2006 Conference on Clinical Legal Education
April 30 - May 3, 2006
New York, New York
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Poster Presentations
To view posters that have been submitted for online viewing (PDF), click the 'view poster' link next to the poster's title name.
Esther Canty-Barnes, Rutgers University, Newark
Jennifer Rosen Valverde, Rutgers University, NewarkPoster Title: With All Deliberate Speed: Strategies for Improving the Educational and Developmental Needs of Children in Foster Care
The project focuses on improving the special educational and early intervention needs of children in foster care through advocacy and comprehensive training and education of individuals who play a major role in their lives. The Special Education Clinic at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark , New Jersey , serves as a valuable resource in the community to address these needs.
Laurel Fletcher, University of California, Berkeley
Deirdre K. Mulligan, University of California, Berkeley
Jeffrey Selbin, East Bay Community Law Center, Berkeley, California
Poster Title: The AIDS Lanka Project: A Multiclinic Collaborative
The AIDS Lanka Project brought together students and faculty in three clinics – a community-based HIV/AIDS law practice and in-house clinics in human rights and law and technology – to work closely with an in-country NGO and other interested parties in Sri Lanka . The collaborative was designed as a proactive effort to address the need for affordable and accessible HIV medications in a developing country vulnerable to the AIDS pandemic. The project represents one model for interclinic collaboration in an increasingly complex domestic and global environment.
Timothy W. Floyd, Mercer University
Poster Title: Collaboration in the Georgia Capital Defender Clinic
The clinic is a collaborative in at least three ways: first, it is a joint course offered by three law schools, Georgia State University College of Law, Emory University School of Law, and Mercer University School of Law, in which students from all three schools work together; second, the clinic is a collaborative effort between the law schools and the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender, a state agency charged with the responsibility of representing capital defendants; and third, the students' work in the office is itself collaborative, in that defense teams are multidisciplinary, including lawyers, mitigation specialists, social workers, and mental health professionals. There are many institutional, logistical, and political roadblocks to effective collaboration in law school clinics, but this clinic offers lessons in ways to overcome some of the obstacles to effective collaboration and to foster the relationships necessary for collaborative work.
Faye Gertner, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Poster Title: SMLS/SECASA Joint Legal Clinic
The joint legal clinic serves victims of crime by providing them with information and assistance that enables them to access justice and compensation. The clinic teaches students at the same time as it assists victims of crime by demystifying the law and running matters that would not otherwise be handled by private solicitors.
Brian G. Gilmore, Howard University
Poster Title: “Synthetic” Discrimination in Cooperative Housing
This poster will present the high points of a research project completed by the Fair Housing Clinic involving cooperative apartments and discrimination based upon sexual orientation.
Theresa A. Hughes, St John's University
Heather Bausano, St John's University
Craig Meisel, St John's University
Tim Rauch, St John's University
Poster Title: University-Wide Collaboration -view poster-
Given the multiple legal, social and emotional issues that arise in child representation, we have tapped into many disciplines within our university in order to address the needs of our clients, including: Department of Psychology, Education and Fine Arts.
Helen M. Harnett, University of Baltimore
Poster Title: The University of Baltimore Immigrant Rights Project: A Collaborative Work-in-Progress -view poster-
The University of Baltimore School of Law's new Immigrant Rights Project is being developed as a collaborative effort. The law school's existing in-house clinics, including the Civil Advocacy Clinic, Family Law Clinic, Community Development Clinic and the Tax Law Clinic, are teaming up to create this new project with the aim of exposing law students to holistic and collaborative advocacy. Recognizing that clients do not live in boxes of legal specialization, students and faculty from the law school's multiple clinics are partnering to address the cross-cutting legal barriers facing Maryland 's immigrant population. Our poster will describe the successes and challenges that the clinical programs have faced in developing this new project.
Hugh McLean Lee, University of Alabama
Poster Title: What Does a Competency Test Tell Us About Client Understanding? Empirical Evidence of Older Adults' Capacity to Execute Legal Documents -view poster-
This poster summarizes research conducted at the Elder Law Clinic concerning the level of understanding and functional capacity of older adults who appear to be cognitively intact based upon accepted psychological tests. The goal of the research project was to identify areas in which clients, otherwise identified as “competent,” might nonetheless have difficulty understanding. It is hoped that the results of this research will enable us to give focused and improved advice in those areas of client difficulty.
