The Department Of Justice Is Looking For Unpaid Labor And Has Been For Some Time

Don't take the unpaid Special Assistant U.S. Attorney job, unless you are rich, of course.

U.S. Department of Justice (Photo by David Lat)

This issue pops up from time to time, but it’s been a while since we’ve addressed it and some of you are new. Yes, the Department of Justice is hiring “Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys.” Yes, these jobs are unpaid. Yes, the federal government wants you to work for it for free, as if its an indigent criminal in desperate need of basic process.

This isn’t new. We first noticed it in 2011, when lawyers were especially offended because of the weak legal hiring market. It pops up here and there because the very concept of the government or a judge not paying for legal work is rightly offensive.

But it’s also worth noting that the DOJ is asking people to work for free, to do some of the very worst available in a federal prosecutor’s office. From Popehat:

It’s a terrible job, and I like knowing that the kind of wealthy, connected little dauphins who can afford to work for free are treated to the most basement-law level work possible. The only problem is that, inexorably, the people who can afford to work like this will be the people who are thought to have “paid their dues” for better, lucrative opportunities outside of government, while people who had to work for a living miss this opportunity to get into the club.

Luckily for the Justice Department, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t putting her foot up their ass. She’s busy shaming Congress for not paying their interns. Justice better hope she doesn’t have time for them.

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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