A pro bono life.

Long before I visited St. Mary's University Law School in San Antonio a few months back, I knew of its reputation for scrappiness. For nearly ten years, St. Mary's has been a haven for morality-based legal education. To this university, turning out attorneys is meaningless unless they have been exposed to the ideal of restorative justice and the practice of lawyering for clients the bar usually ignores. This isn't a hothouse school offering specialties in acquisition and merger law, boardroom law, or loophole law. It is--or was--one of the leading public-interest law schools in the country.

Founded in 1927 and currently serving 750 students, St. Mary's was headed, last fall, by Barbara Bader Aldave. Aldave was one of the few female law deans in America and the only one in the nine Texas law schools. After her 1989 appointment, she began to reshape an institution that had processed students as if they were slabs of cheese at Velveeta Law School hoping to make partner one day at Cheddar, Mozzarella, & Brie. She created the Center for Legal and Social Justice, a thriving enclave with five clinics and clients ranging from battered women to homeless immigrants.

All this broke with the school's conservative South Texas past, as did Aldave's decision to put in new courses in public-interest law, environment law, and alternative dispute resolution. The school also began to offer a course in capital-punishment law, with students doing pro bono work on Texas's death row--a busy place, since Texas leads the nation in state killings. Minority admissions rose. The year before Aldave's appointment, minority enrollment in the first-year class totaled 7.5 percent. By 1997, it had soared to 43 percent.

These changes did not go unnoticed. In 1997, the American Bar Association honored St. Mary's with its "Public Interest Law School of the Year" award. St. Mary's work also received awards from the Association of American Law Schools and the Clinical Legal Education Association. The Texas Observer said that St. Mary's clinical education program was "unparalleled in the state of Texas."

In a 1995 speech at Marquette University, Aldave reflected on her first five years: "While I was interviewing for the deanship, I was entirely honest about the changes I hoped to effect. The law school had been, by anyone's standards, a conservative institution. The curriculum was extremely limited, and most of the course of study was mandatory. In an area of the country in which Hispanics constitute the majority, the student body was almost exclusively white and male. A dress code and strict disciplinary rules were in effect. The place reminded me of a military camp."

In turning around a school that used to be, in the words of the San Antonio Express News, "a nuts-and-bolts training ground for corporate lawyers," Aldave made enemies. One of her harshest critics was the former dean, Ernest Raba. He charged that St. Mary's had become "a fungus of neo-Satanism and neo-humanism." Another critic was Allan Parker, founder of the Christian Coalition in San Antonio. In December, he told the National Catholic Reporter, "Barbara would be a very good dean at a liberal feminist organization.... I think Barbara ignored the practical aspects of law. Doing a corporate contract is not as much fun as suing a landlord over racial discrimination."

After years of anti-Aldave grousing, which included attacks from some trustees and faculty members who longed for the old days, the dean was finished. University president, John Moder, a Marianist priest, announced Aldave's termination last October. He cited the "stress and strain" brought on by the dean's changes. "Stress did not create a pleasant environment in which to work," he said.

In my conversations with Barbara Aldave, I found myself wondering, how did this humane, risk-taking lover of long shots--she is anti-death penalty, pro-affirmative action--last almost a decade? And in Texas?

The answer is obvious: Aldave provided a service, both to the students who enrolled and to the clients they helped in their clinics after graduation.

"No one other than a rich individual or a corporation can afford legal services," Aldave says. "In Texas, I know that more than 90 percent of the people can't afford to hire a lawyer. What we need are lawyers willing to go out and work for clients of modest means, delivering services to people who have a desperate need for them. Texas needs immigration lawyers, social security specialists, and--everywhere--domestic-relations lawyers. In San Antonio, the minimum retainer among most lawyers for a divorce case is $5,000."

Aldave's interest in promoting public-interest law at St. Mary's contrasts sharply with the indifference found at other sites of legal training. In October, in a story titled "Why Most Law Schools Are Failing Public-Interest Law," the National Jurist magazine reported the bleakness: "A survey of 168 law schools revealed that 66 percent do little to promote public-interest law, earning Ds or Fs in an evaluation of their financial and institutional support, public-interest opportunities for students, and job-placement efforts."

Months earlier, the Appleseed Foundation in Washington, D.C., had similar findings. "Despite their laudable progress, law schools still fall short on their obligation to ensure that a commitment to public service is fostered in all courses," it noted. "When they treat legal services or other clinics as `soft' courses and when they fail in `traditional' courses to consider societal problems, areas of unmet need, and the effect on disadvantaged groups, law schools send a powerful message."

Earlier this decade, surveys reported that 70 percent of America's lawyers work for 10 percent of the population. In the Oxford Dictionary of Legal Quotations, a 582-page volume brimming with the eloquence of our great legal minds, the offerings include sixty-nine quotes on power, thirty-five on taxes, twenty-one on property, ten on wills, but not a syllable on pro bono or public-interest law. The bias toward serving the rich and powerful may be one reason lawyering is among the professions with the highest career burnout for people between the ages of thirty and forty.

