2007 Workshop on Clinical Legal Education:
Challenging Assumptions
and
Law Clinic Directors Workshop
May 2 - 6, 2007
New Orleans
 |
Programs for Clinical Legal Education
and
Clinic Directors Workshop
Clinic Directors Workshop
-click here for the Clinical Legal Education program
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
4:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Registration
6:00 – 7:30 p.m.
AALS Reception
Thursday, May 3, 2007
7:30 a.m.
Registration
8:45 – 9:00 a.m.
Welcome -view-
Elizabeth Hayes Patterson, AALS Deputy Director
Introduction
Elizabeth B. Cooper, Fordham University and Chair, Planning Committee for 2007 AALS Workshop on Clinical Legal Education
9:00 - 10:30 a.m.
Starting a Clinical Program and Keeping Clinics Vibrant -view outline-
Jon C. Dubin, Rutgers, The State University of N.J., Newark -view handout-
Lawrence C. Marshall, Stanford Law School
Mary Helen McNeal, Syracuse University
Moderator: Susan R. Jones, George Washington University
10:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Refreshment Break
10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Dealing with External Challenges to Clinical Education (ALDA, ABA, State Legislatures)
Robert D. Dinerstein, American University -view outline-
Richard J. Morgan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Laura L. Rovner, University of Denver
Moderator: Robert R. Kuehn, The University of Alabama
12:15 – 1:00 p.m.
AALS Luncheon
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Moderated Discussion
Directors will have the opportunity to raise and address particular concerns and problems they are facing in the administration, growth or direction of their clinical programs.
or
1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Solidarity Tour
Program for Workshop on Clinical Legal Education: Challenging Assumptions
Thursday, May 3, 2007
3:00 – 7:30 p.m.
AALS Registration
6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
AALS Reception with Posters
Posters will be displayed and presented during the AALS Reception, 6:30 – 8:00 p.m., Thursday, May 3, 2007, in Grand Ballroom B, First Level. They will then be on display in Grand Ballroom A & B, First Level, (the AALS Plenary Session room), throughout the remainder of the Workshop.
E. James Burke, University of Maine
Poster Title: Inside the Walls, Outside the Box: Legal Assistance Clinics in the Prison System
Using IOLTA, Law School, and Department of Corrections funding U. Maine School of Law set up the Prisoner Assistance Clinic, which handles any civil cases the prisoners have (other than against the Department of Corrections). The students take their classroom learning, go into prison, work with men and women inmate/clients, and figure out how to do the case. If you can imagine a civil case, the students run into it. Students interview, counsel, draft, litigate, settle, negotiate, and learn how to take their individual style and be a lawyer.Sarah L. Gerwig-Moore, Mercer University
Poster Title: Challenging Assumptions: The Practicality of Appellate and Habeas Corpus Clinics
Assumption #1: Clinics are Expensive
Assumption #2: Clinics require special space
Assumption #3: Appellate and habeas corpus litigation is too complicated, boring, or depressing to make up an effective clinical course.I suggest, after beginning an appellate and habeas clinic first at Emory Law School and now at Mercer Law School, that this does not have to be the case. These clinics are inexpensive to run and require no special space. This work is far from boring, complicated, or depressing. My students meet their clients, accompany me to oral argument, and get their hands on really interesting and important issues of constitutional criminal law. If the faculty member chooses cases correctly, students will argue a case that at least has a chance of winning, and which is procedurally simple enough for a student to comprehend and argue.
Jack I. Lerner, University of California, Berkeley
Poster Title: Re-Wiring Clinical Pedagogy: Lessons from Policy and Technology Work in a Clinical SettingLisa M. Le Sage, Lewis and Clark Law School
Poster Title: Creating Innovative Partnerships in Clinical Legal EducationSpencer Rand, Temple University
Poster Title: Helping Students Process Poverty: Using Welfare Benefit Distribution Schemes To Help Students Confront Their Own Assumptions About The PoorOften, students often don’t know how bad poverty is, in large part because they assume a welfare safety net. For my clinic I have developed a chart that describes government income and health care subsidies. Using it, I ask students to analyze their cases to determine what help their clients can obtain from the government and what they could get if they were categorized differently. We compare this to government set and otherwise drawn poverty guidelines in hopes of getting at least subsistence living for our clients. I also hope students use the exercise to think about how we treat poor people, whether they and their clients agree with these categorizations of relative worth between poor people, whether the categorizations reflect their own prejudices about their clients with which they must deal to work with them effectively, and whether they believe the poor should be treated differently.
Sue Tomkins, State University of New York at Buffalo
Sara Faherty, State University of New York at Buffalo
Poster Title: The Chrysalis Project: Bringing Legal Services to the Women of Carolyn's House.This poster describes how three separate clinics created a comprehensive set of projects addressing the myriad needs of homeless women and their children. Working in family violence, affordable housing, and economic development, we recently had an opportunity to help build housing for families leaving crisis care. This joint project heightened our awareness of our clients’ intersecting needs. Our presentation describes the journey we shared, including the initial collaboration, our decision to establish an ongoing series of meetings between law students and the residents, some of the erroneous assumptions we made along the way, and finally our plans for the future.
Sarah Anne Calli, University of Miami
Jennifer Zawid, University of Miami
Poster Title: The Role of the Classroom in the Clinical ExternshipThis poster presentation will illustrate that the classroom component of the externship field placement program is an essential and necessary element of the students’ learning experience and cannot be eliminated or effectively replaced. This poster demonstrates that the most effective means to teach an externship course is by encouraging guided reflection in a face-to-face cohesive group wherein students are engaged in the common goal of learning to be successful and ethical practitioners. To this end, the poster will also include and display various curriculum techniques that clinical professors may use to foster guided reflection in the externship classroom.
Lora M. Patton, Osgoode Hall Law School
Poster Title: “I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just a Little Unwell”: (Re)Visioning Clients with Mental Health Difference in Clinical Law School EducationGlenn M. Stuart, Osgoode Hall Law School
Poster Title: The Pursuit of True Community Lawyering: CLASP in Jane-Finch’s Caring VillageThrough its role in a collaborative community project to help grade 8 youth in Toronto's Jane-Finch community, CLASP has been driven to re-think its conception of "community lawyering". Rather than delivering fairly traditional legal services into a community "from a distance", the clinic shifted its emphasis to working with community partners in an intense, non-hierarchical collaboration and embraced a vision of lawyering that subordinated the role of traditional law to responding to community issues in different ways. The result forced lawyers and students alike to challenge their assumptions about how to be an effective lawyer.
Charles H. Rose, III, Stetson University
Poster Title: Clinical Educators, Agents for Change in a Time of Transitioning Standards in Legal Education
Friday, May 4, 2007
THANK YOU
THOMSON WEST
FOR PROVIDING FRIDAY’S BEVERAGES AND MORNING PASTRIES
7:00 – 8:45 a.m.
AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Committees
(see message board in the Foyer for listing of committees and their meeting room locations)
7:30 – 9:00 a.m.
Pre-Program Beverages and Breakfast Pastries Sponsored by THOMSON WEST
Visit their table in the Registration Area to participate in an Apple Ipod raffle.
8:45 – 9:00 a.m.
Welcome -view-
Elizabeth Hayes Patterson, AALS Deputy Director
Introduction
Elizabeth B. Cooper, Fordham University and Chair, Planning Committee for 2007 AALS Workshop on Clinical Legal Education
9:00 – 9:30 a.m.
Slideshow of Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath
William P. Quigley, Loyola University, New Orleans
9:30 – 11:00 a.m.
Challenging Assumptions: How We See the World -view handout-
Dana R. Carney, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Kristin Lane , Ph.D., Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
What are the boundaries to conscious thinking and feeling? How do they shape social judgment, decision, and behavior? To answer these questions, we present demonstrations and data showing how mind processes can operate without intention or awareness. We show evidence for the existence of implicit or unconscious attitudes and discuss what we know about their nature. We share evidence from the past decade of research on the disparity between conscious and nonconscious biases. From such demonstrations and research, we will raise questions about what the mind sciences can say about the early mental threats to just and fair treatment.
1:00 – 11:15 a.m.
Refreshment Break Beverages Sponsored by THOMSON WEST
11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Working Group Discussions
(See the handout in your workshop materials folder for your Working Group assignment and its location)
12:30 – 2:15 p.m.
AALS Luncheon
AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Award
2:15 - 3:45 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions
Integrating International and Domestic Law in Clinical Practice
Timothy L. Arcaro, Nova Southeastern University
Steven David Schwinn, University of MarylandIn our increasingly global community, many of us find our clinics working at the intersection of domestic and international issues. We find that integrating domestic and international issues in our clinics is not only interesting and educational, it is quickly becoming imperative. The presenters look forward to an interactive session to imagine and to create clinical offerings that more deliberately bring together domestic and international practice. During the first portion of the session, the presenters will briefly provide examples of integrating domestic and international practice from their own clinical work. Professor Arcaro will explain the pedagogical and ethical values of using cases arising under the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction in live-client clinics. These cases challenge students to resolve complex legal and fact issues as they formulate litigation strategies to represent indigent clients located in foreign countries. Professor Schwinn uses his clinic, which appeals administrative denials of trade adjustment assistance at the Court of International Trade, along with an accompanying seminar on global poverty, to explore globalization's effects on poverty around the world. Students thus represent displaced workers and farmers in the U.S. economy while exploring the relationships between poverty here and abroad. During the second portion of the session, participants will break into small groups to share and to brainstorm current and ideal clinical opportunities that integrate international and domestic practice. Casting aside economic, institutional, and geographical borders for the purpose of our discussion, we hope that participants will come away with an array of possibilities for potential integration of international and domestic issues.
