The State Department Legal Adviser’s Office David B. Sullivan*
For over nine years, I have served as an attorney in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser. This office (commonly called “L,” in Department bureaucratese) is a great place to work for many reasons. The attorneys around me are not only exceptionally bright, which is not unheard-of among respected legal offices, but, more unusually for such places, they also are pleasant, interesting, and convivial. Even new attorneys receive tremendous respect. The work that crosses your desk is interesting, important, and varied.
As a few examples of the work, during a typical few weeks in my previous posting (L/WHA, responsible for Western Hemisphere Affairs) I flew to Ottawa with other agencies' attorneys to negotiate U.S.-Canada border issues; represented the United States in multilateral negotiations on law enforcement cooperation; discussed consequences of and recovery from a Caribbean nation’s potential default on sovereign debt; advised Department officials on compliance with legal and political human rights standards regarding support for Colombia and Haiti; reviewed and edited a draft defense-related treaty with Canada; opined on administrative law issues relating to U.S. funding for the Organization of American States; researched and answered questions about diplomatic immunities of a former foreign official suspected of corruption; and was asked to attend numerous internal Department meetings, some routine and some sensitive, to advise on any legal concerns.
My professional path to this spot went through Crossroads Africa, IBM, Peace Corps Swaziland, the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Yale Law School, a clerkship for the Alaska Supreme Court, White & Case, and the Treasury. A few lessons follow.
1. Life is too short for work you don't like. The English journalist George Monbiot offers excellent guidance in an essay called "Choose Life" -- from www.monbiot.com, choose “Careers Advice.” Part of his message is to do work you care about, instead of working for a large institution that you hope will be a stepping stone to other work. Since lawyers are especially susceptible to the latter course, his essay serves as a good antidote to our careerist tendencies. And, in any event, do not work at a place you despise or do work that you detest, whatever its salary, prestige, or hoped future benefits.
2. Whom you know matters. I found my last two jobs in large part through a friend from Peace Corps and the Fletcher School. The moral is that friends, colleagues, and peers can be a huge source for career assistance throughout your life. Also, you belong to numerous “mafias,” from schools and jobs. Use them. Finally, reciprocate by passing along the help that has benefited you.
3. Opportunities abound. I once had the misconception that there is one place in this country to practice public international law, and it is L. In fact, excellent international law work may be found in, for example, the Departments of Treasury, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and Commerce, and the CIA, USTR, AID, DEA, and on Capitol Hill. There are also countless international law opportunities at firms, corporations, international organizations, universities, and NGOs. Friends have enjoyed work at such places as the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Human Rights Watch, and law school clinics.
4. Not bad, for government work. Working as a government lawyer is very different from law firm life. Drawbacks include lower pay; cumbersome and frustrating bureaucracy; poorer facilities; and limited support resources. In addition, you will likely have to implement and support policies that you would not choose, were the policy choice yours.
On the other hand, advantages over law firms include quality of life, more interesting work, and the sense of working for the nation and its benefit. Another advantage, a startling and dramatic difference for young lawyers, is much more responsibility earlier in your career. One reason is that government law offices tend to be thinly staffed. Another is that law firms have incentives, created by the billable hour system, to generate unnecessary and uninteresting “busy-work” (because the more hours work takes, the more profitable it is), and to assign tasks to overqualified people (because the more highly-paid a person doing something, the more profitable it is). Government law offices lack such incentives.
To illustrate this difference, when I was working for a firm in New York, a friend at another firm griped to me that the most important judgment call she was asked to make as a first-year associate came when she was ordering 40 copies of a set of deal documents, and the copy center asked whether she wanted the copies stapled, or paper-clipped. By contrast, a few months later, in a small meeting the Treasury’s Deputy General Counsel -- the equivalent of a senior partner at a large firm – asked me, "David, do you think the Constitution lets us say this to Congress?" Of course, and fortunately for all concerned, I was not providing the final word on that question, but it seemed extraordinary, compared to my law firm experience, that he sought and listened to the thinking of somebody who was less than a year out of his clerkship, on an important and difficult legal question. Which would you rather contemplate: paper clips or the Constitution?
5. A small world. In international law, people's roles are multiple and changing. Those you know from one place will dependably reappear in others. You will likely encounter the luminaries, such as those named on the AJIL masthead, in numerous guises over time. My example concerns the late great Keith Highet. Most ASIL members can probably tell five comparable stories, but I first encountered him as a Fletcher School professor, and for years I continued to hear about him and run into him. In El Salvador for treaty negotiations, when I mentioned Fletcher, a Salvadoran foreign ministry lawyer lit up. "So you know Keith Highet?" she asked. She explained that Professor Highet had represented El Salvador in its ICJ case against Honduras, and had done excellent work. I sought, as diplomatically as possible to reconcile her praise with the fact that El Salvador basically lost that case. "If it hadn't been for him, the outcome would have been even worse," she said.
Finally, people often ask me how to get a job in L. An honest answer would include chance as much as anything else, but good luck is not needed to have an interesting and stimulating career in this field.
