Leitner Internship Report

I applied to the position in January after finding the advertisement for the internship through PSLawnet, although I also looked it up on the ACLU website. A team of attorneys representing the National Security Team and the First Amendment Working Project interviewed me over the phone and called within days to tell me I got the internship. I decided to start after Memorial Day so I could visit my family in Beirut after finals (a venture that was temporarily delayed because Hizbollah shut down the airport in protest of the political standstill). I had been particularly drawn to the ACLU internship not only because the ACLU is currently handling some of the most important national security cases today, but also because it presented the unique opportunity to simultaneously work on first amendment and human rights issues. Lastly, I wanted to make sure I would get substantive legal experience, particularly practice in legal research and writing.

The ACLU is one of the oldest civil rights litigation organizations in the US and has represented some of the most controversial clients in our history, particularly in the name of First Amendment rights – for example, the Klu Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. Funnily, however, the ACLU was late to take on national security issues after 9/11, in part out of fear of losing member support.¹ The ACLU has made up for this delay by taking on some of the toughest national security issues: currently the team is involved with the Holy Land Foundation trial, a criminal trial brought by the federal government against the largest Muslim charity foundation in the US, in which the government named 302 unindicted co-conspirators; they also represent a number of US organizations in an exclusion case, in which the ACLU is arguing that the government has violated the organizations’ first amendment rights to associate with Mulsim scholars whom the government has blacklisted. The ACLU National Security Project is also fighting attempts by Congress to broaden national security surveillance to a degree that threatens the fourth amendment rights of US citizens living within the US. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the First Amendment and Human Rights projects have significant overlap with the national security issues – for example, the First Amendment is working to challenge the government’s misuse of phone records to locate the position of citizens; and the Human Rights group is currently working on a report analyzing the government targeting of Muslim charities as material supporters of terrorism.²

As a civil rights litigation organization aimed at effecting change on a large scale, the ACLU is usually involved in cases that present either a constitutional question or an issue affecting an entire class so as to maximize its effect. Thus, client contact is rare for the attorneys – as an intern, I never met a client. Often the ACLU is the petitioner – for example, I drafted a complaint on behalf of the ACLU alleging that the government had failed to provide documents as required by FOIA. This was a fascinating experience for me as it allowed me the opportunity to learn how to draft a legal document that was later brought in court. Furthermore, the substance of the complaint – arguing serious allegations that the US government had been illegally acquiring information from cell phone companies in order to track the location of various mobile phone carriers without a warrant – resulted in widespread media coverage, an extra perk of the work.

The National ACLU is a large organization with an attorney staff of over 100. It houses a number of different projects including Immigrant Rights, LGBT, Women’s Rights, Prisoner’s Rights, and Racial Justice, to name a few. As such, the ACLU hires a large number of legal interns for the summer. Because of space constraints, all of the legal interns sit in one large room on a floor separate from most of the attorneys in what was affectionately called the Legal Intern Sweatshop. We each had to bring in our own computers and worked at long tables with each other. Communication with my attorneys was mostly through email with occasional face-to-face meetings with the intern coordinator for our team who gave us the assignments. Over the course of the summer, I worked on two human rights projects, three national security projects and two first amendment projects. Each project required some type of follow-up and usually overlapped with previous projects, keeping me very busy. Often my projects had important deadlines, either because the team needed to file quickly or because the attorneys wanted to decide whether or not to take on a project and needed to respond to potential clients. The challenge was that more often than not my assignments required me to research substantive and undecided constitutional questions. The result was occasional late nights and very long memos, frequently totaling over 25 single-spaced pages – quite a feat for a 1L law student whose longest memo previously was a 10-page double-spaced memo for Legal Writing!

The substance of my work was unfailingly challenging and fulfilling. One of my first projects was drafting a complaint (as mentioned above). Certainly one of my most challenging questions involved whether or not a foreign citizen living abroad (in another foreign country, of which he was not a citizen) could bring a suit in the US alleging a violation of his constitutional rights after the government shut down a website he had purchased in California for national security issues. Needless to say, the question opened up a number of questions, requiring me to research intellectual property rights, Fifth Amendment rights with regards to non-citizens, First Amendment rights for non-citizens, and national security concerns. Another memo asked me to decide whether there were any Fourth Amendment limitations on what the government can do with information it has legally acquired pursuant to the new FISA bill. These assignments pushed my legal skills to the max! – I was often in the office until late at night researching the various issues. Perhaps my favorite assignment was of a less legal nature – I produced a 40-page report detailing the government’s closure and seizure of assets of eight Muslim charities since 9/11, all carried out under the authority of executive order. The project required a good amount of legal research but also a significant amount of news and internet searches, and allowed me to weave together a narrative for each charity and the devastating effects of the closures.

The ACLU internship was exactly the summer experience I set out to have: although I often felt overwhelmed, I also felt challenged to capacity, proud of the work I was doing, utterly fascinated by the subject matter and happy to put in the hours. I learned both procedurally and substantively: for example, I had to learn a valuable lesson through a big mistake. I was given an assignment somewhat vaguely and told there would be follow up to clarify. After a few days, I was given a separate assignment that took precedence so put the first one aside. The week before I was leaving, the first assignment suddenly became urgent. I didn’t hear anything further about what it was supposed to cover so I carried on without following up. I spent a week staying late to meet the deadline and wrote a 10-page paper on what turned out to be the wrong topic. When I was called back up to fix it, the attorneys acknowledged that I had rightfully answered the wrong question! – they clarified the question and I got back to work, writing a 20-page memo. The experience, while discouraging, emphasized to me the importance of narrowly constructing the issue, and of asking questions when unsure about something, even at the risk of bothering the attorney.

I feel immensely lucky to have worked with the ACLU’s National Legal Department. My one regret is that I didn’t get to spend more time with the attorneys. In terms of a legal experience, it was perfect for me as what I wanted was substantive legal experience. I truly feel like I was able to contribute to important civil rights advocacy as well as learn about the issues and legal procedures used in civil rights litigation.