Energizing Pedagogy and Scholarship: Challenging the Assumptions of Clinical and Cause Lawyering Scholarship Through Exchange and Cross-Pollination
Sameer M. Ashar, City University of New York
Stephen E. Meili, University of Wisconsin
Corey Shdaimah, University of Maryland School of Social WorkClinical legal scholars found a home for their work with the founding of the Clinical Law Review in 1994. Shortly thereafter, social scientists and legal scholars who study “cause lawyering” – a style of practice characterized by the centrality of moral and/or political commitments, as distinguished from ( though not necessarily mutually exclusive with) client-centered advocacy – came together in a series of conferences that have resulted in several published volumes. Each area of scholarship has much to share with the other, but there has been little contact as each has developed and matured. Most clinical teachers are cause lawyers in practice, if not in name, as their moral and political commitments infuse their dockets and syllabi. Most cause lawyering scholars are focused on the structure of lawyer-client relationships and the transmission of moral and political commitments to new generations of lawyers. The facilitators of this concurrent session – whose work often lies at the intersection of these movements in legal scholarship – will first identify the insights embedded in each and then, through techniques such as role-playing, critical incidents, case studies, and mini writes, and brainstorm with participants about ways in which to connect and expand our collective scholarly and pedagogical agendas.
Challenging Assumptions within the Externship Context: Encouraging Students to Think Critically about Legal Practice
Laurie A. Barron, Roger Williams University
Eden E. Harrington, The University of TexasAs Externship Program Directors, we propose to focus on challenging assumptions about legal practice and best practice standards within the context of a multi-layered externship placement. In the externship setting, students are primarily dependent on the their field placement supervisors for the teaching of standards of practice, skill development within the context of that particular practice setting, and what is or is not possible to achieve within the context of that particular lawyer’s caseload, jurisdiction, and office structure. As faculty directors of programs with multiple placements, we have no confidential relationship with the offices and therefore are not privy to most of what goes on at the micro level. Our students quickly become acculturated to their supervisor’s style of lawyering and the work ethic of that particular office. As faculty members, we are often seen as the “interloper” by both student and placement supervisor as we don’t really “understand” what goes on there or why they do things the way they do.
We would like to explore the ways in which we, as educators, can encourage our students to think critically about their placements and to challenge their own and their supervisors’ assumptions about the level, quality, and ethic of practice in their settings. We hope to share ideas within the context of classroom teaching, reflective writings, and individual meetings with students and/or with students and their supervisors. We will encourage participants to bring at least one successful idea for a classroom exercise, reflective writing assignment, intervention with a student (or supervisor and student), or compelling article or reading to share with the group. We hope that participants will leave this workshop armed with practical ideas about ways to tackle the challenge of challenging assumptions!
Challenging Assumptions about Technology:What to Teach Clinical Students About Using Electronic Technology
Marilyn Joan Berger, Seattle University
Ronald Clark, Seattle University
John B. Mitchell, Seattle UniversityFor decades we have taught our students how to use visuals. We have drilled them on laying the foundations for diagrams and photographs, carefully explored the best techniques and sequences for having the witness mark the exhibit, and overall have made our students consider the strategic role of the visuals in the presentation of their case theory. But increasingly, in addition to easels, flipcharts and whiteboards, courtroom technology has emerged where documents are offered on CD-rom and demonstrative evidence, computer animations, and electronic storyboards are projected from laptop computers. We will explore a set of recurring assumptions, such as whether high-tech visuals are always the best choice, or whether low-tech or even no-tech options are sometimes preferable. We will look at static visuals, simple and more sophisticated use of PowerPoint, and computer animations. The session will include demonstrations, role-plays, discussions, and a hands-on exercise where workshop participants will create a low-cost, but effective visual for a closing argument.
Challenging Assumptions About (Non)Directiveness in Supervision
Keith Blair, University of Baltimore
Beryl S. Blaustone, City University of New York
Joseph A. Rosenberg, City University of New York
John B. Snyder, University of BaltimoreThe purpose of the workshop is to examine our individual and collective perspectives on (non)directiveness in supervision. Nondirectiveness is part of the orthodoxy of clinical supervision. Central to our assumptions about our role as supervisors is that students learn most effectively through the experience of planning, doing, and reflecting, and that we are at our best when we are nondirective in our approach to guiding, facilitating, and coaching. Yet the reality of our supervision is more complex and diverse than merely situating ourselves as close to a nondirective approach as possible. Although we don’t want to substitute our judgment for that of the students, whether it involves preliminary case planning matters or ultimate strategy decisions, there are vast areas of supervision in which the continuum of (non)directiveness is difficult to identify and navigate. Using short videotapes of supervision meetings and thoughts of clinic interns about supervision, this will be an interactive, participatory workshop that will draw on the knowledge and experience of everybody attending to develop greater insight and understanding into the supervision process in ways that will have a tangible impact on our work.
"Movin' On": Clinic Directors Figuring Out Exit Strategies and Creating "New Lives"
StacyCaplow, Brooklyn Law School
Martin Guggenheim, New York University
Jane L. Johnson, Tulane University
Alan Kirtley, University of Washington
Wallace J. Mlyniec, Georgetown University
Nina W. Tarr, University of IllinoisIs there clinical life-after-director? Many of the earliest generation of clinical teachers became directors of their school’s overall programs. During these years, many programs grew and became much more complex under their stewardship. The clinic director’s job description included teacher, fundraiser, personnel manager, technology expert, and lawyer (both for clients and the programs themselves). This concurrent session will focus on why, how, and when long-term Directors of clinic programs move into new roles in the academy. Several former directors will discuss their decisions to step aside, the transition process for their programs and institutions, what lessons they have learned that will assist other individuals and clinics go through these changes, and their new post-director activities. Conference participants will then be invited to discuss issues they anticipate will arise for themselves and their programs.
Challenging Assumptions with Critical Theory
Carolyn B. Grose, William Mitchell College of Law
Bill Ong Hing, University of California at Davis
Margaret E. Johnson, University of Baltimore
Ascanio Piomelli, University of California, HastingsThis session will start by exploring the definitions of the terms critical theory and critical lawyering theory. We will then examine how these terms and ideas might be used in a clinical setting. In particular, we want to consider how particular critical theories – e.g. feminist legal theory, critical race theory, poverty law theory – might provide important perspectives and information to clinic students as they begin to confront the various legal, political and social issues raised by their live-client case work and their lawyering for social change. In addition, we will raise the question posed by some students regarding the practicality of the collaborative/ rebellious/community-based social change lawyering style for busy public interest lawyers trying to keep their heads above water. Moving from the particular theories, the session will also consider how the study and use of critical lawyering theory in general – no matter the substance of the particular theory – can help students develop their own abilities as critical thinkers regarding client representation and social-change lawyering. For instance, we will ask how critical lawyering theory can help progressive students critique traditionally-conceived progressive lawyering. Throughout the session, we will call upon the audience to engage in role-playing and critical analysis to facilitate these discussions and explorations.
Expanding the Storefront: Small Business Services and the Fight for Economic Justice
Evan S. Hobbs, University of New MexicoIn the fight for economic justice we assume that lawyers will be there, on the ground, to serve communities mired in the past and living legacies of deprivation. But how well are clinical programs addressing the skills a lawyer needs to provide affordable, case-appropriate services to a small business? Should the clinical training of business lawyers be limited to low-income clients? To what extent should the economic development of a particular community be emphasized in a business-law clinical program? Do the benefits of addressing immediate concerns of a community – that is, does the short-term “social-justification” of clinic services – outweigh the cost of limiting a student’s exposure to experiences that might increase the quality or affordability of the services the student may later provide to members of that same community as a lawyer?
Incorporating a Challenging Assumptions Component into “Staple” Clinical Exercises -view outline-
Bridgette A. Carr, Ave Maria School of Law
Marisa Silenzi Cianciarulo, Chapman University
Karla M. Mc Kanders, Villanova UniversityAs clinical professors from different schools, we all teach in the area of immigration law and have worked with clients seeking asylum in the United States. This presentation combines various exercises and teaching techniques that we have used in order to teach students how to work with cultural bias and assumptions. We will each discuss a particular simulation exercise that we have used in the classroom and found successful in helping the students to challenge cultural and legal assumptions. During the presentation, participants will take part in exercises as students would. We have found that these exercises lead the students to examine and critically analyze how assumptions will affect their clinical experience and their future work as attorneys. We will end with a critical examination about challenging student assumptions; challenging assumptions about how students learn; and frameworks that guide pedagogical decisions regarding teaching social justice clinics.
Challenging Gender and Culture-Based Assumptions in Representing Survivors of Gender-Based Human Rights Abuses
Jenny-Brooke Condon, Seton Hall University
Lori A. Nessel, Seton Hall UniversityThis concurrent workshop is designed to explore cultural and other assumptions that students and supervisors may encounter in representing foreign survivors of gender-based torture. In working with students on cases that involve gender-based human rights abuses, issues frequently arise that call into question a number of assumptions. For example, in an effort to be sensitive to female victims of rape or sexual torture, students may assume that the client is not comfortable around male students or translators, when for cultural reasons the client may actually prefer a male student or translator. Students and supervising clinicians may also have certain expectations of how survivors of sexual torture, such as trafficking or domestic violence, behave. In this concurrent session, we will explore interdisciplinary scholarship and films that can be used to train clinical students to consider gender/culture-based assumptions in their representation of clients. Discussion topics will include: sharing “teaching moments” when these issues arise in client representation; exploring connections between gender, class and culture and the impact on how we perceive our clients and their needs; and brainstorming about effective ways to use these “teaching moments” to encourage our students to challenge underlying assumptions in client representation.