Patricia A. Legge, Rutgers School of Law - Camden
Poster Title: Collaboration Three Ways
This is a visual presentation of how one Judicial Externship Seminar incorporates the local judiciary, alumni practitioners, and legal writing professors to give the students a well-rounded clinical education while cultivating the law school's relationships with those outside the academic realm.
Andrea Loretta McArdle, City University of New York
Poster Title: Student-to-Student Collaboration: Learning About Written Advocacy Across Second- and First-Year Law School Courses
This presentation will demonstrate an indirect second-to-first-year law student collaboration mediated by a teacher's structuring of a classroom deconstruction of advocacy techniques. It will address how a web-based version of early and revised drafts of a second-year law student's advocacy writing served as a springboard for a classroom exercise in a first-year lawyering-legal writing seminar to develop students' appreciation of advocacy strategies. And it will examine teaching methods used in the assignment to encourage the first-year students both to trace the actual path of the brief writer's revisions in language, paragraph organization, and choice and level of detail and to think about how to apply these insights to their own persuasive writing assignment.
Suzette M. Meléndez, Syracuse University
Poster Title: Medical-Legal Collaboration: The Syracuse Family Advocacy Program of Syracuse University College of Law and Upstate Pediatric & Adolescent Center of University Hospital of SUNY Upstate Medical University
The Syracuse Family Advocacy Program (FAP) is a collaborative project of the Syracuse University College of Law and the Upstate Pediatric & Adolescent Center of University Hospital of SUNY Upstate Medical University (UPAC). FAP addresses the health-care based needs of young children and their families through advocacy, training and research, including representation in individual cases. Legal assistance and information on health-related matters is provided to children, their families, and the Children's Rights and Family Law Clinic, and through the Family Law & Social Policy Center .
Faith Mullen, Catholic University
Jo Anne Tyler, Pennsylvania State University
Poster Title: Work Stories, Stories Work: Storytelling for Meaning Making and Pedagogical Improvement in Clinical Legal Education -view poster-
This collaboration explores the application of knowledge transfer strategies developed in for-profit settings to clinical legal education. The primary purpose of this qualitative research is to develop an understanding of the effect that systematic inclusion of participative storytelling will have on the students and faculty involved in clinical legal education. Secondarily, the research considers whether the inclusion of storytelling has potential implications for faculty and institutional approaches to the pedagogical processes used in clinical legal education.
Doris Y. Ng, Golden Gate University
Poster Title: The San Francisco “Wins” Garment Workers' Fight for Justice: A Law & Organizing Approach
This poster will highlight the actions of over 250 Chinese garment workers to recover their unpaid wages. With the help of community organizers, advocates and the Golden Gate University School of Law's Women's Employment Rights Clinic, the workers organized demonstrations against the factory owners, testified before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and sued the factory owners for over $2 million. This poster will “display” the voices of the worker leaders.
Elizabeth A. Reimels, Emory University
Poster Title: Interdisciplinary Student Teams -view poster-
The Barton Child Law & Policy Clinic at Emory University is a program of Emory Law School dedicated to ensuring safety, well-being and permanency for abused and court-involved children in Georgia . Our public policy and legislative advocacy work includes writing policy briefs, impact statements, fact sheets, and white papers, as well as legislative drafting and analysis. The Clinic works closely with state agencies and non-profit organizations on training, policy development and implementation, public education, and media messages regarding the child welfare system. The Barton Clinic's policy work is carried out by teams of law, social work, public health and theology students working together under the direction of a clinical instructor. The Barton Clinic's poster explains the work of the Clinic and the strengths and challenges of using multidisciplinary student teams for legislative and policy development and advocacy.
Ruth Anne Robbins, Rutgers School of Law, Camden
Michael R. Smith, Mercer University
Brian J. Foley, Florida Coastal School of Law
Poster Title: Once Upon a Time: A Three-Part Collaboration to Create the New Discipline of Applied Storytelling -view poster-
This poster will introduce viewers to a collaborative project among a clinical professor, a legal writing professor and a criminal procedure professor that centers on the various uses of storytelling to make a legal argument.
