Student blogger:
Minhquan Nguyen (’14)
PILF Co-President

 

Midnight.  Still not in bed.  Alarm is set for 6 AM (argh, argh).  One month until the Silent Auction.  So why does it feel like the Silent Auction  is tomorrow and years away all at the same time?

I should never have gotten myself into this.  I thought I knew what I was doing when I signed up to be the Public Interest Law Foundation’s (PILF) president. I never would’ve thought the job entailed staying up to the wee hours of the morning worrying that a bunch of missing envelopes may be the thing that dooms us all.

The letters soliciting donors for our auction should’ve gone out two weeks ago. That’s according to the very specific timeline we wrote out a month earlier, a dreamer’s folly I just laugh at in a worrying manner now.  After all the revisions to make the letters plaintive without actually begging for donations, after inputting some hundred-odd lines of contacts into a spreadsheet for the mail merge, after sorting and folding all letters to be ready for mailing, we are being set back because we don’t have the right envelopes!

If the letters don’t go out on time, no one will know anything about our auction.  About the painstaking negotiating we had to do to reserve the venue (with its sizable security deposit—gah!  Gah!!).  About the nervous sweat I and co-prez Ali Bollbach went through asking Judge Wendy S. Lindley and Bette and Wylie Aitken, public interest superstars, to be our honorees for the evening.  About all the work the entire Silent Auction team put in to make the night fun: semi-open bar, lawyers playing jazz!

No one will know about any of that, and no one will donate anything to auction off at the event and everyone who attends will have to bid on a night on the town with me, the highlight of which will probably be watching White Collar back at my house. Obviously no one’s going to put in good money for that and then we’ll have disappointed every law student at our school hoping to do some good in the world this summer.  All those innocent, naïve kids wanting to use their legal skills to help folks—all disappointed because I failed to get the right envelopes.

Thinking of all this makes me want to do something drastic and hysterical, right now, like ordering in a coterie of carrier pigeons to deliver all the letters.  But there are downsides to that too, namely clean-up duty and bird flu and the question of whether they can bring us back checks.

If I fixate on all the stress and troubles of the present moment, I’ll probably quit, honestly.  Instead, I think of the goal: using the funds from our auction to help students help others who really, really need it.  Doing good works for their own sake, not for the money.  Proving that not all lawyers are the heartless, manipulative highway robbers people see us as; some of us really want to make the world a better place.

With that in mind, the work ahead suddenly seems doable and worthwhile. Whatever happens, we’ll be fine.  We’ll have a great night and do a great job and one way or another, some students will have the money they need to work in the public interest this summer.  Even if we never find those dang envelopes.

One in the morning—glargh!

PILF’s Silent Auction will take place at 6 PM on March 7th, 2013 at the Orange DoubleTree Hotel. The gala dinner will celebrate the work done by Chapman’s Public Interest Law Foundation and will be attended by students, alumni, professors, practicing attorneys and judges. Students may attend the dinner at a discounted rate of $20 per ticket (regularly $50). Auction items will include photos and memorabilia signed by celebrated artists and performers, parties or meals with professors, gift baskets, discounted Bar preparation courses, and more. RSVP here, or contact David Finley at (714) 628-2565 or dfinley@chapmn.edu for additional information.

About the author:
Minhquan Nguyen is a second-year law student and the current Co-President of the Public Interest Law Foundation (PILF) at Chapman University School of Law. He went to the University of California, Irvine to receive his undergraduate degree. Minhquan likes to tell people he watches Game of Thrones and Mad Men, while he actually prefers Downton Abbey and Cougar Town.

The views expressed in the student blogs are those of the author and not the law school.