Exposing, Exploring and Challenging the Assumptions of (and Within) Clinical Legal Education
Michael Pinard, University of Maryland
Ellen Marie Weber, University of MarylandClinical legal education was originally premised on the notion of providing individualized representation to under-resourced individuals whose legal needs might not have otherwise been met. This notion of clinical education flowed directly from the Legal Services model. However, clinical legal education has expanded greatly over the past decade to include other components (some of which mirror the legal strategies available to more privileged individuals) and goals, including: community education, policy work related to systemic reform, legislative advocacy and media advocacy. Moreover, clinics have expanded beyond the provision of traditional legal services (for instance, we now have IP, Small Business and Legislative clinics). Some of these newer clinics have not involved the representation of individual clients, but have taken on tasks such as writing white papers and reports, and partnering with groups that are striving for systemic change. This concurrent session will explore and challenge some of the assumptions that the clinical and law school communities hold about clinical design, in light of this expansion of practices and legal strategies. Specifically, the session will explore how these assumptions have given rise to tensions, some of which relate to the notion of having individual clients. Examples of these tensions include: 1) how the formulation of new clinics may require a needs assessment and/or project identification that may preclude client representation, but is nonetheless useful for students in identifying goals and strategizing approaches; 2) how issue orientated advocacy – a common form of advocacy in practice – may not require an individual client; 3) how we, as clinicians, work through the special considerations for engaging in non-client based work, both as an institutional matter and as a pedagogical matter for new attorneys. We will use this session to explore these specific tensions and others, and attempt to foster meaningful dialogue on the definition(s) of clinical legal education in the 21 st Century.
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Race: Identifying and Testing Our Own Assumptions
Lynn Barenberg, Boston College
Donna H. Lee, City University of New York -view handout-
Evangeline Sarda, Boston College
Carol Suzuki, University of New Mexico
Carwina Weng , Indiana University, BloomingtonThis session challenges us as clinical teachers to acknowledge and address our own assumptions about race and ethnicity as part of our classroom teaching. Such self-knowledge allows more accurate reads and management of classroom dynamics and discussions of race and ethnicity. It also models for students the awareness they need to work in a culturally competent manner with clients and others. Through simulations and discussion, participants will learn to identify their own assumptions, to create safe and collaborative learning environments for engaging with race issues, and to conduct discussions about race respectfully and productively.
Client-Centered Counseling, Decision-Making, and Effective Assistance of Counsel
K. Babe Howell, New York University
Holly Maguigan, New York University
Jenny Roberts, Syracuse University
Steve Zeidman, City University of New YorkWhat’s a lawyer to do when a client wants her to do (or refrain from doing) something on a case and the lawyer’s best strategic sense tells her otherwise? For example, what should a criminal defense lawyer do if a client - despite repeated meetings and discussions regarding the importance of investigation - insists that he does not want the lawyer to interview any witnesses? We assume that clinicians, indoctrinated with client-centered counseling, would err on the side of client autonomy in such situations. This session will explore the applicability of traditional notions of client-centered counseling in the criminal defense context. While most, if not all, Clinics purport to extol the virtue and teach the practice of “client-centered” counseling, do we assume it means basically the same thing to everyone and is consistent with the mandates of the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel? What conflicts arise where the requirements of the Sixth Amendment suggest a course of conduct opposed by the client? These issues are proliferating in practice and now courts up to the Supreme Court are weighing in and evaluating them through this constitutional right to counsel lens. Small discussion groups will analyze recent transcripts that frame these issues, and consider alternative responses that are consistent with the best traditions of client-centered counseling.
Challenging Assumptions About Business as Usual in Legal Education
Margaret Moore Jackson, University of North Dakota
Peter Joy, Washington University
Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, University of New Mexico
Mary Lynch, Albany Law School
Roy T. Stuckey, University of South CarolinaTwo recently published books call for fundamental changes in legal education, including supervised practice experience for all students during law school. This program will begin with an overview of the primary recommendations contained in Educating Lawyers, the report of a study of legal education by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Best Practices for Legal Education, the culmination of a collaborative effort by a wide ranging group of legal educators to describe a vision for the future of legal education and road map for getting there. The presenters will then engage the audience in an interactive discussion of possible strategies for persuading law schools to implement the recommendations in these documents.
Examining our Assumptions in Developing Clinics Abroad
Michele R. Pistone, Villanova University
Richard J. Wilson, American University
Leah Wortham, The Catholic University of America
David Zammit, University of MaltaFor years, U.S. scholars have been traveling abroad as Fulbright scholars and ABA CEELI volunteers, on U.S. government sponsored grants, or at the invitation of foreign universities to help develop clinical programs. Most scholars travel to other countries with a host of assumptions, based on their own lived realities, of what to expect when they are abroad about such things as: the legal system and how it operates; the role of the lawyer in society; the role of law as an agent for social change; client’s expectations about legal representation; the process and nature of advocacy; the nature of legal education; the place of professional ethics in lawyering and legal education; and the role of lawyers in legal practice in such tasks as fact investigation and witness preparation. Only through recognizing the assumptions that we have about these issues can we be effective in helping to develop a sustainable clinical legal education model for foreign countries. This session will focus on recognizing the assumptions we bring, methods for acquiring information to orient us to a new setting, and constructive ways to share our experience with those seeking to establish clinics abroad.
Challenging Assumptions:When Legal Systems Fall Apart - Teaching Students to Operate Without Assumptions in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Adam Babich, Tulane University
Pamela R. Metzger, Tulane University
Stacy Elizabeth Seicshnaydre, Tulane University
Tania Tetlow, Tulane UniversityCatastrophe forces us to think outside the box. Law school clinical instruction normally assumes well-functioning judicial systems and focuses almost exclusively on litigation as a force of incremental change, but these assumptions are no longer possible in New Orleans. Katrina depopulated a major American city, knocked over all of its legal and social systems, and shook every assumption loose. Our faculty and our students have been forced to examine heretofore unknown legal problems and develop creative solutions to solve them. In so doing, we have learned to challenge our own assumptions. Have we really identified “the” problem, or are we only examining the small legal slice of the pie usually reserved for us? Have we really identified our clients’ goals, or are we only assuming that the clients’ goals fall within our range of expectation. Have we really identified the solution, or are we limiting our vision because of our assumptions about power and its uses? And do we teach our students the non-traditional lawyering skills that are necessary to accomplish the broader solution we envision?
Challenging Assumptions through International Human Rights Law
Sandra Babcock, Northwestern University
Lisa Crooms, Howard University
Stephanie T. Farrior, The Pennsylvania State University
Beth Lyon, Villanova University
Cynthia Soohoo, Columbia UniversityInternational human rights law offers a distinctive prism through which to evaluate, challenge and expand traditional thinking about U.S. law. It thus can act as a catalyst for sparking new approaches in advocacy. This workshop will present “Human Rights Law 101” for clinical legal educators. The discussion will cover the use of this law to advance new arguments for subsistence rights and the right to counsel in civil matters, challenge gender-based rights violations and racial discrimination in such areas as health care and housing, address inequalities in the criminal justice system, and advance the rights of non-citizens.
3:45 – 4:00 p.m.
Refreshment Break
Beverages Sponsored by THOMSON WEST
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Working Group Discussions
(See the handout in your workshop materials folder for your Working Group assignment and its location)
5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
AALS Reception
Saturday, May 5, 2007
7:30 – 9:00 a.m.
AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Committees
(See message board in the Foyer for listing of committees and their meeting room locations)
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Teaching Our Students to Challenge Assumptions -view presentation- -view outline-
Muneer I. Ahmad, American University
Susan J. Bryant, City University of New York
Jean Koh Peters, Yale Law School
This interactive session will explore innovative techniques to encourage our students to shake up their reflexive ways of thinking and acting.
10:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Refreshment Break
10:45 a.m. - 12:00 noon
Working Group Discussions
(See the handout in your workshop materials folder for your Working Group assignment and its location)
12:00 noon – 1:45 p.m.
AALS Luncheon
Dr. Norman C. Francis, President, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, Louisiana
Dr. Norman C. Francis has been president of Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation's only historically Black, Catholic university since 1968. Although he spent some years away from Xavier, during which time he earned his law degree from Loyola Law School, he has been at the campus as a student and administrator for over five decades. He is chair of the Lousiana Recovery Authority and immediate past chair of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, among numerous other civic leadership positions. In 2006, he received the nation's highest civil award, The Presidential Medal of Freedom.
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions
The Clinical Externship’s Role in Value Clarification
Sarah Anne Calli, University of Miami
Timothy W. Floyd, Mercer University
Marjorie A. Silver, Touro College -view handout-
Jessi Tamayo, University of Miami
Jennifer H. Zawid, University of MiamiThis concurrent session will challenge the assumptions that the current law school curriculum has no negative effect on student well-being and career satisfaction. In addition, the session will challenge the assumption, made by many students and non-clinical faculty, that a curriculum designed around guided reflection and student value clarification is non-substantive and unnecessary. A variety of needs influence a student’s decision to attend law school. Often these include a wish to make political change in the community, a desire to help others, and a social justice mission. The reasons behind the decision to become a lawyer depend largely on the value system that the student holds. Often contrary to their original criteria for success, law students quickly seek status, salary, class rank, and “winning the case” as indicators of achievement. These are the accomplishments that are rewarded in law schools. The student’s own personal best, personal enrichment, or desire to serve may no longer be the focal point. Currently, most law schools do not address this concern. Through the use of exercises, simulation, and discussion, this concurrent session will explore: 1) how the law student’s values and criteria for success change in law school, 2) the impact this has on the student’s personal happiness and professional practice of law, 3) the role a clinical externship program can play in reintegrating the student with his or her value system and developing a professional identity, 4) tools designed to help students rediscover their purpose in entering the legal profession, and 5) specific techniques to facilitate students’ awareness of their personal goals, needs, and motivators.
