October 25, 2000–White Plains, NY: Pace Law School will hold a regional colloquium for law faculty and public interest law practitioners October 26 and 27 to examine ways in which law schools can make more academic resources available to legal services/public interest law practitioners. Elliott Milstein, president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), and Hon. Juanita Bing Newton, Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Justice Initiatives in New York, are among the speakers at the opening event on Thursday, October 26, at 6:00 p.m.

The event is open to law faculty, public interest law practitioners, and the media. For more information, please contact Alta Levat at Pace Law School by phone at (914) 422-4128.

The Pace colloquium is one of 19 to be held at law schools across the country in 2000-01 as part of an AALS-sponsored initiative, the Equal Justice Project, calling upon law professors to work to improve universal access to the legal system. The Pace Colloquium is being organized by Pace law professor Vanessa Merton, who is the School's Associate Dean for Clinical Education. According to Dean Merton, "The Pace Colloquium will engage law faculty, law school administrators, and legal services/public interest practitioners in structured dialogue to generate a clear agenda of useful potential contributions that law school faculty and administrators could make to practitioners." Professor Merton continued, "As back-up and policy centers concerned with the needs of poor people are systematically defunded and dismantled, legal academics could assume a vital role by organizing and writing amici briefs, drafting comments and/or testifying on proposed legislation and regulations, and researching and writing traditional law review articles and books that offer theoretical analyses and empirical data relevant to current issues in poverty and access to justice law."

The Equal Justice Project is the initiative of this year's AALS President, Professor Elliott Milstein of American University's Washington College of Law. "A major goal of the AALS is the improvement of the legal profession through legal education. This Project seeks to inspire law faculty to participate–through their teaching, scholarship, and service–in the tremendous challenges of providing effective representation to the large numbers of people and communities left out of today's legal system," said Professor Milstein. The AALS is the national organization for over 160 law schools.

The Project is a response to the critical national need to provide competent lawyers for persons and communities unable to afford adequate legal. Funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute, the Colloquia Series will bring together law school faculty, students, and staff with legal services lawyers, public defenders, nonprofit and private public interest lawyers and firms, and pro bono lawyers in an effort to forge greater cooperative efforts around the critical issues of equal representation in the current legal system.

Pace Law School, and the other 18 law schools holding the Equal Justice Colloquia Series, have, or are developing programs that will be responsive to the concerns of their communities, states, or regions. "Pace Law School has a tradition of supporting equal justice initiatives through its clinical education program and through the work of its Social Justice Center, Women's Justice Center, and Center for Environmental Legal Studies, but we recognize that law schools can and should do much more in the face of a national crisis in the provision of legal services for indigent people," said the School's Dean, David Cohen.