The combined grant money "completely made it possible" to do public interest immigration work over the summer with the group El Rescate in Los Angeles, says Monken. Recent years have seen increased attention to aiding students at Pepperdine Law interested in public interest legal work. "Over the last two years, there has been a big improvement" in public interest funding at Pepperdine, says Monken. The law school's new Dean, Kenneth Starr, "has been really helpful in making sure more money is being allotted to this," she adds. Currently, there is a growing endowment at Pepperdine Law to help repay loans of graduates who go into low-paying public interest positions. Also, the student organization Advocates for Public Interest Law (APIL) funds a few students every summer who commit to unpaid public interest positions. Another addition to this funding trend is the law school's own stipend for public interest summer work—this year, a total of $40,000, divided between 23 students. Last year, fewer students received funding from a $25,000 pool. Prior to that, for two years, there was a law school grant that was put towards a student's academic credit hours, but not given to the student directly. This year, the APIL awards totaling $27,000 went to eight students. Armin Azod, now wrapping up his first year at Pepperdine Law, received one of the full grants to work at the Los Angeles-based organization Bet Tzedek, which in Hebrew means "House of Justice." Bet Tzedek is a large service organization that works on a myriad of issues, including employment rights, housing issues, eldercare issues, and Holocaust reparations. Azod will rotate through every department, he says. He will do client intake interviews and then most likely work on housing issues. Before going to law school, Azod volunteered with Bet Tzedek, doing translation of documents in German for the Holocaust reparations project. Azod, waiting for his U.S. citizenship to come through before applying to law school (he is originally from Iran), worked as a stockbroker for Morgan Stanley and then was an accountant. After graduation, Azod would like to do public interest litigation. "That's the reason I came to law school," he says. While at Bet Tzedek this summer, "I'll help out as much as I can," says Azod. As for Monken, last summer, she worked for the immigration arm of El Rescate, which mainly handles asylum cases. She wrote trial briefs and prepared cases for low-income people seeking asylum and also helped apply for citizenship for abused women and did regular pro bono immigration work. El Rescate was founded more than 20 years ago to aid refugees who fled to the United States from the war in El Salvador. Continuing its work of providing social and legal services to immigrants, El Rescate's services now include immigration and asylum legal assistance, working on discrimination cases, facilitating legal training, and providing policy analysis. In her asylum work at El Rescate, Monken helped one of the clients who is from a part of India where there is a great deal of violence between Muslims and Hindus apply for asylum on religious grounds. Monken also helped with immigration cases of women being abused by their husbands, who are citizens. Since immigration applications for family members usually need a family sponsor, abused women are sometimes denied citizenship applications by their spouses. If the women and their advocates can prove the abuse, then the women can "self-petition" for citizenship, without their husbands' aid. Monken speaks Spanish, as do the majority of El Rescate clients she saw. The clients applying for asylum, however, were from India, Kenya, and Cameroon. She is not sure how the cases turned out, although she continued to volunteer with El Rescate through this past January. "I really enjoyed it," she says. Monken would like to do some sort of public interest work after graduation, especially in the immigrant community, in which many legal issues seen by low-income people are compounded by language differences, she says. Public interest law was, Monken says, "the driving force behind my coming to law school." Before coming to Pepperdine Law, Monken was a policy analyst for a defense think tank in Washington, DC. While there, she realized that she wanted to go to law school "to be equipped to affect problems" that she saw. This summer, Monken will work at a law firm and do pro bono work on adoption cases.

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