Narrative Theory and Visualization: Challenging Students’ Assumptions
Timothy M. Casey, Case Western Reserve University
James Parry Eyster, Ave Maria School of LawAs lawyers, we tell stories – stories where the law or legal structures impact the lives of the characters. The importance of narrative is certainly not new to clinicians, and indeed, many clinicians teach the fundamental skill of helping students persuasively tell their clients’ stories. Many students, however, approach the issue of developing the narrative of the case with hidden assumptions, and frequently those assumptions create barriers to effective advocacy. In this session, we examine students’ assumptions about the characteristics of successful legal narratives. Using techniques gleaned from art theory, semiotics, theater and psychology, we explore methods that will assist students and advocates to visualize and portray specific scenes that are necessary to the telling of the legal story. Finally, we will present examples of specific class exercises designed to challenge students’ assumptions and to demonstrate the importance of narrative and visualization to effective advocacy.
Human Rights at Home and Abroad: The Role of Supervised Overseas Missions in Clinical Legal Education in Human Rights
James L. Cavallaro, Harvard Law School
Sharanjeet Parmar, Harvard Law School
Peter Joel Rosenblum, Columbia UniversityThis concurrent session seeks to evaluate the role of supervised, on-site investigations (also termed “research/fact-finding/advocacy trips”) in clinical education in human rights. Partnering with rights groups in the developing world, this kind of overseas travel ordinarily involves a small group of students and a trained clinician or clinical professor. Though increasingly becoming part of the core functions of law school human rights clinics, very little has been written about the role of research/fact-finding/advocacy trips abroad. What potential do these supervised field missions hold for transforming the pedagogy of human rights clinics? To what extent do they support classroom learning and other forms of human rights clinical education? What do—and should—these trips entail? Through analysis of this dynamic, this panel will address the development of the research/fact-finding/advocacy trip as a central element of the human rights clinical enterprise, as well as legal clinical education.
What Can You Do For Me? Challenging Assumptions About Clinicians, Librarians and the New Frontier in Legal Education
Tom Boone, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Megan Chaney, University of Nevada, Las VegasCurriculum changes at some of the nation's top schools demonstrate a trend toward practice-oriented education. In this environment clinicians have an opportunity to take a leading role in determining future standards in legal education. To make this happen, clinics should collaborate with their schools' libraries, making far more use of the information resources -- and professionals -- available to them. In addition, librarians must expand the service they currently provided to most law school clinics, going beyond scholarship and curriculum support and reaching into practice support as well, much like a law firm librarian does. For these changes to happen, Professors Boone and Chaney argue that clinics and libraries must make some fundamental changes in the ways they work together. This includes the implementation of digital library technologies for clinics, as well as the creation of a new professional clinical position: clinic library coordinator. The presenters will demonstrate some of the methods they have used this semester to implement some of these changes.
Challenging Assumptions about Clinical Teaching on Race, Culture, Gender and Justice
Amy J. Cohen, The Ohio State University
Elizabeth Cooke, The Ohio State University
Terri Enns, The Ohio State University
Angela Lloyd , The Ohio State UniversityCritical theories on race, culture, gender and justice have burgeoned over the last 25 years. Clinical legal education has simultaneously flourished. Each semester in clinic courses, substantive issues of race, gender, culture and justice present themselves, often in divergent forms. As clinical teachers, we strive to address these issues in ways most intellectually and professionally stimulating for our students. Yet, does the small, interpersonal, and hands-on context of a clinic drive us to accept and validate students’ personal/experiential insights rather than present more challenging academic theories? This concurrent session will address ways to breach the practice-theory divide and to create a shared vocabulary for addressing critically the issues arising as a result of race, culture, gender and socio-economic disparities between lawyers and their clients.
Clinical Education in 2007: A Time to Think, A Time to Grow
Nancy S. Abramowitz, American University Robert D. Dinerstein, American University
Kristine A. Huskey, American University
Adrienne Lockie, American University -view description-
Claire A. Smearman, American University
Jane K. Stoever, American UniversityOur goals in this session are to explore in some depth the rationales—both individual and institutional—that underlie the choices we make about such issues as:
- The substantive focus of our clinics;
- The nature of the legal work in which our clinics engage;
- The balance among service, social justice and educational goals;
- The definitions and assumptions that lie behind our concepts of advocacy for clients;
- The different assumptions revealed by different clinical staffing patterns;
- The role of funding sources in influencing the above choices; and
- The need for transparency at a number of levels—when interacting with our colleagues within and without the clinic, with the law school, with the community, and with our students.
We will present a fictionalized meeting of a law school curriculum committee that is considering the creation of a new in-house, live-client clinic. We will play the roles of a clinician proposing the new clinic, faculty members of the committee (which could include a clinical teacher), a student member of the committee, and a representative of the administration (probably an associate dean for academic affairs). The clinic being proposed will be one related to juvenile justice issues; we have consciously chosen to discuss a clinic different from the ones in which any of us are currently teaching. Although the proposed clinic is in an area that might be considered traditional, the proposal will describe a broad range of planned student activities (including non-litigation approaches, policy advocacy, media advocacy, and so on) and will not limit its focus to a low-income clientele. In role, members of the committee will challenge a number of the aspects of the proposal, providing an opportunity to air some of the considerations that, we believe, should inform any discussion of why we choose to teach the clinics that we do in the way that we do. Following the role play, we will each describe our own perspectives on these issues based on our actual clinical experience. After the panel discussion, we will engage the audience in an interactive discussion on the issues raised in the role play, and, more generally, on the issues identified in the above bullet points.
Cultural Competence for Clinicians: Engaging Students On Their Own Terms
Kimberly Ann Bart, The University of Alabama
Daniel M. Filler, Drexel University
Elizabeth M. McCormick, The University of Tulsa
Valorie K. Vojdik, West Virginia UniversityClinicians frequently talk about developing their students’ cultural competence. This panel will consider a similar, but under-discussed issue: bridging the cultural gap between clinical faculty and their students. For all their individual differences, clinicians often share certain key similarities with respect to their views on politics, religion, and approach to advocacy. At a significant number of law schools, however, clinic students experience and view the world very differently from these faculty. These differences may lead to conflicts over both practical lawyering decisions and broader goals of the clinic. This panel will consider how clinicians address these conflicts and insure that they remain true to the needs of their clients, students and their own political and ethical commitments.
Challenging Assumptions about International Externship Programs: Boondoggle or Peak Experience?
Liz Ryan Cole, Vermont Law School
Martin A. Geer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Susan K. Mc Clellan, Seattle UniversityThis presentation is both for externship directors who have international programs and those who are merely thinking about creating them. Our panel will address different models for international externship programs, including issues about site selection, supervision, funding, and interactions with field supervisors. We will focus on academic externships for which students receive credit after working with an attorney or judge and completing a reflective component. We will invite participants to describe their own experiences and other models they have tried or are considering. We will then address the hard questions, posed by both the panelists and participants, about the value of these programs. Are international externships merely great travel experiences, or do they merit law school credit and the commitment of financial and human resources?
Are Transactional Attorneys Becoming Obsolete? Challenging Assumptions about the Role of Transactional Attorneys in an Information and Technology-Based Society
Louise Anne Howells, Univ. of the District of Columbia
Laurie A. Morin, Univ. of the District of Columbia
Susan Louise Waysdorf, Univ. of the District of ColumbiaThis interactive panel will challenge assumptions about the appropriate role for lawyers in an information and technology-based society, where the general public has access to a potentially wide array of legal resources and computer–based services that used to be within the exclusive domain of the legal community. In light of these technological developments, what is the unique role of lawyers in providing legal services? The panel will engage participants in self analysis about what lawyers do that only lawyers can do, and conversely, what services lawyers might relinquish to “expert systems.” The panel will also explore how expert systems can be used to address unmet legal needs of people who have limited access to legal representation. In the first portion of the program, participants will collaboratively experience an expert system that gives consumers the ability to obtain information and advice by inputting data into a computer program and will thereafter observe a fictional live-expert analysis of the same data. In the second part of the program, the panel will explore and evaluate technological devices that may be employed to provide efficient (or even lawyer-less) assistance, focusing specifically on legal problems that confront individuals in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Challenging Students Assumptions about Ethics
Ann Juergens, William Mitchell College of Law
Thomas A. Kelley, University of North Carolina
Lisa Gabrielle Lerman, The Catholic University of America
Faith Mullen, The Catholic University of AmericaThis interactive workshop will identify the most common student assumptions about legal ethics and suggest fresh ways clinicians can challenge those assumptions. Ann Juergens will explore how clinicians model ethical practice for students in the way that they administer clinic law offices. Tom Kelley will demonstrate a way to teach legal ethics that minimizes discussion of the rules, using instead a narrative approach that uses short stories, novels, lawyer oral histories, poems, and film to get at ethical questions. Lisa Lerman will address some of the most common ethical issues in clinics that implicate multiple rules of professional conduct and illustrate how to teach students to navigate through the rules. Come prepared to have your own assumptions about teaching ethics challenged!
