Then And Now: Training The Next Generation Of Litigators For Liberty

There has never been an IJ without student programs. We hosted our first clerk and held our first law student conference in the summer of 1992—the very first summer after we opened our doors, back when we had just eight employees.

This past summer, we hosted 24 law clerks (now called Dave Kennedy Fellows, in honor of our inaugural board chairman) across five offices, plus an additional 11 law students and undergraduate interns working to support five different departments. 

Our 2026 law student conference—still our flagship student event—featured a deep dive into what it takes to litigate a case up to the U.S. Supreme Court (something we’ve been doing a lot recently!) and what we look for in potential cases and clients when developing that strategy.

Educating and inspiring students is inextricably linked with who we are as a public interest organization.

Every year since our founding—practically every day—we’ve worked with students. Beyond the summer programs, we host semester law clerks in our state offices and (beginning during the pandemic) virtual law clerks who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to work with us. In addition, we regularly host student groups for tours and talks, travel to law schools for speaking engagements, and pair students and attorneys for mentorship conversations.

 Educating and inspiring students is inextricably linked with who we are as a public interest organization. It’s in our DNA. And we genuinely love to do it.

More Than A Summer Program

Our student programs may be rooted in tradition, but they aren’t static. We are constantly evaluating how we can maximize our impact on students, just as we do in the law. Over time, we’ve incorporated more practical legal skills—the skills we know often aren’t taught in law schools—with hands-on, interactive exercises, such as vetting mock cases and designing litigation strategies for them. 

But not all of the changes have been incremental. In 2019, we created a second student conference series, our Legal Intensives. Intensives are designed to meet students where they are: on law school campuses around the country during their regular school term. We’ve been to places like UCLA, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. Intensives are high-energy, one-day introductions to students who are less familiar with IJ or who might not be able to travel to our Arlington, Virginia, headquarters over the summer.

And in 2022, we formalized our longtime undergraduate litigation internship as a paid Hellman Fellowship (sponsored by Arthur D. Hellman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law). It now regularly attracts more than 400 applications for just two spots each summer. 

From Students To Colleagues

For the lawyers at IJ, helping students navigate their early legal careers isn’t just a job responsibility; it’s personal. Half of our current lawyers started out as IJ law clerks or conference attendees themselves. Some always dreamed of working at IJ and joined us at their first possible opportunity. Others saw a clerkship or conference as a chance to check us out—and then returned to IJ after judicial clerkships or a few years in private practice.

We’ve always considered former students when hiring new lawyers, but in recent years, student programs have evolved into a powerful and sophisticated recruiting tool. The process typically goes something like this: A student hears an IJ lawyer speak at his or her law school. The lawyer promotes an upcoming Law Student Conference. The student applies, is accepted, and is inspired (including by hearing from a panel of IJ clients—always a conference favorite) to want to do this work. After graduation, she applies for our litigation fellowship for new attorneys. And we know from her previous participation that she has a strong IJ foundation and would be able to hit the ground running.

Spanning the generations from 1992 until today, lawyers we first met as students have gone on to impressive and impactful careers.

Of course, we don’t have space to bring on every single promising student we meet, and we are happy to support and build relationships with students whose career goals will take them outside our four walls as well. Spanning the generations from 1992 until today, lawyers we first met as students have gone on to impressive and impactful careers in every state and in every corner of the legal profession.

A Network For Liberty

Graduates of our conferences and clerkships collectively make up our Human Action Network (HAN). And over 35 years, they’ve really added up!  More than 1,300 HAN lawyers, trained by IJ on our issues and our strategies, are poised to advance the cause using their own unique expertise.

On any given day, those lawyers are each advancing liberty in their own ways, and we stay in touch. We might call on a senior appellate practitioner at a prestigious firm to write an amicus brief; connect with a professor about presenting an emerging legal issue at an upcoming IJ event; write to an experienced lawyer at a medium-sized firm about taking on a client who has dealt with something awful but whose case isn’t quite right for impact litigation; or field an update from a lawyer representing IJ pro bono in FOIA litigation as we fight to get government records. We have had HAN members who are now judges and justices. And we delight in teaming up with lawyers trained by IJ who now work for like-minded organizations and public interest firms around the country.

Perhaps most critically, these lawyers form a powerful network of legal watchdogs, alerting us when they see a case or issue that might be a fit for IJ. In fact, HAN members and other lawyer contacts outside IJ tipped us off to nearly 20% of the cases we ended up launching in 2023 and 2024. Students who first learned about forfeiture abuse sitting in rows at a summer conference grow up to be the lawyers who call us when they see it.

Our next Legal Intensive is coming up in November. Attendees will be some of the first students to learn firsthand about our work and plans to advance the rule of law under our new pillar. And in a few years, some of them may just be our colleagues doing it.