On the first day of his legal career, Mitchell Karlan found his lifelong passion for pro bono work.

“After my first year of law school I got a job working for minimum wage for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund,” said Karlan, remembering his student days at Columbia University. At the time, the law concerning the constitutionality of the death penalty was very much in flux, he says, and the NAACP put the young law student to work.