Although we rightly focus much of our attention in the public interest realm on civil society organizations, there is perhaps no sphere in which lawyers can do more to promote the public interest than in government service. Teaching Stanford students about the special challenges of lawyering in public policymaking is a great priority and passion.

With expertise in international and national security law, the law of war, international dispute resolution, and international criminal law, Allen Weiner focuses his scholarship on legal responses to international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. For 11 years, Weiner worked at the U.S. Department of State, where he advised government policymakers, negotiated international agreements, and represented the United States in litigation before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. He also served as legal counselor to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. Weiner co-directs the Stanford Program in International Law and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.

‘Equal Justice Under Law’ is the slogan we put over courthouse doors, but it in no sense describes what goes on behind them. Helping to reduce the gap between our principles and practices regarding access to justice should be a central priority of legal education as well as the legal profession more generally.

One of the nation’s leading scholars in the fields of legal ethics and professional responsibility, Deborah Rhode is a prolific author on the regulation and reform of the legal profession and the most frequently cited scholar in legal ethics. She is also a renowned scholar on the legal status of women and feminist jurisprudence and has served as chair of the American Bar Association Commission on Women and the Profession and director of Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. A former president of the Association of American Law Schools, Rhode is a regular columnist for The National Law Journal. She is the founding director of Stanford University’s Center on Ethics and is the director of the new Stanford Center on the Legal Profession.

The most fundamental attribute of good lawyering is the commitment to service—the dedication of one’s talents, energies, and intellect to help meet the needs and interests of others. I’m proud to teach at a school with such a venerable tradition of training lawyers committed to public service.

A nationally recognized scholar in the area of professional responsibility and the legal profession, Norman Spaulding teaches civil procedure, remedies, complex litigation, and legal ethics. His work has probed the causes of professional failure and malaise from a historical perspective. In 2004 the Association of American Law Schools presented him with its Outstanding Scholarly Paper Prize for “Constitution as Counter-Monument: Federalism, Reconstruction and the Problem of Collective Memory,” published in the Columbia Law Review. His experience before Stanford Law included environmental litigation at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and participation in the pro bono Asylum Program run by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

One of my favorite poets, Randall Jarrell, once wrote: ‘If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.’ Our job, as law professors and as lawyers ourselves, is to work with our students to make them the kind of lawyers who make their times better, to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

A productive scholar and award-winning teacher, Pamela S. Karlan is also the founding director of the law school’s extraordinarily successful Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and as assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Professor Karlan is the co-author of three leading casebooks on constitutional law and related subjects, as well as an author of more than 60 scholarly articles. She is a widely recognized commentator on legal issues. Her early experience includes serving as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States.