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Over the past 10 days, Temple Law students in the Community Lawyering Clinic at the Temple Legal Aid Office have represented four clients seeking disability…

Sometimes lost in the discussion of why law school clinics have value is the clinic’s role in helping students develop their public interest calling and…

My students are probably tired of hearing me talk about how lawyering was almost thirty years ago, when lawyers were lawyers and did not let…

Over the past few years, the value of “bespoke” or personalized legal services has been challenged.  My experiences over the last few months suggest that…

News today that Pennsylvania is withdrawing its Healthy PA Medical Assistance (Medicaid) plan for what should be a much more comprehensive and simpler Medicaid Expansion should be welcome news for the poor in Pennsylvania.  Since Healthy PA was implemented, our Legal Aid office has been receiving calls about it from clients describing ways it was cutting their health care coverage.  For example, one client diagnosed with lymphoma last fall found himself categorized by the state as not needing full coverage and was put into a new private insurance plan in the midst of his treatment.  Potentially, that lesser plan would not have covered his treatment and the physical and mental health problems he developed due to his diagnosis.  Under the “traditional” Medicaid Expansion the state is planning to choose, he should now be covered, as will many more of our clients suffering with HIV, cancer and disabilities who will more likely be able to live independently in the community.

As a teacher in the Temple Legal Aid Office, I have the chance with my students to watch the way the poor face life and how government decisions on how to help those seeking help really matter.  Although Medicaid Expansion is a start

My students get tired of hearing me saying that lawyering is all about empathy. (See, at least I understand my students’ feelings!) A lawyer cannot practice effectively without understanding their clients’ situations from their clients’ points of view, recognizing their clients’ emotions to the extent they play a role in their legal decision making, identifying what having a lawyer and utilizing the legal system means to them, and knowing what their clients’ visions of a successful outcome is.

My study of this over the summer led me to Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. In it, Jamison writes essays that explore people’s emotions and mindsets. Her subjects range from athletes who participate in the Barkley Marathons, a race where people cover over 100 miles over several days through almost impossible terrain and torturous obstacles that almost no one completes; a prisoner who was one of those athletes, looking particularly at what confinement means to a person whose daily life as an endurance athlete involves active movement that prison takes away; people with Morgollons, a disease where people believe thread or other matter is growing out of them, a condition that they clearly believe is very real that others question; and parents of child murder victims of the West Memphis Three, looking at how their grief is taken away from them and turned to anger when perpetrators are identified, and then looking at their subsequent feelings when it becomes clear that those alleged perpetrators might not have done it. She even tries to explain and understand the artistic genre she calls “wounded women”—the Ani DiFranco, Sylvia Plath, Carrie expressions of female pain (I admit that I struggled with this one).

At a public hearing of the PA Long Term Care Commission focusing  on funding priorities for long-term care in light of the Affordable Care Act,…

Over the past two weeks, the Temple Legal Aid Office represented six clients at hearings before Administrative Law Judges to obtain Social Security Disability and…

Rising 2L Jeremy Giatras had a very productive summer at TLAO!  Along with working with clients at Action AIDS and Liberty Resources and preparing cases…