The Collaborative Model: Challenging Assumptions about Case Selection, Community Interaction, Pedagogy, and the Clinical Learning Environment
Meetali Jain, Seton Hall University
Shavar Dakel Jeffries, Seton Hall University
Scott Michelman, Seton Hall University
Jonathan Romberg, Seton Hall UniversityThis collaborative session is intended to foster a discussion among participants about the potential benefits (and downsides) of an approach to clinical education that – at least superficially – stands in sharp contrast to the traditional model. The four presenters, two professors and two fellows in Seton Hall’s Center for Social Justice, will first very briefly discuss how their four different clinics and projects have adopted overlapping, non-traditional methods of pedagogy in four areas of case selection, community interaction, pedagogy and clinical learning environment.
Challenging Assumptions through Case Selection: What Can We Learn from Representing the Unpopular Client?
Louis S. Rulli, University of Pennsylvania
Dveera Segal, Villanova UniversityThis session will identify and challenge long-standing assumptions inherent in case selection norms of civil litigation clinics by exploring the benefits of accepting non-traditional case categories, especially on behalf of unpopular clients, that may offer students a superior means of challenging assumptions about the law, courts, administrative agencies, the lawyer’s role, and, most importantly, about clients themselves. Specifically, the session will examine positive experiences gained in supervising students in two discrete areas of civil representation – drug-related civil forfeiture cases and expungement of child abuse records at the request of the perpetrator – both of which introduce students to the intersection between the criminal and civil
justice systems and lay bare essential questions about race, gender, and class in our society, the neutrality of law, and public assumptions underlying popular governmental policy initiatives aimed at combating drugs and protecting children. Through a series of short video vignettes created specially for this conference, the session will explore differing perspectives and expectations and will challenge the audience to re-examine their own assumptions at critical stages of legal representation, such as case selection and the allocation of scarce resources; decision-making and client counseling around what constitutes a good result in a difficult case; and role conflicts and inherent tensions in serving client, community, and self. In the end, the session will suggest ways that clinicians can expand the boundaries of their students’ learning experiences by offering tudents the opportunity to swim upstream against popular movements that enjoy widespread public support.
Beyond the Teaching-Service Mission: Developing the Research Potential of Clinics
Jeanne Charn, Harvard Law School
Jeffrey Selbin, University of California, BerkeleyThe modern clinical legal education movement in the U.S. has been animated by an explicit teaching and service mission. The synergy (and tension) of this dual mission has been the subject of considerable debate and discussion over the last four decades as law school clinics have become sites of increasingly diverse and innovative pedagogy and practice. At the same time, the U.S. legal services movement is at a crossroads. The access to justice gap for the poor has been well chronicled, yet almost 40 years of government funding for legal services has yielded relatively few answers in terms of how best to serve clients, assess program effectiveness or understand client and community needs. This session will explore the potential of law school clinics to serve as sites of inquiry and knowledge production. Clinics are uniquely situated to answer critical questions confronting the legal services and access to justice communities, and participants will be encouraged to consider ways in which their own clinics can serve as both laboratories for testing service delivery models and portals for substantive research.
Teaching Policy and Community-Based Advocacy: Assumptions, Challenges, and New Ideas
Christine N. Cimini, University of Denver
Brenda V. Smith, American University
Anita Michelle Weinberg, Loyola University, ChicagoTeaching legislative and policy advocacy (included in this is also community lawyering, coalition building, and community organizing - all essential to broad based advocacy) in a clinic setting presents challenges different from traditional clinical teaching. The panelists, who represent a range of law schools with different resources and demographic challenges, will describe through case studies and discussion, their approaches to teaching legislative and policy advocacy, how they have addressed challenges faced when working with students in the policy and legislative arena, assumptions to overcome, and lessons learned. Time will be set aside to allow for questions, answers, and discussion among the attendees and panelists.
3:30 – 3:45 p.m.
Refreshment Break
3:45 – 5:15 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions
Challenging Assumptions : Individual Representation, Educating Students and Social Change
Deborah E. Anker, Harvard Law School
Matthew Muller, Harvard Law School -view outline-In a time of intense legal change and challenges to the rule of law, should students and clinics continue to focus on individual representation or should they be engaged in litigation and policy and legislative advocacy? How does work with individual clients impact broader social change? How can law school clinics engage with community organizations? Should law school clinics collaborate with local legal services organizations or advocacy groups? How does an activist clinic justify and maintain its legitimacy within the legal academy? Is legal education itself changing, developing a stronger connection to the world of practice? How do clinics and clinicians affect these changes, especially to the general law school curriculum? This session will use asylum and immigration clinics as a case study to address these questions, drawing on the ideas and experiences of participants to find possible answers. It will also address some specific issues regarding asylum representation, the engagement with clients from different cultures and of different nationalities, and explore the challenges and opportunities this presents for the internationalization of legal education. Recommended law review articles: Dina Haynes, Client-Centered Human Rights Advocacy, 13 Clinical L. Rev. 379 (Fall 2006); Ingrid Loreen, Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Law School Asylum Clinic, 17 St. Thomas L. Rev. 835 (Spring 2005).
"Why Can't Clinic and Externship Students Participate in the Same Class ? "
Julia Fayngold Covey, Whittier Law School
Vanessa Merton, Pace UniversityDuring this session, we want to challenge the assumption that externship and clinic students belong in separate programs or courses. We will present two different models that mix clinic and externship students in the same classroom, discussing goals, structure, and pedagogy. We hope to facilitate a discussion about the advantages as well as the challenges of combining externship and clinic teaching and supervision, and to encourage suggestions for enhancing the synergies between field placement and in-house clinical programs.
Enlisting Clients to Become Partners in Social Justice Advocacy
Edgar S. Cahn, University of the District of Columbia
Matthew Fraidin, University of the District of Columbia“Poverty” law, from which clinical legal education took root and with which much of clinical legal education remains firmly linked, assumes that lawyers’ clients are poor. In the context of a litigation-based clinic, a transactional clinic, and a public defender’s office, this presentation will explore what it means for clinical teachers and students to enlist the capacity of clients -- clients' wealth -- in ways that empower those clients and that enable them to become our partners and co-workers in addressing social problems and in advancing social justice. Based upon the economic theory of “Time Banking,” the presenters will reframe the process of providing legal assistance as a collectivizing, catalytic role that empowers the client to use his or her capacity to unleash capacity in community. The strengths of clients and communities can have a major impact on the conditions which generate social problems and which create an unending stream of clients. The Time Banking paradigm challenges the assumptions that ensnare law school clinics and legal services lawyers in an unending cycle of providing justice retail without addressing the causes and the pathologies that generate injustice on a wholesale basis.
Reflective Practice: Challenging Assumptions within Clinical Pedagogy
William Berman, Suffolk University
Jennifer A. Gundlach, Suffolk University
Phyllis Williams Kotey, Florida International UniversityThis session will offer participants the opportunity to identify, utilize and evaluate the process of becoming a more critically reflective instructor within clinical pedagogy. After viewing a video-taped mock supervision session, participants will first consider what assumptions the clinical supervisor may have had and whether those assumptions were valid. We will share some tools and resources for developing reflective practice and then examine how the clinical supervisor’s use of these tools might have helped to challenge the supervisor’s assumptions and enrich the supervision session. There will also be an opportunity to discuss scenarios raised by participants.
Identifying and Challenging Assumptions that Impact the Development of Professional Judgments About Families
Leah Aileen Hill, Fordham University
Lyn Kennedy Slater, Fordham UniversityWhile teaching a clinic that provides interdisciplinary advocacy for low-income families with children who have various disabilities, we have found that students often enter the clinic with very strong opinions about the nature of the cases and assumptions about parenting. As a result, students carry into their work multiple cognitive schemas and assumptions that impact both their interactions with clients as well as how they hear and construct information about and from the client. This session will focus on how we teach our students to identify and challenge the many assumptions they bring to their work with families. We have developed a number of techniques and exercises for helping students and faculty comfortably identify biased assumptions and cognitive schema that impede or impact professional thinking and analysis. We will be demonstrating several exercises we use with students in our clinic seminar. We will be engaging the audience in our demonstration as a way of facilitating discussion and obtaining feedback from participants.
The Power of Innocence: Challenging Assumptions on Law and Clinical Pedagogy -view outline/handout-
Steven A. Drizin, Northwestern University
Keith A. Findley, University of Wisconsin
Jacqueline McMurtrie, University of Washington
Meredith J. Ross, University of WisconsinHow do "innocence cases" challenge our assumptions about the workings of the criminal justice system? About the appropriate perspective and duties ofcriminal justice actors, including prosecutors, defense attorneys, trial and appellate judges, and correctional officials? About the authority and persuasiveness of certain kinds of evidence, including scientific and eyewitness evidence? About the kinds of cases that are appropriate in law school clinics, and the roles that students and clinical supervisors should play in working on those cases? And, finally, about what constitutes an "innocence case" in the first place? Using the case study method, this session will allow participants to explore these issues in depth in small group discussion and in a larger conversation with panelists who teach in three innocence projects nationwide.
