Sometimes lost in the discussion of why law school clinics have value is the clinic\u2019s role in helping students develop their public interest calling and voice. Certainly, clinics are great places to learn practice skills and develop a professional identity\u2014by lawyering under the supervision of an attorney, particularly in the intense setting of a clinic with real clients who have real problems, students learn to be good lawyers.<\/p>\n
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However, perhaps as important are students taking clinics to develop their public interest voices. A frequent complaint of longtime clinical teachers is that as law schools focus more on teaching skills, clinics are losing their social justice missions and public interest teaching. I have had the opportunity to hear about this regularly over the past few weeks. At Penn Law, I had the chance to hear Barry Scheck from Cardozo Law talk about how clinical programs must necessarily have a social justice voice and how his innocence work was intentionally designed to be part of a clinic instead of a public defender\u2019s office, in part to maintain this focus for students. Also at Penn, Samir Ashar from Cal Irvine spoke of teaching students to lawyer for the poor while thinking about who clients are within their communities and how to strengthen those communities. At Yale\u2019s Rebellious Lawyering Conference, I heard students and professors alike discuss social justice agendas and what students were doing in their clinics to further them. This mirrored comments made to me a few years ago by a Yale clinical fellow,who told me that if a student was interested in the lives of the poor and social justice generally, there was no question they would be in a clinic\u2014that is where public interest and social justice is learned and expressed.<\/p>\n
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As students come through my clinic, they certainly develop skills through the administrative hearings, disability planning, and other legal work they do. But like is true in many of our clinics, they learn about their social justice voice by diving into the community and learning. One student this semester went to a prison to interview a client, getting to see some of what life is like for the prisoner there while discovering how our welfare system fails to help people prepare for leaving prison. Another saw clients at Liberty Resources, our Center for Independent Living, and got to see how people with illnesses and disabilities struggle to maintain independent lives due to intentional and unintentional barriers that are hard to overcome. Two students are developing an intake site at Temple Hospital\u2019s Cancer Center, learning about legal struggles that accompany illness that can be exacerbated by poverty.\u00a0\u00a0 Each of these students has the opportunity to perform social justice and public interest work by helping the clients they see. They also have the opportunity to think about what they see generally, interact with other professionals working with those clients, and think through what their roles could be after the clinic is over. As I am most familiar with other internal clinics at the law school, I know that professors at each of them could tell similar stories about how students learn about what is going on in the world for the poor and legally underserved and where they\u00a0can insert themselves as law students and later as graduates, either by taking on public interest jobs or by taking on public interest work as part of their private practice. Next academic year, as our Community Lawyering Clinic keeps working with people with disabilities, cancer and HIV but focuses more on being in the community and as the makes connections with students in\u00a0the Poverty Law class I will teach, the opportunity for students to develop their public interest selves will continue.<\/p>\n
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Helping students find and develop their public interest voice is one of the things that many of us who teach in the clinics really value, as do students and employers. Although clinics can be the best place to learn skills, let\u2019s make sure that clinics maintain this social justice focus in this moment in legal education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes lost in the discussion of why law school clinics have value is the clinic\u2019s role in helping students develop their public interest calling and…<\/p>\n