LawClinic.TV

Challenging The Restaurant Business and Changing the World

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In this clip, Fekkak Mamdouh, one of the founding members of the worker owned cooperative restaurant Colors, and Saru Jayaraman, a founder of Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY),  an organizing group for restaurant workers, talk about the role Professor Brian Glick, and his students in Fordham's Community Economic Development Clinic played in the challenging process of creating a worker owned restaurant. Mr. Mamdouh and Ms. Jayaraman had a wonderfully creative vision, but making it a reality was quite a task.

The restaurant business is very tough and competitive. While they had the benefit of a pool of tremendously talented workers who had helped create a truly great restaurant at Windows on the World, their vision went way beyond the food and the dining experience. They envisioned Colors as a place where all the workers would share in decision making and profits; a fine restaurant that would also help to change the world.

This was the challenge they set for themselves and shared with Brian and his students. Here they talk about how important it was to get the legal aspects of this new venture correct and to use the structure the law and lawyers can provide to help them through the difficult and largely uncharted waters upon which they set sail. These two very dynamic and creative people had a powerful vision and found just the lawyer they needed in my colleague Brian Glick, about whom I will say more in my upcoming post.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Windows on the World, Community Economic Development, World Trade Center

Colors: The Worker Owned Restaurant That Grew From The Ashes Of The World Trade Center - With A Little Help From The Fordham Law Clinic

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This is the story of a group of surviving workers from Windows on the World, the restaurant that was at the top of one of the towers of the World Trade Center, and how they created a wonderful worker owned restaurant in tribute to and memory of their colleagues. Fordham's Community Economic Development Clinic had the privilege of working on this groundbreaking project and helping the workers realize their bold plan.

Fekkak Mamdouh, who we first see in this clip, lost many friends on 9/11, when the restaurant, in which he had worked for years, was destroyed while breakfast was being served. In this clip he talks about how the vision for that new restaurant, Colors, formed in the days after the attack, as he and Saru Jayaraman, a lawyer and organizer, struggled, like so many New Yorkers, to imagine the post-9/11 world. Out of their conversations came Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), an organizing group for restaurant workers, out of which Colors grew.

As Fekkak, Saru and Diana Adams-Ciardulo, a Fordham Law Student describe, Colors developed into a worker owned cooperative restaurant, whose members mirror the tremendous diversity that characterized the people who worked at Windows on the World and virtually all restaurants in New York City. In this, and a series of other posts, it is my privilege to share the story of Colors and the assistance my colleague, Professor Brian Glick and his students in Fordham's Community Economic Development Clinic provided as the restaurant took shape. There is a fascinating story behind the fabulous food and beautiful decor at Colors Restaurant.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, World Trade Center, Windows on the World, Community Economic Development

Investing In Relationships - The Core of Clinical Legal Education

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Those of us who teach in legal clinics have the privilege of spending a lot of time with our students and building relationships with them. For many students, those are their first professional relationships and we are among the first lawyers they get to observe up close, over an extended period of time.

So much of what the students take away from their clinical experience comes not from the conscious moments of teaching, when we execute a thought out plan for presenting ideas, but from the many moments of doing, when our conscious thoughts are on our clients and the tasks at hand. That was certainly my experience as a clinic student.

In this clip, my colleague Cheryl Bader, who co-teaches the Criminal Defense Clinic at Fordham with me, beautifully captures the joy of watching the students grow. I really like this clip. Watch the way Cheryl warms to the topic and the little smile that begins to play across her face as she talks about, and experiences in memory, her students' professional growth and development.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Blawg

Forensic Psychology Shapes Fordham Criminal Defense Clinic Students’ Sense of Legal Culture

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Fordham's Criminal Defense Clinic has an interdisciplinary component. We work with a graduate student in Forensic Psychology. In this clip my colleague, Professor Cheryl Bader, with whom I have had the great pleasure of teaching for the past several years, talks about the role those grad students play. In addition to working with our students on particular cases, the forensic psych students attend our weekly seminar and often are involved in team supervision meetings and casual conversations. I have come to greatly value their insights and observations about the legal system, our class discussion and a wide variety of matters.

So much of law school is about developing a professional identity and learning to think like a lawyer. That work requires immersion in the legal culture and I think there is a great deal of good that comes from the powerful shaping of identity that takes place over the course of a legal education (I know many disagree, but I still adhere to the old idea that the private bar's commitment to the rule of law is a very important safeguard of liberty and an important limit on official power). But I have also come to see that the immersion in legal culture should be leavened by significant exposure to other professional cultures and modes of thought. Like travel abroad, working with other professionals in law school should make us better members of our own culture - more appreciative of its strengths and more honest about its limits.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham University, Law School, Interdisciplinary Education, Legal Culture

The Basic Insight - Hey, There Are Other People Besides the Lawyers

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Big ideas often come from basic insights, as my colleague Leah Hill reminds us in this clip. Leah has a talent for listening to a long discussion at a clinic faculty meeting (and boy, can those discussions be lengthy) and then making a brief, simple sounding observation that cuts to the heart of the matter and puts the whole thing in perspective. Here, she notes that folks from other professions and disciplines make many of the decisions in the child welfare bureaucracy and that she came to recognize that clients would be best served if they too had access to professionals in addition to lawyers.

While Leah and some of my other colleagues saw the need for involving other professionals in our work, I think it was really our colleague Lyn Slater,a faculty member from the School of Social Services, who pushed us to understand that interdisciplinary work required more than just calling upon other disciplines when we, as lawyers, thought we needed an evaluation or a report. We need to understand the work and expertise of our colleagues from other disciplines and respect their insights into the ways they could help our clients realize their goals.

In this clip,  Lyn Slater offers two ways that she and others with social service expertise can help clients, as she notes that other professionals bring different modes of analysis and can offer other valuable services to clients.

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-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Interdisciplinary Education, School of Social Services