The Practitioner and the Clinician: A Structured Conversation About What and How Senior Clinicians and Senior Practitioners Who Recently Became Clinicians Learn From Each Other About Lawyering, Teaching and Learning
Wendy A. Bach, City University of New York -view handout-
Philip M. Genty, Columbia University
Elliott S. Milstein, American University
Ragini N. Shah, Columbia UniversityAs a clinical community we make significant assumptions about the world of lawyering and what constitutes an effective pedagogy to prepare students for that world. As the conference description implies, these assumptions, about, for example, client interviewing, lawyering techniques, the role of a clinician in an interview, or the appropriate topics for clinical work, drive virtually every decision we make. At the same time, across programs, we bring practicing lawyers, of varying degrees of seniority, into the classroom as beginning clinicians. Programs rely on these lawyers to bring “perspectives from the field” into the classroom. These practitioner/teachers bring a deep knowledge of practice, and learning through practice and hold stated and unstated assumptions about what constitutes good lawyering and how lawyers learn in the field. When they enter the clinical world they often learn, from lawyers whose careers have focused on clinical work, about clinical pedagogy and clinical theory. Often it is points of disagreement or difference that cause each of us to ask why we do what we do. This workshop seeks to unpack the assumptions about lawyering, learning and teaching that these two figures – the practicing lawyer turned clinician and the clinician/lawyer – hold, and to explore how dialogues between these figures can lead to better lawyering and better teaching in our programs.
Too Much Talk: Assumptions about Pedagogy, Professionalism, and the Proper Bounds Between Teachers and Students
Lois H. Kanter, Northeastern University
Abbe Smith, Georgetown University
Ilene B. Seidman, Suffolk UniversityThis workshop will examine the assumptions we make -- but too seldom acknowledge -- about teacher-student boundaries in supervision. In the often intimate confines of supervision, we sometimes find ourselves talking about things we wish we weren't talking about. Some of these conversations are prompted by the nature of the work, leading students to reveal their own experience with crime, violence, mental illness, drug addiction. Some of the conversations are prompted by the close teacher-student relationship, leading students to confide family problems, relationship problems, academic problems, health problems. Are these things simply part of the supervisory relationship, or are there limits we can and should draw? At what point is it problematic to engage in these conversations? Then there are students who are resistant to talking at all. How do we get these students to reflect and perhaps even reveal a bit more? Should we let well enough alone with these reticent students and focus on "professional training"? Three experienced clinical teachers want to explore the "instinctive" things we do and don't do in the confines of our offices.
Challenging Our Assumptions about Race
Carl Warren, University of MinnesotaIf only reality filtered through the human mind were objective. Unfortunately, it is not. Our perceptions about people and events and our conduct and decision-making concerning others are heavily influenced by inherent assumptions that seem to us to be as natural and unerring as our senses. This is especially true about the assumptions that we make concerning race. They have profound implications for the practice of law and the administration of justice. This session will explore the prevalence and impact of such assumptions and approaches to teaching our students to challenge them.
Not in My Backyard (or the Poor Next Door): The Future of the Traditional Poverty Law Clinic
Minna J. Kotkin, Brooklyn Law School -view description-
David Jerome Reiss, Brooklyn Law SchoolAs with many other facets of legal education, student consumerism is making itself felt in the clinic. In considering new offerings, the faculty at large and the law school administration are highly conscious of student demand, as well as the public relations value of new and innovative programs – to be touted in the inevitable glossy brochure. But faculty involvement and student consumerism may raise conflicts with some of the original goals of clinical legal education. It is difficult to imagine a proposal for a new in-house landlord-tenant or public assistance clinic garnering much support either from students or faculty today. Judging from the brochures and job opening notices, the hot new clinics are international, transactional, or technological. These offerings may appropriately reflect changes in the nature of law practice, as well as the interests of the student body. They undoubtedly will be well-subscribed. But do they move clinical education away from its underpinnings, both in terms of community service values and of student assumption of the lawyering role? In this session, we hope to pose these questions in the format of snapshots from a faculty meeting in which the clinical curriculum, both externships and in-house programs, is being considered. Among the players will be the curmudgeonly tenured clinical teacher, arguing for the “traditional” clinical values; the progressive newer faculty member, supporting a “broader” perspective on clinical education; and the dean concerned about responding to student interests. We will invite your participation to take on these roles after our initial scenario.
3:45 – 5:00 p.m.
Works-in-Progress (Six Concurrent Sessions)
Coordinators: Richard A. Boswell, University of California, Hastings; Carol Suzuki, University of New Mexico; Michael Pinard, University of Maryland; Katherine R. Kruse, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Jeffrey Jude Pokorak, Suffolk University; Ascanio Piomelli, University of California, Hastings.
Session One
Moderator: Richard A. Boswell, University of California, Hastings“Enlightened Despotism”: Reconsidering the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Public Interest Review
Kim Diana Connolly, University of South CarolinaThe moniker “enlightened despots” was bestowed in June 2006 on the United States Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) by a plurality of the United States Supreme Court. The justification for such harsh criticism was the Corps’ so-called “public interest review,” a multi-step mandatory component of that agency’s individual permitting process. The public interest review, as currently implemented, has at best limited effect in actually securing protection of the public interest by the Corps.
In this article, Kim Diana Connolly calls upon the Corps to reconsider and reclaim its original 1968 approach to reviews of the public interest before issuing any future permits, and to employ that review process to truly protect the public. The article calls into question the developments since 1980 with respect to the review itself. While the Corps claims that “[t]he heart of the Corps regulatory program is the public interest review process, which is designed to produce fair, flexible and balanced permit decisions” Connolly argues that, as implemented today, this review is a far cry from the safety net it claims to be, and in fact may be contrary to statutory requirements and Congressional intent.
The article calls upon the Corps to embrace its role as an “enlightened despot” by reexamining and reclaiming its public interest review regulatory scheme. In so doing, the Corps might actually be able to provide meaningful protection of the public interest.
The Intent-to-Benefit: Individually Enforceable Rights under Treaties
Sital Kalantry, Cornell Law SchoolCitizens of foreign countries are increasingly using international treaties to bring claims against the U.S government. As a result, U.S. courts are being asked to determine whether treaties provide litigants with individually enforceable rights. Although courts have no consistent approach to it, they often apply the textualist methodology derived from statutory interpretation in determining whether a treaty gives rise to individually enforceable rights. Resolution of this issue in favor of individually enforceable rights is particularly beneficial for human rights and humanitarian law treaties, because without individually enforceable rights, those treaties are not likely to be enforced.
Instead of using theories of statutory interpretation, Sital Kalantry argues that courts should apply a modified version of the “intent-to-benefit” test derived from contract law in determining whether a treaty is enforceable by a non-party. Kalantry’s argument rests on three grounds: First, the structural similarities between contracts and treaties (and the correlative differences between statutes and treaties) justify applying the principles derived from contract interpretation to treaty interpretation. Second, Supreme Court jurisprudence supports the view that treaties have the effect of statutes, but are actually contracts. As such, it is appropriate to apply theories of contract interpretation to understanding treaties. Third, arguments used to justify using textualism for purposes of interpreting statutes are not relevant to interpreting treaties.
Kalantry applies the modified intent-to-benefit test to a case study-- the Sanchez-Llamas case, in which the Supreme Court decided last term that the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations does not provide individuals with any remedies.
Session Two
Moderator: Carol Suzuki, University of New MexicoThe Case of the Eroding Special Immigrant Juvenile Status
Wendi J. Adelson, University of MiamiIn this article, Wendi Adelson provides a case study of a larger problem in American administrative law: the creation of unexecuted rights, with a particular focus on the recent degradation of the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) in Miami. Nearly twenty years ago, Congress drafted legislation providing for a pathway to citizenship for unaccompanied minors. In subsequent years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ignored Congress' mandate to issue policy directives that would implement the benefits and privileges associated with SIJS in a manner that would allow eligible persons to take advantage of this status. After explicating the nature of this creeping erosion of the SIJS mandate, especially as it impacts former foster youth with disabilities, Adelson calls for DHS to create clear guidelines that can be implemented in a uniform manner, treating all applicants in a fair and effective manner to clarify and extend the reach of SIJS.
Access to Health Care for Immigrant Families: Challenges and Strategies
Helen Harnett, University of BaltimoreHelen Hartnett explains that as part of the 1996 “welfare reform” legislation, Congress narrowed the range of benefits for which low income immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are qualified. Although low income immigrants continue to qualify for certain programs, use of public benefits by immigrants and their families has declined significantly in the decade since the Welfare Act. In the late 1990s, participation in the Food Assistance Program by the US citizen children of immigrants declined by more than one third. One third of all children who are Medicaid-eligible but not enrolled in the program are the children of immigrants.
Many immigrants do not apply for public benefits out of fear that social service workers will report them to immigration. In their eagerness to be seen as being in compliance with the immigration restrictions of the Welfare Act, states have mandated or allowed frontline staff to require additional information of immigrant applicants. The additional requirements on immigrant-applicants may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In this article, Hartnett identifies barriers to access to health care for immigrants and their families and discusses the reasons why such barriers exist. She analyzes recent strategies used by immigrant advocates to remove the barriers to care. Hartnett then suggests new strategies that would provide the best means of complying with both the Welfare Act and federal civil rights laws.
They’re Not Sex Slaves – They’re Prostitutes: Reforming U.S. Immigration Policies for Victims of Trafficking To Overcome Persistent Cultural Biases
Marisa Silenzi Cianciarulo, Chapman UniversityThe international trafficking of human beings has emerged as one of the most lucrative and far-reaching industries in the world, second only to trafficking in drugs and tied with trafficking in arms. Many victims of international human trafficking, including teenagers and young children, are forced to work in the sex trade. Others work in areas such as agriculture, restaurants and sweatshops. In 2000, in an effort to combat trafficking and encourage trafficking victims to assist in the prosecution of traffickers, the United States enacted the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (“VTVPA”), which created a new visa, called the T visa, for victims of “severe forms of trafficking.” As of August 2006, however, immigration officials had approved only 600 principle T visa applications since the enactment of the visa category.
