Candidate Statement: Keith Bradley

Name: ___Keith Bradley___________________

Class: ___2007__________________________

Phone: ___917-566-5641___________________


Email: ___kb2188@columbia.edu___________


Position(s) Desired: _VP, Practitioner Relationships


Statement of Interest (1-2 pages):
Please address the following two questions in your statement:
1. Why are you interested in serving on the ACS Board?
2. As a board member, what ideas for programming would you like to implement next year?

Keith Bradley, for Vice President-Practitioner Relationships

A strong network of progressive lawyers is one of the most important goals of the ACS. Above all, we need a healthy community in which to develop ideas of progressive law. Students need role models, and practicing lawyers need invigorating contact with progressive students. Further, progressive law will be much better for including insights from practicing lawyers. In addition, of course, a strong network supports itself by nurturing lawyers throughout their careers, as students, as clerks, and later as mentors.
I propose to dedicate myself to building the ACS network through four main activities. First, I want to expand the mentoring program. I value my ACS mentor, and I believe all members could benefit similarly. Second, I plan to work on initiating an ACS moot court. Progressive students from multiple law schools will build relationships through working on a legal problem. Third, I will develop the clerkship database. The chapter itself should have a relationship with progressive judges. Also, I believe it is important for current students to meet and know recent graduates, and clerkship advice can be a useful medium. Fourth, I hope to improve our contact with the practitioner community directly. We need to attend events sponsored by the NY lawyer chapter, and we need to attract practitioners to our events.
In all of this, I mean to include practitioners of all kinds. There are progressives at top law firms and in corporations just as in public interest jobs. As a law school chapter, keeping them involved in progressive law is part of our job.
Who I am: I am a physicist, I am a Californian, I am a New Democrat. I am ambivalent about many core progressive convictions. But I share what I think are the basic premises: that everybody should be happy, and that when people aren't it's often not their fault. Legal structures have a deep influence on the way people live, and I am in law school to try to understand how.