ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A summer program here can take a lot of credit for jumpstarting the current boom in American Indian attorneys, who now number more than 3,000.
Before 1967, when what is now called Pre-Law Summer Institute (PLSI) was started at the University of New Mexico School of Law, there were less than two dozen practicing Indian lawyers in the country, according to American Indian Law Center, Inc. (AILC).
That was the year UNM got funded for a summer program to boost Native enrollment in law schools through an intensive eight-week pre-law course created by Dean Tom Christopher and Fred Hart, later himself the dean of the law school, according to the non-profit’s Web site. This in turn led to the creation of AILC under founding director Robert L. Bennett, a Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Johnson Administration.
The program helped students get placed in law schools, and gave them financial assistance and counseling. (It no longer gives out scholarships, and recommends students approach their tribes first for assistance.)
According to the group, “some have erroneously believed that the PLSI is designed to be an admission-by-performance program for students with lower than average predictors. The Institute is as valid a preparatory program for the student with a GPA and LSAT score in the top 25 percent as it is for students in the lower quartiles.”
AILC in the mid-1970s became independent from UNM, although it is still associated with the school. The non-profit, run for the past 30 years by Philip S. (Sam) Deloria, calls itself “the oldest existing Indian-controlled and operated legal and public policy organization in the country.”
Prominent tribal attorney Cate Stetson, whose law firm is based here, said Deloria, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, has been a mentor to a whole generation of Native attorneys that have gone through the PLSI on their way to law school. According to AILC, its graduates have attended universities as prestigious as Columbia, Cornell and Stanford.
AILC said its summer course prepares Indian pre-law students “by essentially replicating the first semester of law school.” It wryly notes that the course “has been likened to boot camp by many former participants.”
It attributed the success of the course (which has a maximum of 40 students) on the fact that it be “based on sound legal education principles, and not function as a philosophical, political or cultural training ground.”
Course load consists of three law courses, such as Indian Law, and a fourth, varying subject. Students also have to participate in a “moot” trial case involving legal memoranda, briefs, and an oral argument.
AILC estimated the cost of attending its 2001 session at $2,774.
Attendance and timeliness for all classes is mandatory. Classes for this year’s Institute began June 2 and will end July 25.
The Institute’s graduates “may be found throughout federal, tribal and state governments and courts, as well as in private practice and in industry.”
AILC also says it was “the first national Indian-controlled organization to work with tribal courts,” and in 1989 it set up the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals.
Besides Mr. Deloria, AILC staff includes Toby Grossman, senior staff attorney and administrator of the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals, Heidi Nesbitt, PLSI director, and Shannon Rogers, administrative assistant.
