The Harvard Law Record just published my open letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow regarding Harvard Law School’s failure to mainstream civic-minded career building and what Professor Cass Sunstein’s theories of choice architecture can teach us about how to turn the tide:
Harvard Law School’s stated mission is ‘to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well being of society.’ Implicit in this mission is the policy objective of increasing the number of Harvard Law School students who choose to pursue civic-minded careers serving the public interest. We, as a community, are seriously failing to meet this objective. For every Class of 2014 graduate who immediately pursued public interest work in organizations designed to contribute to “the advancement of justice and the well being of society,” five graduates pursued monied interest work with a corporation or law firm. Sunstein’s ideas about choice architecture and default options can help explain this failure.
As one would predict after reading Sunstein’s work, the setting of corporate interest careerism as the default option for Harvard Law students allows subtle deference, loss aversion and inertia biases to nudge us into corporate-minded careers: we subconsciously interpret corporate interest employment as the institutionally endorsed option; we feel that opting out of corporate interest work is a loss of a loan repayment option (high starting salaries) that we have been endowed; and the extra effort needed to opt into the special, public interest path dissuades us from doing so.
Read the full letter — Change HLS’ Default Option to Civic-Minded Career Building — here at The Harvard Law Record.