New York City
In order to better serve an important segment of the HLS community – students concentrating on careers in the public interest – the Program on the Legal Profession has partnered with the Office of Public Interest Advising (OPIA) to sponsor a unique opportunity for HLS students working in public interest summer internships.
The Summer Theory Institute ("STI") is a summer workshop for HLS students with public interest internships in New York City. Founded in 2008 by HLS alumnae Nisha Agarwal '06 and Jocelyn Simonson '06, STI will continue with its second summer workshop in 2009. In the summer of 2009, twelve STI Fellows will meet with the facilitators one evening a week to discuss works of social and critical theory as they relate to the fellows' public interest work. At each session, the group will engage with a different set of short theoretical readings, each focused loosely around a theme that relates to the students' public interest work (e.g., economic justice, women's rights). Although the readings will be tailored to the interests of the group, some examples of the types of thinkers we might engage with include Pierre Bourdieu, F.A. Hayek, bell hooks, and Kwame Anthony Appiah.
The Summer Theory Institute involves a serious commitment on the part of the Fellows. They will be asked to attend all ten evening sessions, prepare for each group meeting ahead of time, participate in the discussions, and lead one week's discussion. In return, STI will provide them with a stipend of $500 to supplement their summer public interest funding. In addition, if any of the Fellows are interested in reflecting more formally on the relationship between theory and their summer public interest experiences, STI will help connect them to professors who would be willing to supervise larger writing projects for law school credit when they return to HLS.
The mission of STI is to infuse excitement, innovation and sustainability into the STI Fellows' first experiences practicing public interest law full-time. Working together to think through the role that social theory can play in legal practice and activism allows the Fellows to engage more meaningfully with their organizations' methods of pursuing justice on a day-to-day basis. By creating the space to discuss larger theoretical concepts outside of the work environment, STI enhances the Fellows' senses of the potential for intellectual rigor and personal fulfillment in public interest work. STI aims to create a community of future leaders who will bring their enthusiasm for pursuing social change through the law back to the HLS
community at the end of the summer.
Read a report on the Institute's inaugural offering in Summer 2008. Additional information and application information for the Summer of 2009 will be available shortly.
If you are a 1L or 2L interested in becoming a Fellow of the HLS Summer Theory Institute, please submit a statement of interest by April 3, 2009. Statements should be emailed to Jocelyn Simonson and Nisha Agarwal. In your statement of interest, please explain (1) your anticipated or desired internship plans for the summer and (2) your interest in the Summer Theory Institute.
No experience with social or critical theory is necessary to participate. Instead, we are looking for a group of Fellows who are excited about public interest work and open to thinking in innovative and sometimes critical ways about that work. While we understand that HLS students may not finalize their summer plans until after the application deadline, all Fellows will eventually be required to secure a summer internship with a public interest organization in New York City. Fellows must be located in New York City for the full ten weeks of STI. Please do not hesitate to contact Jocelyn and Nisha if you have any questions.
The 2009 HLS Summer Theory Institute will be facilitated by Nisha Agarwal and Jocelyn Simonson, the founders of STI.
Nisha Agarwal recently completed a Skadden Fellowship at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), where she is the Director of the Access to Health Care Program. At NYLPI, Nisha's work focuses on community-based advocacy to reduce racial & ethnic disparities in health care. Jocelyn Simonson is a public defender at the Bronx Defenders, Inc. Before joining the Bronx Defenders, she was a judicial clerk for Judge B.D. Parker on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.
Nisha and Jocelyn both graduated from HLS in 2006, where Nisha was Vice-President for Membership of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and Jocelyn was an Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review. Nisha and Jocelyn have been collaborating with each other since their third year of law school as they explore ways to bridge the theory-practice divide in the world of public interest law. In New York, they lead a regular "theory workshop" consisting of practitioners from a variety of fields. They are currently writing an article that discusses the inaugural summer of STI in the context of the gap between theory and practice in legal education. |
