Public Interest

Doing Good While Doing Law

So many lawyers want to help -- let's talk about how.

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Lawyers, from all walks of life, have been the true backbone of the “resistance” to President Donald Trump and the atrocities he commits in America’s name. It’s lawyers who are filing the injunctions that arrest or retard some of Donald Trump’s proposed human rights violations. It’s lawyers who are deployed to the concentration camps and try to help victims advocate for what rights they still may have. It’s lawyers who flood the airports, investigate corruption, and represent and try to elevate the claims of women who say the President of the United States sexually assaulted them. The people have not taken to the streets, the media continues to play a game of normalizing the president, but lawyers have kept their eyes on the ball.

And it’s not just public interest lawyers. Yes, lawyers who work for nonprofits like the ACLU have done a lot of the heavy lifting, but it was a Biglaw firm which defeated the Trump administration’s illegal attempt to revoke Temporary Protected Status to black and brown immigrants. Plaintiffs lawyers have exposed some of the crimes Trump has committed, and are the closest to forcing Trump to sit in a chair and speak under penalty of perjury. And individual attorneys who work at firms both big and small have donated their most valuable asset — their time — to Trump’s victims, even though “immigration law” or “family law” or “international human rights law” are not their fields of expertise.

For every lawyer who is directly involved in pushing back against the Trump administration, there is another who wants to get involved, but doesn’t quite know how. The question I get most often from lawyers I meet is… well, check that, the question I get most often is “AHHH! This is so bad and we’re all gonna die, right?” But the question I hear next is “What can I do, how can I help?”

For the rest of the summer, Above the Law is going to run a series of profiles about lawyers who have been in the fight. Hopefully these stories will help illustrate how others can join, and give people a taste of what they can expect if they devote even a small portion of their time towards being a part of the solution.

Our first interview is with Maxim Thorne. Thorne is the founder of JusticeInvestor, a crowdfunded litigation finance startup. He’s the managing director of the The Andrew Goodman Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is non-partisan and focuses on registering and activating young voters. He’s taught philanthropy at Yale University, and has been involved in the lawsuit against Tennessee’s voter suppression law.

Our email interview has been edited for space. Questions are in bold.

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How did you become involved in the Tennessee case?

In my role as the Managing Director of The Andrew Goodman Foundation, I have seen firsthand how this oppressive law directly impacts the work that AGF has been doing on the ground in Tennessee and the risks it poses to our student leaders (Ambassadors). The Foundation and our co-plaintiffs decided to sue Tennessee because it is clear that this law is a transparent and shameful attempt to restrict the right of students, people of color (POC), and marginalized Americans to vote. From our Foundation’s “boots-on-the-ground” in 25 states and Washington, D.C. vantage point we are certain that this is a Jim Crow-like, larger disenfranchisement effort underway in Tennessee and across the country.

This Tennessee law is a repeated and intensified attempt to suppress African American and youth voting in Tennessee. I first heard this from our program managers who work directly with the student Ambassadors on their college campuses and from our Tennessee coalition partners.

In Tennessee last year, our co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, the Equity Alliance (in partnership with the Black Voters Project) successfully engaged in a voter registration drive that registered over 90,000 new African American voters. As a result of this and many other efforts, Tennessee saw an unprecedented increase in youth and youth of color voting in November 2018. This record breaking turnout of young people and African Americans motivated these legislators to pass this unconstitutional law. Historically, Tennessee’s voter turnout rate and voter registration rates have been abysmal, ranked 45th and 49th in the country respectively. As a result of the efforts of the Equity Alliance, Black Voters Project, and our student Ambassadors in Tennessee, the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds went from 11.9% in 2014 to 31.1% in 2018, which is a 261.3% increase, as reported by the Census in 2019.

This new law subjects third-party voter registration groups, like The Andrew Goodman Foundation and Equity Alliance, to a whole host of restrictions. It requires compliance with pre-registration, training, and affirmation requirements, which, if not followed, result in severe criminal and civil penalties ranging from imprisonment to fines of tens of thousands of dollars. This law would impose both civil and criminal punishment on voter registration workers and organizations for things like submitting registrations that the state determines are not “complete,” which can be interpreted as forgetting to check a box for “Ms.” or “Mr.” or inaccuracies like writing “Jim” instead of “James.”

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Thinking about voter suppression specifically, what can lawyers do to help that fight? I’ve known some people who have signed up to be election monitors, you know, just answer phones and trying to help out on election day. Is there more we could be doing?

Yes, a lot of work still needs to be done. You can definitely sign up for election monitoring — Tennessee now wants to prevent anyone who does not live in the state from doing so as a means to suppress voting even further. These kinds of laws are spreading like a virus across our country.

Lawyers can find opportunities if they reach out and are willing to give their time, talent, and resources to stop voter suppression. Victims of voter suppression are hungry for help.

The three prongs of our work at The Andrew Goodman Foundation are organizing, advocacy, and litigation to raise the voting rate of young people, to increase their civic power by combating voter suppression, and to empower young leaders. Lawyers can always partner with us on at least these fronts. We also need assistance with regulatory compliance of all kinds, from IRS regulations to state charity laws.

In terms of advocacy, our goal is to empower student voices and help them advocate for the issues they care about like climate change, mass incarceration, reproductive justice, gun regulation, gender and LGBTQ+ equality, and more. The Foundation also helps with voter friendly legislation that students can use to educate their peers and elected officials and build awareness about impediments to voting. Lawyers can help students litigate and advocate for polling sites on their campuses, which is a sure fire way to increase student and youth of color voting.

