Program helps young lawyers do public service.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Laura Sadowski never knew Jackie Romm, but their lives have certainly crossed.

Romm was a prominent local attorney who died from breast cancer a year ago, and Sadowski is a recent graduate of the University of Oregon School of Law. Like Romm, Sadowski is deeply committed to the law as a tool to improve people's lives.

And thanks to Romm, Sadowski will find it easier to put her beliefs into practice.

Sadowski is one of the first two students to get help through the law school's Loan Repayment Assistance Program, aimed at making it easier for law students with big student loan debt to afford to take lower-paying jobs doing public service law. Romm donated a little more than $200,000 to the program, allowing it to start awarding loan assistance this year.

"It was just the kind of boost I needed to not have to worry about money," said Sadowski, currently a clerk for juvenile court Judge Kip Leonard. "Unfortunately, in this field money is a legitimate concern, and now I don't have to struggle with that for the coming year. That's kind of a relief."

Sadowski, who plans to take a job helping abused and neglected children, said she considers herself somewhat fortunate to have graduated with only $60,000 in debt. That's about average for the three years it takes to earn a law degree at the UO school, but many students also have student loans left from their undergraduate programs, not to mention credit card and private loan debts.

Suzanne Chanti, Romm's friend and law partner, said it's not uncommon to have law students working as clerks at her firm who will graduate with well over $100,000 in debt. Many of them start law school with the aim of doing public interest law - working as prosecutors or public defenders or for legal aid, environmental or social justice groups or representing abused children - but find that the jobs don't pay enough to live on and also repay their loans.

"Jackie believed that if people don't go into public interest law, we will lose the balance that makes our legal system work," Chanti said. "If we don't all have access to the legal system, the legal system won't work fairly."

That's what inspired the loan assistance program, known as LRAP, which was started as a class project by a group of students who graduated in 2002. Tiffany Harris, a 2002 graduate who now works at a Portland law firm, said the idea was to ensure that the law school continues to be a source of lawyers who help the little guys.

"All of us really saw the LRAP as a way to help the law school fulfill its mission, as the only public law school in the state, to produce law grads that could be advocates for Oregonians who are underrepresented in the legal system and create public servants who are creative and talented and aren't hamstrung by their own debt load," she said.

But establishing the program was one thing; funding it was another. Harris and her fellow students made a number of presentations but hadn't come up with enough money to actually start making any awards - until they met Romm.

Most of Romm's legal work was in domestic relations, but she always had a strong interest in public service law and frequently took cases at no charge for people who needed help but couldn't afford it. Chanti said Romm was passionate about using the law to help people and believed that would only happen if everyone has access to the courts.

"She held a firm belief that the law is a positive thing, that it helps keep society aiming for the best that it can be," Chanti said. "She had the view that the law is one of the more treasured resources in our country."

Chanti said Romm was diagnosed with breast cancer in the mid-1990s. Later, when it became apparent she would lose her fight with the disease, she began looking for a way to make a lasting contribution that would further her dedication to public interest law.

"She knew she was going to die so this would be a way to kind of sow the seeds of the next generation of Jackie Romm lawyers," Chanti said.

"It's kind of the culmination of a life's work and dedication to the law and to those on the margins of society that don't have representation."

Romm's gift pushes LRAP's endowment past $300,000; the law school hopes it eventually will reach $3 million. Selected students receive loans of $4,000 a year to help with debt payments, and a portion of the loan is forgiven for each year they stay in public interest law. The loans are forgiven entirely if they stay in the field for three years.

Harris said that's a small start but hopes that Romm's gift will inspire others to add to it so that more students will be able to take part in future years.

"It means you can fight the good fight when the odds so often are stacked completely against you," she said. "At least if we can maybe get some more young blood in there to fight the good fights, then it's a start, a modest beginning."