Word: public-interest
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...billion a year themselves, and may influence another $200 billion that is spent. But there's no doubt that some of that spending contributes directly to childhood obesity - 32% of American youngsters are overweight, and 50% of the calories kids under 18 eat come from fat or added sugars. Public-interest groups and Congress have urged companies to stop targeting ads to children, and many, including McDonald's, General Mills and Kraft Foods, have taken some steps to comply, by, for example, eliminating cartoons and other kid-centric tactics in their marketing. But consumer advocates say the industry hasn...
Doug Kendall says yes - but not for the reasons you might expect. Kendall is the founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), a left-leaning legal think tank that watches Supreme Court decisions and advocates public-interest law. He points out that with the Court frequently deadlocked between more conservative voices (like Antonin Scalia and John Roberts) and more liberal ones (like Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg), the next President has the power to appoint a new Justice who will tilt the Court. Perennially debated matters, like abortion rights, could be at stake, along with new hot-button issues...
...greater good. “I think that doing research and teaching other people are ways of helping the society as a whole,” he said. Last month, the Law School announced its new Public Service Initiative, which eliminates tuition for third-year law students, beginning with the Class of 2011, who commit to spending five years in either public-interest law or the public sector...
Currently, roughly 60 to 80 students, out of a class of 550, enter the public sector upon graduating. For many, the seemingly insurmountable debt accumulated from years of tuition make low-paying public-interest jobs simply untenable. Some students who enter public interest law now are forgiven of their loans after graduating, but the loan forgiveness program hardly provides explicit encouragement for this branch of law. The new program seeks to rectify that by guaranteeing a tuition-free third year—a psychological frame shift that will hopefully make a public sector career seem more manageable in terms...
Stanford Law School Dean Larry D. Kramer said it was “unclear” whether the initiative is more generous than loan forgiveness programs, according to The New York Times. He added that traditional loan forgiveness programs might encourage those students who enter public-interest law to stay there, in contrast to Harvard’s new program, which requires only a five-year commitment...