In this article, Marisa Ciancurulo identifies several problems with the T visa system that may be responsible for its failure to reach more trafficking victims. She calls for significant changes to the T visa process, primarily the establishment of a Trafficking and Exploitation Victims Assistance (TEVA) program designed specifically to facilitate the identification and evaluation of potential T visa beneficiaries. She also suggests interpretations of the T visa statute that recognize the economic and social conditions of the countries of origin of trafficking victims. Ciancurolo concludes that implementing the recommendations will lead to a more humane and effective system for protecting international human trafficking victims and prosecuting traffickers.
Session Three
Moderator: Michael Pinard, University of MarylandDo Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?
Benjamin H. Barton, University of TennesseeIn this article, Benjamin Barton answers the above question with the following predictive jurisprudential hypothesis: we can explain a quite disparate set of legal results, and predict future legal results in a large group of cases, by asking a very simple question. Is there a plausible legal result in this case that will significantly affect the interests of the legal profession (positively or negatively)? If so, the case will always be decided in the way that offers the best result for the legal profession.
Barton presents theoretical support for his hypothesis from the new institutionalism, cognitive psychology and economic theory. The article then gathers and analyzes supporting cases from areas as diverse as constitutional law, torts, professional responsibility, employment law, evidence, and criminal procedure.
The questions considered include: why are lawyers the only American profession to be truly and completely self-regulated? Why is it that the attorney-client privilege is the oldest and most jealously protected professional privilege? Why is it that the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down bans on commercial speech, except for bans on in-person lawyer solicitations and some types of lawyer advertising? Why is it that the Miranda right to consult with an attorney is more protected than the right to remain silent? Why is legal malpractice so much harder to prove than medical malpractice? The article finishes with some of the ramifications of Barton’s hypothesis, including brief consideration of whether our judiciary should be staffed by lawyer-judges at all.
The Children’s Rights Accordion
Erik S. Pitchal, Fordham UniversityIn this article, Erik Pitchal how the rights of children who experience foster care often expand and constrict. Pitchal explains how the 800,000 children who experience foster care each year are among the most deprived members of society. Specifically, a family court has adjudicated most of them abused or neglected; almost all have grown up in poverty; many have special physical, mental health, or educational needs. Pitchal then explains that in part because of these deprivations, when the state takes these children into its custody, they are bestowed with a constellation of rights that their peers who are still living at home do not have. These include substantive rights (such as the right to social work and other services, and the right to be placed in a safe and the most family-like setting possible) and procedural rights—chiefly, the right to an independent attorney in juvenile court proceedings. When parents lose custody of their children to foster care, the parental function is disaggregated, with the child’s lawyer taking on the role of enforcer of rights (among, potentially, other roles).
The goal of the foster care system is ultimately to reunify children with their families of origin or, if that is not possible, to place them in a new adoptive family. In either case, once discharged from state custody, these children lose the rights they had when in substitute care. Having been exposed to and empowered by their temporary status as rights holders, they return to their prior state of childhood, with parents who determine their best interests—not courts or lawyers.
Pitchal argues that this expansion and constriction of children’s rights—the children’s rights accordion—has significant implications for the relationship between the child’s attorney and her client; for family law; and for child welfare policy.
Challenging Assumptions about Criminal Profiling: Court as Profiler
Sharon L. Beckman, Boston CollegeLegal scholars have long questioned the efficacy and fairness of criminal profiling practices that focus law enforcement attention disproportionately on people of color and the poor. The standard account of the problem is that the Supreme Court gives law enforcement authorities too much constitutional leeway which they in turn abuse by engaging in inefficient and socially regressive profiling practices. In addition to improvements in the selection, training, and supervision of law enforcement officers, the usual prescription for progressive reform includes a plea for the Supreme Court to involve itself more in the area of criminal profiling by interpreting the Constitution to restrain the profiling discretion of the police. This article questions the standard account of judicial inaction and suggests that the Supreme Court has in fact directed the operations of the criminal justice system towards some classes of people and away from others with a mode of constitutional analysis that involves the Court in criminal profiling. A close reading of cases in the constitutional criminal area reveals that the Supreme Court’s recognition of a constitutional right against the investigative, condemnatory, or punishment power of the state and federal governments depends in part on the Court’s assessment of the risk that the law or practice in question will burden “innocent law abiding citizens.” This mode of constitutional analysis requires the Court to differentiate between the classes of people likely to be “criminals” and those likely to be “innocent law abiding citizens.” The Justices carry out this predictive enterprise with the same characteristic-based methodology generally referred to as criminal profiling, utilizing profiles presenting the same efficacy and distributional concerns generally associated with criminal profiling by the police. Recognizing the criminal profiling by the Supreme Court, and subjecting this practice to the same scrutiny legal scholars have given to criminal profiling by the police, is helpful in understanding the Court’s contribution to criminal profiling and in assessing the possibilities and challenges for progressive constitutional reform.
Session Four
Moderator: Katherine R. Kruse, University of Nevada, Las VegasBrothers Always Die First: The Failure of the Social Contract and Reinforcement of the Racial Contract that Prohibits the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Black Male Offenders Into a Free Society
Geneva Brown, Valparaiso UniversityJean Jacques Rousseau devised the social contract to balance the individual freedoms of person against the collective will of others: each person puts all his/her power under the supreme direction of the general will, and in the corporate capacity, each member is received as an individual part of the whole. Charles Mills uses Rousseau as the basis of reconfiguring the social contract into a racial contract that has contrarian claims. Mills theorizes that the racial contract is a set of “meta-agreements” between whites to categorize non-whites as inferior morally and legally in status compared to whites. The “contract” gives whites the right to exploit nonwhites and deny them the privileges and opportunities whites enjoy. I examine Rousseau and Mills and theorize a third contract, the criminal-legal contract. The criminal-legal contract surmises that once a person has violated the laws of the free state that that person must be sanctioned. However, once the sanction is established and completed, that person must be allowed to become a full member of the free state again. The racial nature of the criminal justice system disallows sanctioned individuals from ever becoming members of the free state. Regressive laws are enacted to banish individuals from ever participating in the free state, once their sanction is complete. Felons are not allowed to vote; they must inform employers of their legal status; and they may be denied financial aid amongst other reactionary responses. Columbia, Princeton and Harvard have authored studies that show how poorly educated young black men are becoming evermore disconnected from mainstream society. The incarceration rates of young black men have climbed against the climate of decreasing crime overall. If the free society does not allow the inclusion of young black men with criminal records, the criminal-legal contract surmises that this is the absolute failure of the social contract and the reinforcement of Mill’s racial contract.
Interpersonal Power & the Criminal Justice System
Kimberly A. Thomas, The University of MichiganIn this article, I argue that some, non-trivial, portion of cases that end up in the criminal justice system are motivated by the complainant’s desire to assert or reclaim interpersonal power against the defendant. In particular, I argue that poor people use criminal justice system to shape relationships with other poor people and to create or exert power in interpersonal relationships. A simple example might be the use of auto theft allegations to collect on a personal loan or debt; a more nuanced example might be the use of domestic assault laws to have a partner arrested and removed from the home for a few days. These, largely unspoken and unacknowledged, uses of the criminal system raise questions about the purposes of criminal law and the boundaries of the criminal and civil justice systems. I examine features of the current criminal and civil justice systems that suggest that people, and poor people in particular, might seek access to the criminal justice system as a way to exert interpersonal power usually associated with the civil justice system. Among other things, this includes the difficulty of accessing civil legal assistance, as well as social services for mental illness and substance abuse. I also consider the possible repercussions of this use of the criminal justice system and explore possible ways to limit any detrimental effects, as well as the appropriate resolution and punishment for these crimes.
When is a Battered Woman Not a Battered Woman? When She Fights Back
Leigh Goodmark, University of BaltimoreThis article considers how the civil legal system treats battered women who fight back against their abusers. The narratives of women who fight back are fundamentally different than those of the paradigmatic victim; the article looks at those narratives and how the content of those narratives is shaped by the personal and structural contexts within which these women live. The article argues that because these women (particularly African American women and lesbians) do not fit the prevailing stereotype of battered women, courts are skeptical about their stories. That skepticism can mean that women who fight back are denied the protection of the courts, reinforcing some of the conditions that may lead them to fight back initially. The article discusses the unwillingness of advocates for battered women to present the stories of women who fight back as a norm and the implications of those decisions for both battered women and their advocates. The article will conclude that only by telling counterstories can advocates improve the court experience for these women.
Session Five
Moderator: Jeffrey Jude Pokorak, Suffolk UniversityMaking Indigents Pay Civil Court Costs: Florida’s Switch from Waivers to Payment Plans
Sally C. Gertz, Florida State University College of LawIn 2004 the state of Florida became solely responsibility for funding all state courts and sought additional ways to raise revenue for the state court system. Prior to 2004, a statute waived filing fees for indigents in civil cases. In 2004 the legislature eliminated waivers and instead directed clerks to establish payment plans for indigents in civil cases (and to charge an administrative fee for doing so). The legislature also dramatically increased filing fees in civil cases. Little forethought was given to the decision to abolish waivers and substitute payment plans and implementation of the new law has been chaotic. Glitch bills fixed some of the problems, but Clerks around the state interpreted the statute differently as to: 1) how litigants request payment plans, 2) how much could be required “up front”, 3) what fees to include in plans, 4) the duration of plans, 5) the number of payments, 6) the frequency of payments, 7) the size of payments, 8) the right to review of plans, 9) the process for review of plans, and 10) whether final judgment could be withheld until full payment. Most of the nonprisoners being placed on payment plans are indigent women seeking divorces or child support. Fundamental rights are at issue and the state holds a monopoly on the process, so the state cannot deny them access to the courts. This article examines the impact of this change on indigent civil litigants and discusses whether Florida’s new payment plan statute denies them adequate access to the courts. It also examines the impact of this change on the court system.
