrom, that I could squeeze in. And I took an intellectual property class with Professor Julie Cohen, because I knew she was the best. My goal was to learn how to learn to judge the validity of a will or any other legal document, and to acquire the tools, techniques, and language to cut a wide swath through the various problems that would be thrown at me after I left law school.

And I had a fabulous time.

Effecting change

I came to the law via a circuitous route. Straight from my college years in Ithaca, N.Y., I headed to Washington, D.C., in 1995 determined to Make the World a Better Place. Specifically, I was keenly interested in helping to shape the policies that would govern the World Wide Web (as it was called at the time).

In 1995 there were roughly 12 people who were really noodling the nuances of regulating the Internet. AOL was in its adolescence, and dot-coms were just starting to boom. I was fascinated by it all. I got part-time jobs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. Public Policy Committee for the Association of Computer Machinery (USACM). In the evenings I took classes at George Washington University toward a masters in science technology and public policy.

Of the big policy questions that dominated the high-tech landscape at the time, I was most interested in those related to encryption. Policy makers were asking whether the U.S. government should continue to regulate encryption software as a munition. If treated as a munition, encryption tools couldn't be exported. So software like Eudora Mail and Netscape wouldn't have strong security built in, and people using them to send e-mail would lack privacy. Without encryption, the future for transacting business online was bleak, but more important to my mind, the prospect for private, anonymous communication protected from government searches or big-business snooping was doubtful.

My job for USACM was to be a translator between the scientists building the technology and the inside-the-beltway crowd anxious to regulate it – to bridge the "West Coast and East Coast coders," to use the language popularized by Stanford Law School professor and Center for Internet and Society executive director Larry Lessig. What I discovered was that I didn't have all of the tools I needed to fight this battle.

If Congress was going to deregulate encryption exports, that meant drafting legislation. Effective advocacy required understanding concepts like burden shifting, elements of a criminal statute, civil versus criminal penalties, and the evidentiary standard for determining intent. Armed with only a master's degree, I would never be able to advocate in that arena.

So I entered Georgetown's evening program, because it was located in D.C., where I could continue influencing Internet law by day and start learning the law at night.

Loving the law

I loved law school, though not immediately. It was a tremendous amount of work that first year, as we figured out how to read a court case in less than two hours, how to take notes that were meaningful a moment after they were penned, how to manage our time to fit in a few hours of sleep, and how to study with classmates who were as clueless as we were. But by the end of the first semester, right before the first set of exams, suddenly the trees became a forest. We could even match the story lines on TV shows like Law and Order and The Practice with actual cases we were reading (and thus we began to count hours spent watching courtroom dramas as "studying").

My classmates were some of the smartest and most interesting people I've ever met. My closest friend worked at the Food and Drug Administration as a speechwriter. She had amazing insights into administrative law, which governs what agencies can do and how they are regulated. My study group included congressional staffers, a U.S. Trade Representative negotiator, and a textile industry lobbyist; our classes were filled with doctors, musicians, journalists, and any number of nonprofit advocates for issues as diverse as animal rights, environmental preservation, and civil liberties.

The students' diversity was partly a result of attending an evening law program housed in the nation's capital. But law schools everywhere attract people from a wide array of backgrounds. In my current position at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, I've worked with law students who have Ph.D.s and those concurrently pursuing them in areas as varied as biology, neurology, and sociology. Some have already run for public office, and others anticipate a lifetime of public service. A friend from my undergraduate days, now a Stanford law student, spent six years as a software coder and a year teaching English in South America.

Even those fresh from college are eager for the opportunity to use their education to make the world better; they populate the public interest, youth, education, civil liberties, and environmental law clinics.

They get a great start at Stanford's Cyberlaw Clinic. Led by CIS director Jennifer Granick, the students represent real clients with real problems. Some are Netizens who anonymously criticized a multimillion-dollar corporation online and are now combating the company's efforts to unmask their identities in court. Others are looking for help after being threatened or sued by copyright owners who don't recognize the right to create parodies or derivatives of copyrighted works. I work with the clinic students on projects that have included testifying before the Copyright Office on Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions and advocating for federal legislation to reclaim the public domain. Students get to write briefs and meet with clients and are certified by the state so they can argue cases before the California courts.

This is the kind of work I went to law school to do: to help individuals who are being attacked by big corporations or by our frequently overzealous government. Because I care deeply about these things, I consumed law school with a hunger for the tools I would later use to effect the changes I sought. Now, as I work with the students, I hope my enthusiasm for the law will be contagious and they will go on to use their legal education to Make the World a Better Place, however they see fit.

The EFF

Since I started my path in Internet policy in 1995, a lot has changed. There are far more "cyberlawyers" now, and there is a lot more work for them to do. The battle for control of cyberspace is being waged every day in courtrooms and in Congress. It's being fought in the legal affairs, legislative, and general counsel's offices of technology companies across the world (as well as among the technologists themselves). There is no question that a law school degree is a potent tool to have if you care about the outcome.

My law school experience empowered me to do exactly the type of work I wanted to do. I spent two years as director of public policy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There, I fought against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' power grab for the domain name system, litigated to protect anonymous speech online, resisted implementation of the dreadful Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and battled expansions of wiretap laws and decreases in protections of Internet privacy. I started at the EFF when there were less than a dozen employees; now the organization has more than a dozen lawyers, and even more summer interns from law schools across the country.

At Stanford, I'm helping prepare the next generation of cyberlawyers. Even if cyberlaw doesn't excite you, learning the law is an asset in effecting change in most things. Do you think the government has gone overboard mauling civil liberties after 9/11? As an attorney, you can do something about it. You can provide legal counsel to a detained Muslim or lobby against the Ashcroft-endorsed Patriot Act II, which would drastically increase the government's ability to spy on its citizens.

There is a lot left to do. The content industry controls a massive empire of lawyers who use cease and desist letters and "strategic lawsuits" to scare Netizens into stopping legal activities. The government is expanding its ability to eavesdrop on private conversations. A few multinational corporations now own most of the movies, TV programs, and music we access, as well as the wires, stations, and newspapers we access them on. In 1995 we used to joke that if all the Internet turned out to be good for was buying stuff, we would have failed. That future is still uncertain.

The profession needs more lawyers who enter law school eager to learn and leave eager to improve the world. If you're wondering whether law school could be part of your future, I urge you to think about the unparalleled opportunity a law degree offers. You can change people's lives where you think they've been wronged and change laws to better reflect the type of world you want to live in.

There is no better way to do that than armed with a law school degree. For this alone, a legal education is worth it.

Lauren Gelman, Esq., works at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.