Explain public interest lawyering and the skills that distinguish it from ordinary civil litigation.

The concept: litigation for the unrepresented interest — the public cause pleaded (the environment, the consumers' safety, the prisoners' conditions, the vulnerable groups' rights); the citizen-petition tradition of the Supreme Court's writ jurisdiction (the standing relaxed for the public-spirited petitioner — the letter-petition's judicial acceptance in the classic era); the skills that distinguish PIL lawyering: the issue-spotting (the systemic wrong, not the private grievance), the evidence-gathering on public records (the documents, the commissions' reports), the remedial imagination (the directive orders and implementation monitoring — the structural remedies), the media-and-movement interface (the litigation as one instrument among several). The ethics: the PIL lawyer as the private attorney general — zealous for the public, candid to the court always.