Anna Moscowitz Kross and the Original Problem-Solving Court Movement: Lessons to Learn from a Lifetime of Criminal Justice Innovation
Mae C. Quinn, University of TennesseeThe modern Problem-Solving Court movement purports to offer an “innovative” approach to handling criminal cases, one that solves problems by addressing the “root causes” of what brings defendants before our courts, rather than merely focusing on the crime charged. In claiming to create a brand new criminal court model, however, today’s specialized criminal court proponents fail to adequately acknowledge that other innovators who came long before them made similar attempts at court reform. This paper seeks to explore the life and work of one such early innovator – Anna Moscowitz Kross - who I argue was responsible for New York’s “original” Problem-Solving Court movement – and offer lessons from her lifetime of criminal justice reform efforts.
I will focus on three early, specialized criminal courts in New York City in which Kross played a central role – the Wayward Minors’ Court for Girls, the Home Term Court, and the Social Court for Men. I seek to raise awareness of these historic and unique venues, which have not been meaningfully addressed in legal scholarship, to better inform discussions about today’s movement. Indeed, these institutions, developed over a half-century ago, share many of the same guiding principles, attributes, and goals as today’s Problem-Solving institutions, and present some of the same potential problems and pitfalls. Given the similarities between today’s specialized criminal courts and those abandoned in decades past, I will suggest that we may be repeating history’s mistakes. I will conclude, therefore, by urging modern “innovators” to spend less time rushing to create the next new experimental, specialized court, and to spend more time acknowledging and studying what has come before.
Ignorance is Effectively Bliss: Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions, Silence and Misinformation
Jenny Roberts, Syracuse UniversityThis article explores the ethical, doctrinal and practical interplay of two rules relating to guilty pleas and “collateral” consequences in criminal cases. First, a plea is “voluntary and knowing” as long as the defendant is aware of its direct consequences, such as the potential sentence and perhaps the parole consequences; a defendant need not be advised of “collateral” consequences, including sex offender registration, involuntary commitment, immigration, housing, employment and benefits. Second, affirmative misinformation about a collateral consequence can render a guilty plea involuntary and unknowing and permit the defendant to withdraw the plea. Indeed, a number of state and federal circuit courts have created an “affirmative misadvice” exception to the collateral consequences rule. Under these doctrines an attorney providing no advice about serious consequences of convictions is effective under the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, but an attorney providing inaccurate advice on the ever-shifting range of collateral consequences will be ineffective.
The article explores the consequences of these rules in the context of sexual offenses and the consequence of involuntary civil commitment. It is difficult to imagine that inaccurate information about the fact that a sex offense conviction that could well lead to civil commitment -- after the end of the criminal sentence, for as long as the rest of the individual’s life – is any worse than no information about this consequence. In either case – no warning, or an erroneous lulling of concerns about civil commitment – a person may well have made a different decision about whether or not to plead guilty.
After examining some of the practical issues and doctrinal inconsistencies raised by the two rules, this article focuses on the ethical dilemma – and troubling message -- set up by rules that allow a total failure to warn defendants about collateral consequences but condemns mistaken advice. The message is: defense lawyers provide effective assistance of counsel if a defendant gets no information whatsoever about the collateral consequence. On the other hand, counsel may be ineffective – and the plea may be involuntary or unknowing - if someone tries to give the defendant information yet is incorrect in that advice. So better to say nothing at all than to risk being wrong, particularly in an area that is likely not within the direct expertise of the lawyer or judge. While it may be comforting to assure ourselves that defense lawyers will not shy away from providing information for fear of an ineffectiveness label, and that trial-level judges are not so concerned about the finality of guilty pleas that they will remain silent about collateral consequences, that will not always – or perhaps even usually – be the case. Most defenders, prosecutors and judges work under crushing caseload conditions. A rule that encourages the cost/time-cutting measure of omitting information about collateral consequences may well have the perverse effect of encouraging silence on such issues. It could also discourage those same parties from educating themselves about the growing and increasingly complex web of collateral consequences, including involuntary civil commitment based on sex offenses, perhaps the harshest consequence of all.
Session Six
Moderator: Ascanio Piomelli, University of California, HastingsTo Create a New Society Within the Shell of the Old: MacIntyre’s Subversive Politics of the Local for Lawyers in and of Communities
James J. Kelly, Jr., University of BaltimoreLucie White, Gerald Lopez, Anthony Alfieri and other theorists of progressive lawyering have strongly embraced postmodernist thought for its focus on social change and its tools for unmasking legal and economic structures as mechanisms of domination. As the quest for civil rights has led to the struggle for economic justice, community development lawyers have increasingly concentrated on efforts to create value in their communities in addition to demanding changes from the government. The move from critique to creation has pointed up the limitations of certain types of postmodernism to generate methods and means of lawyering for social change. Postmodernism’s devastating exposures of modern claims for universal moralities facilitate denunciations by lawyers for the marginalized of rules that sanction and solidify inequality. Deconstructionists’ disdain for normative discourse, however, leaves little for progressive lawyers to build on in their articulation of a more just world.
Alasdair MacIntyre has followed his influential critique of modernity’s universal rationalist approach to moral thought with an alternative ethical understanding based on socially generated practical norms or virtues. More recently, he has begun to articulate the centrality of strong local communities in the development of justice as the political virtue. Rejecting statism and capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with a just society, MacIntyre urges attention to the creation of sustainable networks of giving and receiving that embody the “virtues of acknowledged dependence.”
This article will examine the convergences and tensions between MacIntyre’s approach to moral critique and reconstruction, on the one hand, and models of advocacy and renewal typical of the Community Development Movement, on the other. By looking at how MacIntyre’s vision both intersects and parts ways from such diverse Community Development progenitors as Saul Alinsky and Paolo Freire, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, the article will examine the potential for Revolutionary Aristotelianism, as one commentator has labeled MacIntyre’s political theory, to support a theory of progressive lawyers as community collaborators and participants as well as deconstructing advocates.
Welcome to Hazleton! (“Illegal” Immigrants Beware): Local Immigration Ordinances and What the Federal Government Must Do About It
Karla M. Mc Kanders, Villanova UniversityIn 2006, several states and municipalities across the country passed ordinances against illegal immigration. On July 13, 2006, the city of Hazleton made national news as the first municipality in the country to pass ordinances against illegal immigrants. The ordinances resulted from municipal perceptions that the federal government has failed to enact comprehensive immigration legislation. The proposed ordinances would impose fines on property owners who rent or lease to undocumented immigrants, seize the vehicles of individuals who solicit day laborers, revoke the permits and contracts of businesses that employ undocumented immigrants, and require that all city business be conducted in English. This article focuses on the Hazleton ordinance that sanctions businesses for hiring undocumented workers.
This article delves into the profound impact that municipal ordinances that sanction businesses for employing undocumented workers will have on immigration regulation; and furthers the much-needed discussion on the need for comprehensive immigration reform on a national level by pointing out the dangers of immigration reform when it occurs on a local level. In particular, t he article focuses on the constitutionality of such ordinances as Hazleton’s Illegal Immigration Relief Ordinance. Using the Hazleton employment ordinance as a backdrop for analysis, the article examines the whether the federal immigration employment statutes constitutionally pre-empt Hazleton like employment ordinances. Through this analysis, the article identifies the need for uniform federal immigration laws that are enforced in a consistent and fair manner.
Deeming immigration an issue exclusively within Congress’ power, the article examines the current test for federal pre-emption and finds it lacking. In particular, this article stresses (1) the harsh nature of the ordinances and how they stand as an obstacle to federal implementation of comprehensive legislation; (2) the need for a better preemption framework; and (3) the disparate affects the individual communities and the nation as a whole face as a result of the passage of these ordinances.
This discussion grapples with a problem of dramatic scope. The article concludes with an examination of the policy implications of local immigration regulation. Immigration reform is an area of law that has not only domestic repercussions but foreign policy implications as well. Further, as the number of ordinances passed continues to grow, employment discrimination against immigrants- both legal and illegal- will rise sharply.
Bellow Award Presentation
This year's Bellow Scholars will present their projects. They are:
Alan Lerner, University of Pennsylvania
"Identifying the Red Flags of Child Neglect to Facilitate Evidence-Based Focused Responses"Brenda Bratton Blom, University of Maryland
"The Community Justice Initiative, Community Prosecution Project"Joseph Tulman, District of Columbia School of Law
"Using Disability Rights to Diminish Incarceration"
5:15 – 6:00 p.m.
Reflections and Conversations About the Roots of Clinical Legal Education
Elliott S. Milstein, American University
Collaborations in Post-Katrina Activism: An Informal Opportunity for Law Teachers, Students and Local Providers to Brainstorm and Networks
Nancy L. Cook, Roger Williams University -view outline-
Sunday, May 6, 2007
7:30 – 9:00 a.m.
AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Committees
(see message board in the Foyer for listing of committees and their meeting room locations)
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Challenging Assumptions About Clinical Education: Who We Were, Who We Are, Who We Will Be -view outline-
Jane H. Aiken, Washington University
Nancy L. Cook, Roger Williams University
Kristin Henning, Georgetown University
In this session we will examine ways in which clinical education has progressed, identify the current assumptions about clinic development, and challenge ourselves to create an innovative and vibrant future of clinical education.
10:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Refreshment Break
10:45 a.m. - 12:00 noon
Working Group Discussions
(See the handout in your workshop materials folder for your Working Group assignment and its location)
12:00 noon – 1:30 p.m.
AALS Luncheon
AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Town Hall
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