Getting Involved

The Access to Justice Institute offers students a multitude of ways to put academics into action.

• Connecting You to Public Interest Opportunities
• Partnership Projects: Social justice opportunities
• Building Social Justice: Find guidance and support
• Public Interest Log

Connecting You to Public Interest Opportunities

ATJI links you to various short-term and long-term public interest opportunities throughout the school year and summer, as well as post-graduate fellowship opportunities, social justice conference and events.

Public interest internships, volunteer opportunities and trainings are announced in the Center for Professional Development's weekly electronic newsletter and blog, and public interest events are announced in the Student Life weekly electronic newsletter.  All public interest opportunities are also posted and kept current on ATJI's Public Interest Opportunities page and posted on the ATJI office bulletin board.

Students who are interested in receiving email notices about the most current public interest opportunities can sign up for the ATJI Public Interest Opportunity Listserv by contacting James Tan, ATJI Program Assistant, at tanj@seattleu.edu.

If you are interested in pursuing any of these opportunities, directly contact the organization's point person who is listed.  If you want further information, insight, or guidance involving these opportunities, or if you want to post an opportunity that you know about, please contact James Tan at tanj@seattleu.edu.

Social Justice Partnership Projects

To enable all students to succeed in high quality, potentially transformative experiences that call for the direct application of their legal education to addressing real world social justice needs, ATJI is developing Partnership Projects. These projects involve partnerships with various national and local social justice organizations and are aimed to provide quality experiences for students. Partnership Projects, which ATJI is currently developing, involve immigrant advocacy, consumer rights, youth law, language access, child support, Indian estate planning and poverty law. Many of these Partnership Projects will be launched in the 2008-2009 academic year, so stay tuned!

Building Social Justice

ATJI provides mentoring, guidance and support to students and student organizations who want to lead efforts or initiatives to connect their law school experience with the needs of marginalized or underrepresented communities. Whether it’s giving a community legal education presentation or collaborating to organize a legal clinic, ATJI staff wants to help students enhance and build upon existing social justice work already being done by connecting them with key community partners. We encourage you to contact James Tan, ATJI Program Assistant at tanj@seattleu.edu in the early stages of your planning. We can help develop work plans, suggest panelists for social justice events and provide other guidance. Depending on the scope and purpose of any projects we help you build, they may end up becoming Partnership Projects.

Public Interest Log

We want to showcase how our law student community is making a difference in serving the marginalized or underrepresented community locally and beyond. This will help us to mobilize potential funding sources to increase social justice career opportunities for our law students. Help us do that by using the Public Interest Log. You have the opportunity to keep track of the social justice, public interest and public service work you perform on and off campus. Not only is the log a useful tool for your own record keeping, but it will also help us demonstrate the funding needs for post-graduate fellowships, summer internships, and other social justice programming. In addition, it will help us to provide accurate reporting and showcase our law school’s commitment to social justice.