Litigating in the Public Interest: Building a Career Advocating Within the Courts

Law students often worry about identifying which substantive areas of law they are most interested in, but it’s just as important to think about the method of lawyering that you want to use to further the public interest. Join Wasserstein Fellow Adam Pulver, an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group focusing on administrative law litigation and appellate and Supreme Court work, as he discusses his career as a public interest lawyer focused on litigation in various settings, working in substantive areas ranging from police misconduct and prisoners’ rights to administrative law and consumer class actions Adam will discuss the differences litigating in various practice settings; the differences in direct representation, class action practice, and impact litigation; and the differences between trial and appellate work. He will also share the ups and downs of litigating in a hostile judicial environment, and how litigation itself can be your specialty.

Lunch provided. Please RSVP below! Open to the HLS community.

If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations, please contact HLS Accessibility Services at accessibility@law.harvard.edu two weeks in advance of the event.

Adam Pulver is an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, where he specializes in administrative law and appellate and Supreme Court litigation on behalf of consumers, workers, and civil rights plaintiffs. Prior to joining the Litigation Group in 2017, Adam worked in a variety of public interest positions. Most recently, he was a Senior Attorney at the Office of the Solicitor of Labor at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), working on a variety of litigation and non-litigation matters relating to discrimination, labor union governance, and labor-management relations. Prior to joining DOL, he spent several years as an associate at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP in New York, where he litigated cases in state and federal courts at all levels, with an emphasis on civil rights cases under section 1983 and the Fair Housing Act. Following law school, Adam served as a law clerk to the Honorable Christina A. Snyder, Honorable Stephen G. Larson, and Honorable Virginia A. Phillips, all of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 2008, where he was a James Kent Scholar and Dean’s Public Interest Law Scholar, and received the Allan Morrow Prize for Sexuality and Gender Law. Adam earned his undergraduate degree from Tufts University.