Michael J. Robinson-Dorn, University of Washington
Poster Title: 2 Countries, 1 Ecosystem, 2 Clinics -view poster-
For the past three years, the environmental clinics at the University of Washington and the University of Victoria have embarked on a collaborative mission to work together, to pursue joint cases and projects, to leverage their resources to address issues of concern in their shared ecosystem, and to bring new ways of looking at and thinking about environmental issues of concern. The Clinics' shared goal of inspiring, mentoring and training the next generation of environmental lawyers and stewards has also produced rich unexpected opportunities for the professors involved, and is forging links between other programs at the two law schools.
Anne N. Schroth, University of Michigan
Poster Title: The University of Michigan Law School Pediatric Advocacy Clinic: A Medical/Legal Collaborative in a Clinical Setting
The poster will highlight the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, a new clinical course that gives students an opportunity to practice law in a collaborative setting with healthcare providers by adding legal advocacy as part the healthcare team's available resources for their low-income patients. The Pediatric Advocacy Clinic not only involves students in direct client casework, but in training healthcare providers on legal issues affecting their patients, developing community and professional education materials to expand the reach of our services, and working with healthcare providers to identify and pursue opportunities for coordinated approaches to systemic barriers faced by our shared clients. The goal of this poster will be to demonstrate some of our work and illustrate the potential for this kind of interdisciplinary clinic design.
Christina A. Zawisza, University of Memphis -view handout-
Poster Title: A Law School , University, Legal Services Partnership in Disability Studies -view poster-
This session will describe the emerging partnership among the Law School , the larger University of Memphis , the University of Tennessee 's College of Medicine and Memphis Area Legal Services to meet the needs of low-income clients for expert consultations and evaluations to support successful resolution of legal cases. It will feature several case examples drawn from the Child Advocacy Clinic and from the Public Action Law Society's Social Security Project. The promise of such a collaboration, including its ability to provide law students with substantial pro bono opportunities and skills training, will be discussed.
Susan F. Cole, Harvard Law School
Michael Gregory, Harvard Law School
Poster Title: Helping Traumatized Children Learn
The Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI) is a partnership between the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), the goal of which is to ensure that children traumatized by exposure to violence succeed in school. This poster will describe TLPI's multi-strategic approach to achieving its goal, which includes individual case advocacy, legislative and executive advocacy, research and report writing, and interdisciplinary coalition building. The poster will also highlight recent accomplishments of the project, including the publication of Helping Traumatized Children Learn , enactment of recent legislation, and the work of our clinical law students.
Anita Michelle Weinberg, Loyola University, Chicago
Poster Title: Eliminating Childhood Lead Poisoning: A University-Community Interdisciplinary Collaboration
A university-community partnership that advocates for policy and legislative reforms, promotes public awareness, and fosters collaborations to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.
JoNel Newman, University of Miami
Poster Title: Medical-Legal Collaboration to Assist HIV+ Populations in Miami -view poster-
University of Miami Schools of Law and Medicine work collaboratively to provide a range of medical and legal services to the poor HIV+ population in Miami.
Maria Arias, Esq., Battered Women Rights Clinic, City University of New York
Martha Lucia Garcia, Clinic Social Work Supervisor, City University of New York
Alizabeth Newman, Esq., Immigrant and Refugee Rights Clinic, City University
of New York
Poster Title: Teaching Community Lawyering Through Collaboration with Grassroots Organizations, The CUNY School of Law Battered Immigrant Women's Project. (View poster at http://www.law.cuny.edu/app/clinical_programs.jsp.)
The poster board presents three panels that convey the process of engagement and development of the VAWA Self Preparation course for immigrant survivors of Domestic Violence. This innovative project was created in response to the demand for lawyers that would represent women in critical circumstances. Survivors were trained to prepare their affidavit and documents, making it possible for lawyers to be able to represent more clients in a client centered fashion.
The collaboration included: law supervisors from the Battered Women Rights Clinic, the Immigrant and refugee Rights Clinic, legal interns, a social work student and social work supervisor, SEPA Mujer a domestic violence organization and the women.
In the first panel the Poster Board describes some of the fears and concerns of the collaborators, prior to initiating the project. The second panel highlights the common goals that were identified by the collaborators, and which motivated and kept the project going. The third panel lists some of the elements that were identified as necessary for a successful collaboration.
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