Summer Litigation Internship 1L (2026)

Civil Rights Corps, an innovative non-profit civil rights organization, invites applications from current law students to join our Washington, DC-based team for the summer of 2026.

Civil Rights Corps (CRC) is an innovative non-profit civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 2016, CRC challenges wealth-based and race-based systems of oppression. CRC has won groundbreaking litigation challenging the rise of debtors’ prisons, abusive private probation schemes, and wealth-based pre-trial detention. CRC works closely with community partners and is committed to fundamentally transforming the criminal system. CRC’s staff is comprised of passionate and dedicated advocates with a profound commitment to social justice and fighting inequality in all its forms.

Learn more about our work at civilrightscorps.org.

Summer interns will have a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge civil rights cases in a fast-paced environment. Interns will work closely with Civil Rights Corps staff to investigate and challenge systemic injustice in the criminal legal system. Interns will participate in a wide variety of tasks depending on the organization’s needs and the intern’s interests, including, for example, drafting briefs, conducting legal research, reviewing documents, drafting letters, preparing legal memoranda, and interviewing clients and witnesses. Our ideal candidate will have an unflagging commitment to our mission, a sense of urgency about the need to disrupt a criminal system that devastates lives every day, and strong research, writing, and communication skills.

Our summer internship program offers an opportunity to work closely with attorneys, along with organized sessions dedicated to cultivating interns’ legal writing and advocacy skills and deepening their understanding of legal career paths, among other discussion topics driven in part by intern interest. In the past, we have invited judges, reporters, attorneys, activists, and others whose work intersects with ours for our lunch speaker series.

CRC is a hybrid work environment, and interns can choose to work out of our Washington, D.C. office or fully remote. This is a full-time, 40-hour per week internship.

Application Requirements

To apply, please submit the following to jobs@civilrightscorps.org, with your name and “Summer Litigation Intern 2026 1L” in the subject line:

• Cover letter
• Resume
• Law school transcript
• Writing sample
• Two references

Please submit all materials as a single merged PDF document.

Applications for Summer 2026 placement will be reviewed as they are received on a rolling basis, with priority given to applications submitted before January 2nd. We are currently only hiring 1Ls. Postings are always available here: https://civilrightscorps.org/join-our-team/.