Hochkammer Scholarship Recipient Plans to Become Public Defender

Jordan Plunkett, a second-year student who received the William O. and Marcia A. Hochkammer Scholarship, once planned to litigate wrongful conviction cases, but she has instead set her sights on becoming a public defender.

That shift happened after Plunkett became familiar with the famous case of Steven Avery—which she notes has close ties to Northwestern Pritzker School of Law—and was impressed by how a public defender had exonerated him based on DNA evidence. “I was like, ‘A public defender can make so much of a difference in these cases,’” she says. “That’s ultimately how I ended up here.”

Plunkett wasn’t always focused on the legal profession. The Louisville, Kentucky, native majored in musical performance at Indiana University Bloomington, where she played the oboe. But given the hyper-competitive nature of the orchestral world, she started surveying other career possibilities. While home in Kentucky after COVID broke out, Plunkett became involved with the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which helps those arrested in political protests such as those surrounding the police killings of George Floyd and, locally to Louisville, Breonna Taylor.

When Plunkett returned to college in fall 2021, her perspective had shifted. She finished IU with a double major in music performance and arts management, along with a minor in African American Studies and a certificate in entrepreneurship, but she already knew she wanted to go to law school. “I joke about how the music—or musical theater, any type of performance—to litigation pipeline is strong,” she says.

Plunkett did an internship at the public defender’s office in Bloomington the summer she graduated, then moved back home to Louisville, where she became a court clerk for the next nine months, ending up as a bench clerk for a judge who was a former public defender. “It couldn’t have been more perfect for me,” she says. She took the LSAT in November and worked until July before preparing to move to Chicago.

During her nearly two years at Northwestern Pritzker Law, Plunkett says that Evidence and Trial Advocacy—both part of the “Introduction to Trial Advocacy” (ITA) course series—have the most impactful courses, given that they cover evidence, trial advocacy, and ethics all at once. “That is the best way to take evidence and ethics, because through trial advocacy, you’re actually applying the rules of evidence every time you do an exercise,” she says. “It’s different than sitting in an evidence classroom, and you’re hearing hypotheticals from the professor and shouting out, ‘I think that would be a hearsay objection!’”

While ITA has that classroom aspect, there’s also a four-hour block where students work a case file and battle it out with opposing counsel, Plunkett explains. “You actually get to see the procedure of, ‘This is when I would make this objection. This is how I would make this objection. And this is how this judge’—who’s an actual sitting judge because the adjunct professors that they hire are practitioners— ‘this is how convincing or not convincing they found that argument to be, and why.’”

During her 1L summer, Plunkett gained experience in the Family Defense Division of the Office of the Cook County Public Defender, which represents parents in abuse, neglect, and other cases in which the state Department of Children and Family Services takes a child from their parents.

“When they’ve been adjudicated as neglectful, at that point, they’re kind of at the mercy of the court,” she says. “They have to do all the services, like parenting classes, individual therapy—there’s a lot of different stuff that they have to check off before they can get their kids back. So it’s not criminal defense work, but it’s still meaningful work.”

This semester, in Criminal Law practicum, Plunkett is gaining class credit via another internship with the public defender, this time working in the Domestic Advocacy Unit, which handles misdemeanor domestic violence. And Plunkett will be interning at the public defender’s office in Louisville this upcoming summer.

Upon graduation, she would like to work in public defense at the state level. “I could see myself maybe five or 10 years down the road … transitioning to being a federal defender,” she says. People also have encouraged her to think about becoming a judge at some point. “Until very recently, I’ve always said, ‘I never want to be a judge. I never want to be the one making those decisions.’ But I think that changes for a lot of people after they practice for a while.”

Scholarship Benefits
Plunkett’s scholarship money helps her “sleep at night,” knowing that her debt from law school will be much more manageable. She doesn’t think she would have enrolled without the Hochkammer Scholarship, funded by Bill Hochkammer (JD ’69) and Marcia Hochkammer (BS ’67), because she erroneously had thought Northwestern would be a better destination for someone interested in corporate as opposed to public interest law.

But Plunkett realized the Law School was equally strong on both fronts when she attended admitted students’ weekend, where Professor Leonard Rabinowitz talked about what a great school Northwestern Pritzker Law is for those who want to become public defenders. “Obviously, he’s a public interest icon at the school,” she says. “Northwestern, in the classes that it offers, in the clinics and all of that, make it a really good public interest school.” However, she adds, “At first glance, I was like, ‘Hmmm. I could go into a lot of debt and go to a school that might not be perfectly tailored to my needs.’ But I found out later that it was actually perfectly tailored to my needs.”