The way Professor Charisa Kiyô Smith tells it, public service law isn’t a niche and it isn’t a job description. “Public service isn’t just about nonprofit jobs or courtroom advocacy,” she said in a recent interview with National Jurist. “It’s about seeing law as a tool to serve people.”
Her words land less like a definition than a directive. Asked to speak to the next generation of public interest advocates, Smith was direct: “Your understanding of what it means to lack something—power, access, opportunity—that’s not a weakness. That’s what the profession needs right now.” Then, more insistent: “Don’t wait to be invited. Now more than ever, you are meant for this.”
This ethos runs through CUNY Law and pulls people here. It’s also the reason National Jurist just named CUNY School of Law the Best Law School for Public Interest in 2025—an honor that feels less like a ranking than a confirmation. What Smith is saying, the students are already living.
Why Students Choose CUNY Law for Public Interest
For Noa Street-Sachs ’25, the path to law began inside a maximum-security prison. As an undergraduate teaching assistant, she worked with incarcerated students, an experience that, as she told National Jurist, “made me want to pursue a career in public interest, specifically advocating for people enmeshed in the criminal legal system.”
“I was really grappling with the law and working alongside lawyers … speaking to people, mostly from marginalized communities, who had experienced police harm,” she said. “That really confirmed for me that I wanted to be an advocate; I wanted to be a defense attorney.”
It was CUNY Law’s commitment to “not just learning the law but how to challenge it, how to engage with it, how to use it to help people” that ultimately brought her here.
Ranjana Venkatesh ’25 arrived after years of housing justice and anti-gentrification work. Watching lawyers provide free legal support to tenants facing eviction showed her what was possible.
“If you care about changing the world—about housing, criminal justice, immigration—ask yourself how law fits into that,” she said. “It’s not about status. It’s about what you do with it.”
She added: “I wasn’t interested in chasing prestige; I wanted to make a difference. I knew I wanted to use legal tools for the public good.”
Through the Defenders Clinic, she worked with clients seeking parole and clemency. “You’re building relationships with people impacted by systemic injustice. It’s intense, but it’s also where real connection and change happen.”
Beyond Numbers
Rankings are built on numbers: CUNY Law graduates enter public service at the highest rate in the nation. According to the most recent ABA data, more than half of our graduates are working in public interest, government, or clerkships within ten months of graduation.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. A substantive part of the equation is the training: every student takes a first-year Lawyering seminar that pushes them to ask who the law serves and who it excludes. The curriculum emphasizes client-centered practice, movement-informed advocacy, and writing that drives change. By their final year, every student is embedded in a clinic—working with clients, community organizations, and policymakers in housing, immigration, youth justice, family law, and more. These clinics are nationally recognized not just for what students learn but for what they achieve: vacaturs for survivors, parole for people serving decades inside, protections for immigrant communities and so much more that numbers could never capture.
And then there are the people leading this work. Professor Charisa Kiyô Smith, who co-directs the Family Law In-House & Practice Clinic, is reimagining family law through the lens of equity. Her scholarship is matched by her advocacy, which has shaped both policy and practice.
Smith is one of many CUNY Law faculty who see law as a tool to serve people, not power. Professor Steve Zeidman, co-director of the Defenders Clinic where Venkatesh trained, helped launch the Second Look Project to challenge extreme sentences. Professors Nermeen Arastu and Talia Peleg, co-directors of the Immigration & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic, earned national recognition this year for litigation and advocacy that protect immigrant communities while training the next generation of lawyers.
Faculty members teaching across CUNY Law’s Critical Race Theory curriculum are advancing anti-colonial pedagogy, interrogating racial capitalism, connecting CRT to anti-ableist frameworks, and showing students how the classroom links directly to radical movements and lived experience.
In the CLEAR Clinic, Professors Ramzi Kassem and Naz Ahmad, with their students and co-counsel, are leading nationally significant cases, such as Khalil v. Trump, defending free speech, academic freedom, and the right to dissent, while challenging the surveillance and criminalization of Muslim, immigrant, and activist communities.
The expertise at CUNY Law isn’t abstract—it’s lived, tested, and carried into courtrooms, legislatures, and communities every day.
What National Jurist recognized is what CUNY Law has always staked its identity on: we train lawyers who are ready: practice-ready, justice-ready, future-ready.
The nation’s #1 public interest law school is part of the City University of New York, and our graduates are everywhere the fight for justice demands.