If change comes, it will not be from the top but from below, among law school customers, the students. "A significant proportion of students--over half, in my view--come to law school in hopes of doing reasonably well for themselves but also with a strong motivation to do good for others," says Aldave. "If the law schools just made opportunities available for students to acquire the skills they need either to serve the marginalized or work for law reform, I think the schools would have more takers than they can handle. The will is there. If a school really shows that it regards the work done for the poor as important, many students will be attracted to it."

Public-interest law is attracting a large and expanding constituency. In 1986, students at fifteen of America's 176 law schools stopped agonizing and began organizing. They formed the National Association of Public Interest Law (NAPIL) in Washington, D.C., a group that has in twelve years made it possible to use the words "conscience" and "American law" in the same sentence.

From those fifteen schools, NAPIL has burgeoned into a multi-program organization with chapters at 144 of the American Bar Association-approved law schools. In twelve years, students have raised more than $15 million through auctions, pledge drives, and other discreet hustles to fund grants for some 8,500 summer public-interest internships. NAPIL currently runs three national summer fellowship programs. For law school graduates who care more about making a contribution than making partner, NAPIL funds the Fellowships for Equal Justice. These are twenty-four-month stints that pay tuition and up to $52,000 a year.

Forty-five fellows have served since 1992. This year's fellows are working with farmworkers, juvenile detainees, Central American refugees, homeless gay and lesbian youths, Native Alaskans, Medicaid ineligibles, and battered women.

The inspirational madman at NAPIL is David Stern, executive director of the twelve-person staff. Stern has helped nudge law schools to create loan-repayment assistance programs by which graduates can do public-interest law and have their debts forgiven. In 1986, only five law schools had these programs. In 1996, fifty-one had them. In 1986, no law school had pro bono graduation requirements. In 1996, fifteen did.

Stern, a man of natural ebullience, believes that the 1,400 summer public-interest jobs that NAPIL runs are vital for students. "Those jobs are the most important experience they can have," he says. "Whether they continue doing public-interest work or go to a firm, they are much more likely to do some kind of pro bono or public-interest law because of that experience. Our Rural Legal Corps puts ninety students into programs over two summers."

Two former students of my course at Georgetown Law, "Law, Conscience, and Nonviolence," are current NAPIL fellows: Rosemary Dady, with the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation, and Sczerina Perot, with the Washington, D.C., Legal Clinic for the Homeless. I remember each as having a surplus of the talents--moral alertness, low tolerance for cant, follow-up questioning skills--that wouldn't land them editorships on the law review but would keep them committed to careers of restorative justice.

In 1995, Dady wrote a memorable essay entitled "Struggling for a Free Press in Indonesia: Activist Lawyers Defending Independent Journalists." She had secured an internship the previous summer in Jakarta with Lembaga Bantuan Hukum (LBH), the Legal Aid Institute. Coming between her first and second years at Georgetown, the experience energized her to push on.

"After finishing my first year of law school, I was pretty discouraged," she wrote. "Spending a year of my life reading endless cases in which poor people, women, and people of color were frequently defeated by parties with more power left me questioning whether the law could be an effective tool for social change."

That summer, Rosemary Dady worked with LBH Institute lawyers defending a group of anti-censorship reporters and editors who had formed the Alliance of Independent Journalists. In March 1995, three members were arrested for violating Indonesian "Hate Sowing" laws. They were tried and sentenced to terms between two and three years. Later that year, one of the three, Ahmad Taufik, the president of the alliance, received an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists for his work to promote a free press in Indonesia.

In Washington, Sczerina Perot is in the second year of a NAPIL Fellowship. She serves homeless families. "I love what I'm doing," she told me. "Sometimes I lose sleep about my clients. But during the day I have a feeling of being appreciated, and it's always there."

Dady and Perot are fortunate. Georgetown Law is one of the few schools wise enough to have a first-year public-interest program. "First-year students," Stern said, "get all wrapped up in their classes. This year, Georgetown asked its incoming students if they would like to have a public-interest mentor. Well, 105 students signed up."

I've kept copies of all the papers my students wrote--boxes of them. On hearing years later that, like Rosemary Dady and Sczerina Perot, they're using their skills to decrease pain in people's lives and to increase justice, I go back and reread their papers. I can't claim that they are better lawyers for having written about unlawschoolish topics but I will wager a billable hour that they are better people. And what does the law profession need more than that?

As for Barbara Bader Aldave, her plans include teaching in the fall at Northeastern University law school and the following semester at Boston College law school. One of the truths about progressive educators is that no matter where they are teaching, students need them.

Colman McCarthy, a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C.