One at a Time

11.13 am

Mid-semester evaluations for the Human Rights Clinic this week, which meant sitting down with my supervisor to talk about where we are in the project, where we want to be, and whether I'm getting what I thought I would from the whole thing. After establishing that the best time to have that meeting will be two weeks from now, when R and I are frantically writing draft after draft of the handbook, he asked how that whole social justice thing was going.

Social justice? What? I vaguely remembered mentioning something about having gone into law school with the idea of saving the world. Then came OCIP and callbacks and offers - and the truth of the matter is that when you're worrying about whether you're even going to have a job this summer, after you've been counting on said job to help pay for your semester in Europe, you start to forget that there was anything to school besides a mountain of debt and a BigLaw job at the end.

My supervisor said something that was oddly reminiscent of something I'd heard in one of those summer blockbuster disaster movies. "You can't change the world. Nothing that you or I do can change the world. But you can save one person. And for that person's family, it matters."