Many law firms are asking their incoming first-year associates to defer their start dates (from a few months to a full year) and are offering stipends to these deferred associates to work at public interest organizations. Cato has been running a deferred associates program for the last few months and we are now extending it for as long as top-notch candidates want to ride out the economy with us.

The Cato Institute invites third-year law students and others facing firm deferrals to apply to work at our Center for Constitutional Studies. This is an opportunity to assist projects ranging from Supreme Court amicus briefs to policy papers to the Cato Supreme Court Review. Start and end dates are flexible. Interested students and graduates should email a cover letter, resume, transcript, and writing sample, along with any specific details of their deferment (timing, availability of stipend, etc.) to Jonathan Blanks at jblanks@cato.org.

Please feel free to pass the above information to your friends and colleagues. For information on Cato’s programs for non-graduating students, contact Joey Coon at jcoon@cato.org.

Use Your Law Deferment to Work for Liberty! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

 The current Attorney General, Eric Holder, left DC’s Covington and Burling to return to the Justice Department, where he held a senior post during the Clinton years.  Holder’s mission is to supposedly ”rein in the free market excesses of the last eight years.”  Bush’s people are done with their own crackdown and are now returning to DC’s big law firms to warn their client business firms about the coming crackdown by Holder’s prosecutors.  This is sorta like the GOP legislators who are now trying to lodge complaints about Obama’s spending.  Despite the rhetoric, both sides aggrandize federal power and then enrich themselves (pdf) while advising businesspeople on how to comply with myriad regulations  from the alphabet agencies.

For related Cato work, go here and here.

Prosperity in Washington is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog