About

The Blog for the Public Good is a blog about public interest lawyering. It aims to be a resource for prospective law students thinking about becoming a public interest lawyer, current law students and young lawyers trying to chart their career path, and experienced lawyers wanting to transition into public interest law after working for a law firm or other corporate job.

Contributors

Nicole Hallett is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and is the founder and lead contributor of Blog for the Public Good. She is the author of Becoming a Public Interest Lawyer, which is a comprehensive guide for aspiring public interest lawyers. She has practiced public interest law for 15 years and has taught law students for 10 years. Before coming to the University of Chicago Law School, she taught at Yale Law School, NYU School of Law, and the University of Buffalo School of Law. She has practiced and taught immigration law, employment and labor law, and legal ethics.

In her practice, she specializes in creative lawyering through complex litigation and multi-pronged advocacy. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, The Nation, the Today Show, the Intercept, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press, among other places.

Before beginning her teaching career, she was a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at the Community Development Project of Urban Justice Center in New York City, where she represented victims of human trafficking and labor exploitation.

After graduating from Yale Law School, she clerked for the Honorable Mark R. Kravitz on the United States District Court of the District of Connecticut and the Honorable Rosemary S. Pooler of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also has a master’s degree from the University of Oxford.

For more background on Professor Hallett’s work and advocacy, please see Charlie Savage, Testing Novel Power, Trump Administration Detains Palestinian After Sentence Ends, N.Y. Times, Mar. 26, 2019; Liz, Robbins, Owner Was Target, but Restaurant Workers Are Swept Up in Immigration Raids, N.Y. Times, Nov. 11, 2016, and Sarah Maslin Nir, The Price of Nice Nails, N.Y. Times, May 7, 2015.