The School of Law's goal is to prepare students not only for traditional careers in private law, but also for careers devoted to low-income clients, to advocacy for underserved populations and for other non-traditional routes. Serving students with these interests means two things: First, it means offering courses not available at most law schools, such as a specialized course in the intricacies of Welfare Law, a course in Public Health Law or a course in the structure and taxation of nonprofit organizations. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it means drawing out the public side of courses traditionally thought of as private. For example, it means infusing the first-year Property course with environmental issues and talking about the Public Trust Doctrine, or including a class on Social Security as property. In ways both obvious and subtle, Northeastern strives to prepare its students for a broad range of careers, and to assume in every class—whether Prisoners' Rights or Patent Law—that the public component is integral and needs to be addressed and examined.

Legal Skills in Social Context (LSSC)
Most law schools neither expect nor provide in-depth opportunities for their first-year students to grapple with law in a broader social context or to work on real-world social problems. In addition to the standard fare of first-year law courses, Northeastern students participate in Legal Skills in Social Context, a yearlong program that exposes students to the complex ways in which law reflects and constructs societal values and power relationships, with particular attention to law's impacts on the poor, people of color, prisoners and other disenfranchised groups.

The course is taught in small sections of 12 to 15 students, guided by faculty members, adjunct writing instructors and upper-level teaching fellows, with an emphasis on the development of teamwork in lawyering. During the second semester, each of these small groups is turned into a "law office" and is assigned to a community-based organization, which has identified a specific legal challenge that its constituency faces. To further the mission of the client organization, a law office researches the social impact of existing law, describes new legal approaches, and suggests legislative reform.