Teaching From The Back Of The Room - Brian Glick's Clinic And Colors, The Worker Owned Restaurant

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In this clip, Fekkak Mamdouh, one of the workers who founded the worker owned restaurant Colors, Saru Jayaraman, a lawyer and organizer, who founded Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), an organizing group for restaurant workers, Diana Adams-Ciardulo, a Fordham Law Student and Juan Carlos Stolberg, also a Fordham Law Student, talk about the work Fordham Law Clinic students did on behalf of the worker cooperative and how Professor Brian Glick supervised the work. You won't see Brian in this clip, but that captures how he went about this task.

Mr. Mamdouh is so typically perceptive as he describes Brian sitting in the back of room at meetings, giving the leading role to the students in his clinic. I know how much work went into preparing for those meetings. Sure, Brian could have run the meetings instead of the students, but that is not the way we usually do things in clinical legal education and it is very much not the way Brian operates. Indeed, on this project, it would have been particularly ironic if a worker cooperative, which stresses participation, had been brought into being with the help of a traditionally hierarchical lawyer, but ironies abound. After all, the shoemaker's children are proverbially barefoot.

Brian's commitment to putting his students out front is only one part of his broader commitment to democracy and pushing power down to each and every member of any group. He lawyers and teaches the way he lives and I admire him greatly for that consistency. This clip gives you a good sense of just how successful Brian was, and is, at teaching from the back of the room. The students' smiles say so much as they describe how much the work they did means to them. I am also so moved by the students' evident commitment to, and deep respect for, their clients, something I know Brian powerfully modeled.

Here, Brian and his students talk about the work they did with the workers who formed Colors. We hear them talk about taxes, leases and operating agreements, the daily fare of the transactional lawyer. Too often we think that deals are the province of the rich, but Brian is a very experienced transactional lawyer who has always worked on these issues from the perspective of the poor and disenfranchised. He has helped to transfer a lot of wealth in his career, moving resources to those who most need them and paying attention to process as well as outcome and leaving many people and organizations much better than when they first met him.

-- 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

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