The second-year seminar,
Problem Solving in the Public Interest, is a required three-unit seminar. The course examines public interest lawyering and the principal skills and conceptual approaches useful to public interest lawyers, in whatever setting they may practice. Utilizing a particular public interest/public policy/lawyering problem as an examplar of a public interest lawyering problem, students are asked to look very hard at the complex problem from a number of different perspectives in an attempt to identify different ways of approaching the types of problems routinely confronted by public interest lawyers and policy analysts. The seminar covers questions of how public interest problems come to be framed, how clients, lawyers and their allies think about problem-solving strategies, and the multitude of roles played at one time or another by public interest lawyers.