No, You Don’t Need to Specialize: How to Reframe what it Means to be a Public Interest Lawyer and How to Build the Skills to Make Meaningful Change

Law school is full of conventional wisdom—including that as a 1L you need to pick an area of the law in which to specialize and that appellate litigation is the pinnacle of the profession. Join OPIA for a conversation with Wasserstein Fellow Bradley Girard, Senior Counsel at Democracy Forward, on why you should ignore that conventional wisdom. Bradley is a public-interest appellate generalist who has litigated cases involving the First Amendment, Title VII, habeas corpus, police violence, bankruptcy, and much more. As a first-generation law student, Bradley didn’t know what to focus on—he didn’t even know what lawyers actually did. Bradley will share how he figured out that impact and appellate work was his path, and will offer you advice on getting there if that’s what you want. But he will also talk about how conventional wisdom obscures that different approaches to the law and career paths are just as important.

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.

Bradley Girard is Senior Counsel at Democracy Forward. Throughout his career in civil impact litigation, Bradley has focused on issues of constitutional law, civil rights, employment discrimination, qualified immunity, and consumer protection, among others. He practices mostly in the federal courts of appeals and Supreme Court.

After graduating from Georgetown Law in 2014, Bradley clerked for the Honorable Neal E. Kravitz on the D.C. Superior Court and on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey. Bradley also served for two years as the clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, where he taught students public-interest impact litigation in the federal courts of appeals and the U.S Supreme Court and earned an LLM in advocacy. Bradley was a constitutional litigation fellow at Americans United, where he later returned as Litigation Counsel, litigating cutting-edge First Amendment cases across the country. During law school, Bradley interned at Gupta Wessler, Public Justice, Mehri & Skalet, and in the civil-rights division of the Institute for Public Representation. He also interned on the D.C. district court, in the chambers of the Honorable Gladys Kessler.

Bradley serves regularly as lead counsel in courts of appeals across the country and the Supreme Court. His writing has appeared in a variety of legal publications, including the Georgetown Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, Law360, and SCOTUS blog. He enjoys arguing for hyphenation of phrasal adjectives and against two spaces after a period. Bradley’s non-law interests include woodworking, collecting vinyl (and DJing), crossword puzzles, the cosmos, and jumping off things into water.