A Faustian Bargain? Rethinking the Role of Debt in Law Students' Career Choices.

Despite the absence of strong empirical evidence to support the relationship, legal scholars have long argued that a model of financing legal education through student debt makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most students to take seriously a career path in Government and Public Interest law (GPI), where salaries are generally lower than private, corporate practice. Drawing from a multi-wave, panel survey of law students, we take advantage of a unique tuition remission intervention that occurred at the founding of UCI Law, resulting in a natural, quasi-experiment. Using OLS regression and an instrumental variables approach, we ask whether law student debt influences the likelihood that students (1) will launch their careers in the GPI and (2) aspire to the GPI sector five years after graduation.

Status and collaboration: The case of pro bono network inequalities in corporate law.

We examine how status shapes intersectoral collaboration between large US corporate law firms and public interest legal organizations (PILOs). We draw from status theories to derive competing hypotheses about the status processes that generate organizational collaboration within this network. Supporting a status-signaling hypothesis, high-status law firms tend to collaborate with similarly high-status pro bono organizations.

New Research on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination: Effect of State Policy on Charges Filed at the EEOC.

In 2013, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) began allowing anyone who believed that they experienced sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI) discrimination to file charges of sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Very little is known about the impact of the EEOC's decision and whether it has enhanced protections for LGBT people. In this brief report, we present preliminary findings on trends and patterns in charge filing, paying particular attention to differences that emerge in charges filed in states with and without SOGI employment nondiscrimination laws.