1986:Cover conducting a Teach-In, courtesy of Yale Law School

Shortly before his untimely death in the summer of 1986 at the age of 42, Robert Cover, a beloved law professor, legal scholar, and social activist at Yale Law School, circulated a memorandum among his colleagues on the faculty, advocating the creation of an annual public interest retreat for law students, law teachers, and public interest practitioners that would serve four related purposes:

First, it would be an opportunity to break the isolation. Students from around the country with common concerns would get to know one another and would realize our national scope of problems and professional opportunity.

Second, students would interact with lawyers, legal academics, and other professionals who might provide both practical guidance and role models for the variety of possible public service careers.

Third, the conference would be a forum for thinking about reform or change of legal education.

Fourth, the conference would provide students with a jump-off or starting place for the formulation of programmatic politics of legal change.

In Cover's words, "careers in public service work seem more exciting and worthwhile when there is a sense of movement -- of common effort and common commitment.”

Some of Bob's friends -- Milner Ball of the University of Georgia, Avi Soifer, then at Boston University and currently Dean of the University of Hawaii School of Law, and I, joined a short while later by Danny Greenberg, then Director of Clinical Programs at Harvard Law School and currently President and Attorney-in-Chief of the New York City Legal Aid Society, and the late Henry Schwarzschild, a long-time advocate of abolition of the death penalty -- decided to honor Bob's memory by organizing an annual public interest retreat as he had advocated.

The first Cover Retreat was held at Boston University's Sargent Camp, a rustic outdoor recreation center in Peterborough, New Hampshire, during the first weekend in March of 1988.

The Retreat has become an annual event, held at Sargent Camp during the first weekend of March.

Each year, the Retreat has been coordinated by students from a different law school, providing them the opportunity to learn how to organize such an event, to plan the program, and to select and invite public interest practitioners to be speakers and mentors. Over the years, students from Yale, Boston University, Boston College, Columbia, NYU, Touro, University of Connecticut, University of Pennsylvania, Dickinson, and other schools have organized the Retreat.

Students also have chosen the themes for the Retreats, and the following examples show the range of their concerns:

• 1992 "Correcting Politics: Pursuing Public Interest in Legal Education and Practice"
• 1995 "Privilege and Power in Public Interest Advocacy"
• 1997 "Without a Net: Public Interest Practice in a Mean-Spirited Age"
• 2002 "Lawyering in Context: Exploring the Intersections of Law and Community"
• 2004 "Confronting Challenges: Making Public Interest Work"
• 2005 “How to Make the Interest Public”
• 2006 “The Faces Behind the Cases”
• 2007 “Lawyering for Social Change”
• 2008 "Snow and Tell"

March 2008 Update: This year Peterborough, New Hampshire was a snowy retreat, where 103 stduents, practitioners, and professors from 25 schools, as far away as Florida up the coast to Maine, gathered for this year's Cover Retreat.  Students from University of Connecticut Law School, under the leadership of Ben Smilowitz, organized the retreat and brought with them fourteen students and two faculty members from UConn. 

The various panels were intense and exciting.  "The Coolest Stuff Around--Law School Students Show and Tell" allowed the various schools to report on the public interest work they are conducting.  New Englad School of Law is involved in the Judicial Language Project, started in 2005.  The project examines judicial opinions that inappropriately imply that a victim of violence is in some way responsible for the harm.  Georgetown University's Street Law Clinic teaches public high school stduents the distinctions between civil and criminal law, and conduct a mock trial program.  At the University of Maine, students involved in the Maine Patent Program support economic development by helping Maine inventors and small businesses protect their intellectual property.

Professor Anthony Farley of Albany Law School facilitated discussions about critical race theory, racism, and the law. 

SALT co-president Margaret Martin Barry led a discussion "Domestic Violence: What Lawyers Can Do," which brought together a diverse group, each with different levels of understanding and experience with domestic violence. 

"Lawyering for the Poor--Legal Services and Immigration Work," hosted by Professor Stephen Wizner of Yale Law School, provided an opportunity to explore the different ways students at the other schools are working with issues of immigrants' rights. 

The Cover Retreat allows a contemplative approach to pressing issues where the informality and beauty of the setting lends to a relaxed and revitalized examination. 

The Cover Retreat has inspired the development of the annual Trina Grillo Public Interest Retreat on the West Coast, and the annual Norman Amaker Public Interest Retreat in the Midwest; all three retreats receive support and sponsorship from SALT. The three retreats offer public interest-minded law students across the country opportunities to gather with other like-minded law students and with public interest practitioners to encourage and learn from one another, and to be inspired to become the next generation of public interest lawyers in America.

Originally published by Stephen Wizner, Yale Law School SALT Equalizer (May, 2004), and expanded

Click here to go to the Cover Retreat website. 

For fuller descriptions of each Cover Retreat, go to the Equalizer portion of the website, where annual reports on each public interest retreat are published.

Camp Sargeant, March 2008

John Britton at Cover, March 2008