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Alumni

In the Public Interest

It’s been four years since Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city of New Orleans, but residents there are still coping with its aftermath — and Georgetown Law students continue to provide plenty of pro bono legal assistance in the region. In March, 27 students headed south during spring break to volunteer their time at the New Orleans City Attorney’s Office; at Orleans Public Defenders, an independent legal office representing indigent defendants in Orleans Parish; and at the Capital Appeals Project, a nonprofit organization representing indigent defendants sentenced to death in Louisiana.

“I’m not one to sit on a beach over spring break when I could be doing something more useful,” said Kym Hunter (L’10); who co-chairs Georgetown Outreach, the Law Center’s student-run community service organization. The New Orleans effort was a joint initiative of Georgetown Outreach and the school’s Global Race and Identity Project. Hunter had originally planned to merely organize the trip, along with fellow students Monique Luse (L’10), Abby Fee (L’10), Yaamini Rao (L’10) and Elizabeth Jones (L’09). However, the more she became involved in the planning, the more she wanted to go. “There is a lot of talk in the environmental community about putting a ‘human face’ on climate change,” Hunter explained. “I believe that being down there and seeing some of the damage, both human and physical, will help me be more aware of this real human side of the devastating consequences of climate change as I work in climate change law and policy in the years to come.”

Georgetown Law students have been traveling to the Gulf Coast to provide pro bono relief services since 2005 — but never on this large a scale, said Fee, who helped plan a similar trip for eight students in 2008. “We knew there was enough interest to make the trip much larger and have more of an impact,” she said.

And in this, the students seemed to have succeeded. An online article published in March on the City of New Orleans Web site described city officials’ appreciation and gratitude for the 11 Georgetown Law students who worked in the housing law, federal litigation and appeals departments there. Hunter and Fee both worked in the city attorney’s housing law unit. “Our goal was to use the practical skills that we were gaining in law school to provide legal services to a community that continues to be in need even years after Katrina and Rita,” Fee said.

Foundations for the Future

Other Georgetown Law students helped to improve the environment in a more immediate way: Eleven Law Center students, members of Georgetown Law’s Habitat for Humanity group, lent their hammering skills to a low-income community in Chatham County, North Carolina. Another group of 16 students and staff members went to Panama, wielding pickaxes and shovels to dig and pour a foundation for the future home of an indigenous family. They also raised $1000 for the local Panama Habitat for Humanity affiliate.