The First Year Council's inaugural, yearlong service initiative, which included light-hearted competitions to raise money for a dozen charities (including "No-Shave November," above), collected more than $5,000 by the close of the school year.

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Adam Heyman '03 recently discussed his advocacy for communities in New York and Kathmandu, and how students can use their legal training to work abroad in unexpected settings.

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Members of the University of Virginia Black Law Students Association cleaned up outside the Schoolhouse Thrift Shop in Charlottesville as part of the organization's community service week. Other events included volunteering at Crozet Elementary School and at the Piedmont CASA office and helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity..

Third-year law student Dan Hausman is applying his passion for childhood education as the University of Virginia School of Law's 11th Powell Fellow. The fellowship, which offers a $40,000 salary for a graduate working in the public interest, is allowing Hausman to work for a Chicago-based nonprofit to help developmentally challenged, low-income children get the education services they need.

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Terrica Redfield is now a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, where she represents people facing the death penalty at trial, on appeal, and in the post-conviction review process. Virginia's Loan Forgiveness Program has helped make her work possible.

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Of the more than 800 youth in juvenile correctional centers across Virginia, more than a quarter have been convicted of serious crimes, according to Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice statistics. A team of University of Virginia law students, attorneys from the McGuireWoods law firm and the legal aid program JustChildren are working together to help many of these youths demonstrate to the courts that they deserve a second chance.

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The Program in Law and Public Service offers participants a curriculum that includes faculty mentoring, guaranteed funding for summer public service jobs and access to seminars relating to public service law. Each year up to 20 first-year students and five second-year students are accepted into the program.

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Each year students are awarded fellowships to help represent the indigent, including the Skadden, Independence Foundation and Equal Justice Works fellowships in 2011. Jeree Harris '11 [above] is using her Skadden fellowship to ensure the education rights of incarcerated youth in Central Virginia.

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Former Skadden Fellow Rebecca Vallas '09 is now a staff attorney with the nonprofit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. "Early experiences teaching English to children of refugees, and working with survivors of rape and domestic violence and their children, left me energized — but also feeling strongly that a law degree was the tool I needed to really play a part in changing the underlying factors that lead to and perpetuate inequality."

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The 60 students who participated in the Alternative Spring Break program in 2012 volunteered more than 2,000 hours at sites in North Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Orleans, New York, Charlottesville, Richmond and Washington, D.C.

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Chinh Le, a 2000 graduate of the Law School, started his public service career as a Skadden Fellow. Now legal director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, Le has also served as New Jersey's civil rights director and as assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

More than 50 University of Virginia law students helped qualifying community members file their federal and state tax returns free of charge in 2011. "What's really satisfying is when we can find opportunities like the Lifetime Learning Credit, or an income tax credit or other tax incentives they may not have been taking advantage of in the past," said organizer Ben Grosz.

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It's not every day a law student gets to prosecute a felony jury trial. But Wade Gelbert '13 recently tried and won a conviction against a Culpeper, Va., man charged with possession of a firearm after being convicted of a violent felony — a crime that carries a mandatory five-year minimum sentence.

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The Migrant Farmworker Project, which is run by the Law School's Latin American Law Organization, dispatches law students to migrant farmworker camps to inform the workers about their legal rights, observe working and living conditions, and to check that the workers are being properly paid.

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano '83 received the 2010 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law. Napolitano recently traced her own career path from law school to her current position as the head of the third-largest department in the federal government.

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A record number of University of Virginia law students volunteered for more than 10,000 hours of pro bono work across the country during the 2011-12 winter break, far surpassing the Law School's previous tallies. Over the holiday, 200 law students — primarily first-years like Anne Reser, above — worked with 164 organizations and contributed a total of 10,060 hours.

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The Law School and the Public Interest Law Association distributed more than $483,000 to 109 students working in public service positions over the summer of 2012. Thorne Maginnis, above, worked for the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Kim Keenan '87, general counsel to the NAACP, recently spoke at the University of Virginia School of Law on "Pro Bono and Professionalism: Keys to a Winning Career" as part of a conference on increasing diversity in the legal profession.

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