The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program was endowed to honor Arthur Liman, Yale Law School Class of 1957, who personified the ideal of commitment to the public interest. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he demonstrated how dedicated lawyers in both public and private life can serve the needs of people and causes that might otherwise go unrepresented.

Although best known as an attorney in private practice, Arthur Liman served in a wide variety of public service positions. He was chief counsel to the New York State Special Commission on Attica Prison; president of the Legal Aid Society of New York and the Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem; chair of the Legal Action Center in New York City and the New York State Capital Defender’s Office; and special counsel to the United States Senate Committee Investigating Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition.

Established in 1997 at Yale Law School to encourage young people to pursue public service and further Arthur Liman’s commitment to justice, the program has expanded to include fellows from Barnard, Brown, Harvard, Spelman, and Yale, as well as Princeton. Yale’s law school coordinates the program and holds an annual conference each spring for Liman Fellows to meet and explore the meaning and impact of public interest law. At the conclusion of the internship, each of the fellows writes a report explaining how the internship affected his or her understanding of public interest law and future academic and career plans.

At Princeton University, the Program in Law and Public Affairs is grateful for the gift of the Liman Family, particularly Emily Liman ’85, that enables Princeton undergraduate and graduate students to participate in this program. In 2007, Amelia Rawls ’07 was named a Liman Fellow; her report to the Liman Fellowship Committee describing her internship and how it has affected her future career plans follows.

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by Amelia Rawls '07

During the summer of 2007, I worked as an intern for the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at NYU Law School. CHRGJ is a research and advocacy organization that partners with NYU’s International Human Rights Clinic to provide research and legal analysis supporting various nonprofit human rights activities.

The Center’s work is divided into six project areas:
• Detainees and the “War on Terror”
• Racial profiling and national security
• Caste discrimination
• Economic, social, and cultural rights
• Extrajudicial executions
• Transitional justice

Within each of these areas, the Center works independently or with other major human rights organizations (e.g., Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) to publish current reports and research, litigate on behalf of victims of human rights abuses, and advocate for policy changes before government and international authorities. These projects often are conducted in conjunction with academic courses at the law school and/or with the ongoing research of NYU professors.

As an intern with CHRGJ, my most important assignment was to perform background research and draft memoranda relating to a field study and possible lawsuit regarding deficient water quality/access in Haiti. International human rights treaties protect a legal “right to water,” but in Haiti, as in many other developing countries, this right is routinely violated by both private and public actors. Combining my research from the Center with the surveys/data taken by NYU researchers in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, CHRGJ laid the groundwork for future litigation before U.S. courts and the International Court of Justice.

A second assignment was to help with the Center’s work on detainee abuse and extraordinary rendition by the U.S. and foreign governments. This project area received a great deal of media attention over the summer, as NYU’s International Human Rights Clinic joined a civil suit filed by the ACLU against a private company believed to have facilitated rendition and torture of detainees. One of the more exciting aspects of my summer was being asked to draft a small section of the complaint
filed in that case.

Finally, I also worked with experts from Human Rights Watch on a briefing paper about human rights violations committed by multinational corporations. The paper was being prepared with the goal of eventual submission to the United Nations. Building on previously conducted research and reports, I analyzed patterns of illegal action in scenarios ranging from gold and diamond mining in Africa, to Indonesia’s pulp and paper industry.

A particularly memorable moment of my internship was my introduction to detainee abuse litigation. Although, like many people, I had always felt a guttural outrage at the idea of torture and other illegal interrogation techniques, I had never before been able to link those practices with the name or face of an individual victim and, thus, until that moment, had maintained only an abstract and generic understanding of the problem. That understanding changed quickly, however, as my familiarity with the enormous human consequences of those practices increased, and as I learned how the experience of being “disappeared” and subsequently tortured had destroyed every aspect of one client’s life. I found that I became infinitely more committed to my assignments when I could make the connection between a policy and an individual; this realization was invaluable as it showed me that within the nonprofit sector, my talents and energies might better be suited to direct client representation than to research and publishing.

I graduated in May from Princeton University with a degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and I am thrilled to report that I will be attending Yale Law School in the fall. I expect to explore several areas of public interest law, including immigration and asylum law, and detainment work similar to that on which I worked this summer. I would like to close with my sincerest thanks to the Liman family and to the Liman Fellowship program for providing me with an amazing opportunity I will never forget.