We need lawyers to represent students in attempts to block unlawful residency restrictions and limits on using student IDs as voter IDs. This is done by filing for declaratory and injunctive relief as early as possible so that enough runway is secured before the next election to have these issues resolved. Illegal voter purging, particularly of African Americans and other POC is another issue that needs litigation support. These cases can be brought by students, organizations with standing in the jurisdictions, and more. There is never a shortage of clients or issues to address.

How do lawyers help with this fight given that front lines are generally far away from NYC or Chicago or K-street where a lot of these Biglaw types end up? Like, there aren’t a lot of Yale and Harvard Law School grads who want to *move* to Tennessee or Georgia or Indiana. How can they carpetbag in for extra legal muscle?

First, I want to demystify where some of the work is needed. In the South definitely, but right here in New Jersey and New York we’re dealing with myriad issues. You don’t have to travel far to make an impact. For example, Montclair State University in North Jersey is ridiculously gerrymandered — it is divided into three congressional districts, similar to how Louisiana State University is divided into four, and North Carolina A&T State University into two — in order to dilute the youth vote.

Take Bard College, a private liberal arts school located alongside the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains, 100 miles north of New York City. In this Dutchess County voting district, 68% of the eligible voters reside on campus, yet its polling site is deliberately set miles from campus on an unlit street with no sidewalk or public transportation route, which is in clear violation of New York Election Law regulating polling place accessibility. The Dutchess County election commissioners have continually imposed unlawful rules like prohibiting students who’ve changed dormitory residences from voting by machine or rejecting registrations because students used their dorms’ street addresses rather than their dorms’ names, and more. Dutchess County’s actions display a clear pattern of youth voter suppression. Since 2000, Bard students have been forced to resort to litigation or the threat of litigation three times to protect their voting rights. They could use legal support again. The list goes on and on.

BigLaw lawyers interested in fighting youth voter suppression across the country, whether you are in NYC, DC, Chicago, LA, SF, Seattle, etc. should reach out to us.

Do you think it’s better for young lawyers who want to be involved in this kind of work to go through the pro bono coordinators and support at their firms, or do you suggest a more direct approach of networking and finding clients on their own?

If you’re already in a firm, both the pro-bono coordinator route and direct networking can lead you to fulfilling engagement in social justice movement work. Firms that have pro-bono coordinators may already have strong connections, especially with the more prestigious nonprofits, and that can lead to good opportunities. Direct networking does have the potential to be more rewarding because it can be client intensive, and you’d get greater flexibility in tailoring the work to exactly what you’re seeking to do.

How much time, in a kind of billable hours way, does it take out of your day to do that kind of work? A lot of people are kind of consumed with how many hours they can “bill for free” on issues like this.

We have a team of paid and pro bono lawyers who do most of the legal research, writing and filing, and they commit varying hours, depending on the work they’re doing. The kinds of legal help that our organization needs runs the gamut from high profile cases like Tennessee’s, to assisting us with reviewing grant agreement terms, leases, IRS regulations, fundraising rules, and more.

If lawyers care about safeguarding and expanding voting rights, there are a wide range of opportunities to take advantage of, that can take very little time or can take many days, depending on how involved one wants to be. Our movement needs as much legal advice on organizational infrastructure as it does on voting rights litigation.

To put it another way, last year in Florida, we successfully sued to blocked the state from prohibiting any early voting sites on college and university campuses that would deny over 850,000 students their right to vote early . That suit may generate an award in the upper hundreds of thousands in legal fees and costs, particularly since we amended it to include a new egregious voter suppression law that was recently signed by the Governor. On the other hand, legal assistance to help us register to fundraise in California may be only a few hundred dollars in attorney time. The hours needed vary on a case by case basis.

What is your feeling on “offsets”? By that I mean, a lot of people with high salaries earned from representing corporate clients “give back” by making donations to the ACLU or some other organization. Do you find these offsets effective? Is more direct action required? If you’re a fifth-year corporate associate, with no actual litigation training, is your checkbook more valuable than your legal skills to these efforts?

I believe we each give in our own way and on a different schedule. As a nonprofit executive over the last two decades, I can say without qualification that monetary donations are our lifeblood as much as in-kind assistance such as voluntary legal work. I am forever grateful to my friends who chose a different path and at the same time take the opportunity to financially support my work and other equality and social justice causes.

Direct legal action is, of course, still required. And some of the best legal work in the social justice space can be done by corporate law firms that have the resources and talent to take on complex, long-term, and broad geographic cases. In this era of threats and attacks on our democracy, from every level of the government including the very policing of our communities, we need as many resources as we can get.

Okay, let’s assume people who have read this far are sold, how can they reach you?

They can contact me at The Andrew Goodman Foundation www.AndrewGoodman.org, @AndrewGoodmanF, @maximthorne, maxim.thorne@AndrewGoodman.org. Stacey Abrams’s organization Fair Fight Action is another great avenue. Biglaw can also reach out to organizations like ours fighting various kinds of voter suppression and offer to partner with local counsel or represent students pro hac vice throughout the year. Don’t wait until three months before the 2020 Presidential Election. We all need help now — and it’s doable from wherever you are.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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