Public Interest Guest Blogger
Periodically throughout the year the CSO will be posting blog entries from guest bloggers about various topics. Please note that the views expressed by our guest bloggers are the personal opinion of each blogger and are not necessarily the views and opinions of the CSO. The CSO guest blogger entries are intended as an opportunity for attorneys currently practicing in the legal field to share their insight and advice with law students.
To kick off Public Interest Theme Week, our first guest blogger of the year, Jason A. Martin, Esq. (class of 2003), discusses the dilemma of public service and being able to serve the public.
Can I Afford to Serve the Public?
By Jason A. Martin, Esquire (2003)
The best public servants are those who come from the communities in which they serve and have a personal stake in the facilitation of justice, however, those potential public servants can’t afford to serve. It is difficult to give this subject the proper foundation without explaining how this dilemma came about.
Ironically, the best illustration of the dilemma comes from the medical field. In the early twentieth century the American Medical Association (AMA) felt that there were too many doctors. So they decided to make medical education so elitist and expensive, and so drawn out, that most students would be prohibited from even considering a medical career. The AMA set up requirements for four years of undergraduate education plus four years of medical school. The schools are required to have expensive laboratories and equipment, thus, by the end of World War I, the number of medical schools had been reduced from 650 to a mere 50 in number. The number of annual graduates had been reduced from 7,500 to 2,500.
The practice of law has traveled the same path as medicine. The practice of law has become an elite profession. The cost to become a lawyer has gone up astronomically over the years. Let’s add it up. To go to a decent law school, yearly tuition is about $20-30,000, not including living expenses, which could run up to $18,000 per year. The cost of books could be an additional $1,500 to $2,000 per year. At the end of the three years of law school, you must take the bar examination to become a licensed attorney. To take a bar examination preparation course will cost between $2,000 and $3,000. To take the actual exam is another $300 to $500. If you are fortunate enough to pass the exam, your money woes continue. There are bar membership fees that could run up to $350 per year and also continuing legal education to maintain your license, which can cost hundreds of dollars per year. The average cost of legal education and bar admission alone could cost someone upwards of $153,000.
Needless to say, new attorneys need to make a decent salary to offset the costs of becoming licensed. Unfortunately, the field of public interest law does not pay well at all. This has caused public interest law to become an elite field of practice. Many public servants, particularly prosecutors come from middle class to wealthy backgrounds. Many of my colleagues in the Queens County District Attorney’s Office lived in Manhattan, exclusive neighborhoods in Queens, Long Island, etc. All places where the cost of living is very high. Almost none of them lived or came from the communities that are most effected by the criminal justice system. This causes a disconnect between the public servant and the very public he/she is trying to serve.
In my experience, many defendants feel as though their attorneys, including legal aid, do not care about them, respect them, and identify with them. This often causes very tumultuous relationships between attorney and client. This occurs because many of the attorneys, in particular, public defenders, do not come from the communities that they are trying to serve. On the prosecution end, many prosecutors come from middle class to wealthy backgrounds, which greatly affect the way they perceive the people they are prosecuting. Many prosecutors operate from stereotypes, generalizations, prejudices and fear of the people they prosecute, especially “minorities”. This problem occurs because many of the people in the criminal justice system are “minorities” from poor neighborhoods, while most of the public servants are whites from middle class to wealthy neighborhoods. This is caused by the cost prohibitiveness of legal education and practice. This is a topic that is almost never talked about by those who could change this reality not only in the practice of law, but in every field of public service.