Yesterday, the Technolawyer mailing list published these comments from a lawyer about how hard it is to make a living in public interest law:

I bristle at the suggestion that I’m not practicing public interest law because I don’t want to “give up [my] lifestyle.” I lived close to the bone as a law student (living in a roach-infested building and giving up coffee and newspapers) so that I wouldn’t have crushing debt that would force me to take a job with a big firm. My debt is completely manageable, and, anyway, my law school has a loan forgiveness program for graduates who enter public interest law. However, my salary is all I have to live on, and after taxes $30K is not enough to pay for rent on a one-bedroom unshared apartment in a clean building, food, and other basics of adult life, at least not in my part of the country.

Stop turning the dearth of public interest lawyers into a “lifestyle” argument. Someone needs to come up with a plan that makes public interest practice a viable career choice for lawyers who are living on their salaries. Maybe all the big law firms, instead of committing time for their attorneys to do pro bono, could instead deposit a percentage of their revenues into a central fund from which public interest law salaries could be bolstered. Yes, I realize that there are legal/ethical/etc. problems on the face of such a scheme, but something needs to change. Surely there are ethical implications to the fact that we are fast reaching the point where the only attorneys doing public interest law—that is, serving those who are most vulnerable—will be those who have other means of support and those whose mediocre qualifications make it impossible for them to find work in the private sphere.

This is how it goes from the public interest lawyer/law student set: whine, whine, whine. “I want to do public interest law… but my student loan debt!!” “I want to work for legal aid… but $30K a year?! Nobody could live on that!!”

The fact is that millions of Americans—and in particular those struggling in the nonprofit, starving artist, grassroots activist, and other idealist worlds—do live on $30K or substantially less. It’s almost part of the deal: the Man and the majority don’t realize how crucial and good the work you do is, therefore you accept a marginal and ascetic lifestyle in exchange for the freedom to fight daily for the things you know are good and true.

It is to none of my surprise but all of my dismay that the idealist, “public interest” side of the legal profession wrinkles its collective nose at the notion of accepting the dirty, sideline, sometimes wretched life that the rest of the fight-the-good-fight fighters do—a life of sharing apartments, going to the library to read the news, dumpster diving for food, moonlighting in shit jobs to make ends meet. I can assure you, all you whining would-be public interest lawyers, that Charles Bukowski is digusted. Bill Hicks would scream at you. The guys in your favorite indie band, who are on their 25th night in a row of touring rural Pennsylvania in an old minivan, staying with friends of friends of friends who steal their crap—well, they don’t see how you’re any less pompous, arrogant, or useless than the $2000-suit biglaw lawyers you see yourself as so much more genuine than.

Where are the public interest lawyers who, like a hundred thousand artists and activists in Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, and points between, respond to a lack of salary and federal funding by working at Starbucks to make it happen? Where are the public interest lawyers who are willing to risk homelessness rather than be “just working a corporate job for a few years to get my loans under control”? Well, they’re out there. There are more than a few, and they are all living inspirations, but there are definitely not enough. I am not one of them. After years and years of wandering this continent as a Jack Burns-ish, loosely-connected activist, scraping by on the scraps I could beg, borrow, and literally steal, I have taken a real, full-time job that will pay me individually what the median household in my state lives on.

But to those true bohemian lawyers, fighting the good fight the way it (unfortunately) has to be fought, this Bud’s for you an’ a’ that. As meaningless as quotes in the midst of a polemic argument can be, I’d like to mention how I’m always reminded of a piece of an Ani DiFranco lyric when I hear a lawyer tell me how he or she had to give up the public interest dream for financial reasons:

And you can blame it on the devil,
Yeah the one whose bed you sleep in.
Don’t tell me what they did to you,
As though you had no choice;
Tell me isn’t that your picture?
Isn’t that your voice?

Or, considering it’s Malcolm X’s birthday today, perhaps his rousing statement that “if you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary” might be stronger still.

Now, some of you might be asking: well, then how come, Mr. Usefulinfo, you have been using this blog to call attention to and support congressional bills that would create federal loan repayment programs for public interest lawyers? I support those bills because, in the context of federal spending policy, they’re better than a hundred other subsidies. Among my choices for how my government is going to spend our money, LRAPs for prosecutors, PDs, and legal aid attorneys seem almost like a good idea.

Incidentally, and for the amusement of anybody who’s made it all the way to the end of this rant, here’s one of my favorite misspelling searches in Google.