LawClinic.TV

Reflecting on the Clinic Midway through the Semester

Here are Doug Cutherbertson and Philip Wells talking about their experiences in Fordham's Criminal Defense Clinic at the midway point of the semester. Their comments capture both the predictable sequence of the casework and the unpredictable, indeed unique qualities of each individual we represent. Philip's comment captures the recurring pattern of predictable legal procedures involving always different people and facts.

That aspect of law practice informs one of my central teaching goals in clinical education. I hope to give my students a firm conceptual grounding in legal problem solving so they can focus less on their lawyering and more on the person in front of them. In my experience, technical expertise in a given area of law can be a scaffold upon which creative lawyering and close attention to the unique individual in front of us can stand. I fear that technical expertise is an end in itself for too many of us, rather than the gateway to careful, individualized professional practices.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

Participating in the Criminal Defense Clinic, Whether or Not You Become a Criminal Defense Lawyer

In this clip, Doug Cuthebertson talks about his work in the clinic and closes with the observation that the Criminal Defense Clinic will be a valuable experience, regardless of whether he chooses to practice criminal law.  This is another insightful point from Doug.  Although there is more specialization in law school than there used to be, clinical legal education and legal education overall still aims to graduate lawyers who can go in any number of directions after law school, rather than lawyers with very specific kinds of expertise.  As a clinical teacher, my goal is to offer an experience that will teach my students broadly applicable lessons about the law and lawyering, through the criminal defense clinic. 

Here Doug Cuthbertson also talks about how we come to represent our clients.  As he notes, we work with New York County Defender Services, one of the two trial level public defender groups in Manhattan.  As Doug notes, our clients don't get the initial say in whether we, or a lawyer from County Defender, first interviews them, but of course if a client does not consent to student representation, he or she would be represented by a lawyer from the County Defender or another licensed attorney, rather than a student permitted to practice under supervision.  I have been involved in clinical legal education for more than twenty years and I can count the clients who have refused student representation on one hand.  I think most people are impressed by how prepared the students are and appreciate that my students and I are going to work hard on their behalf.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

Who's Who at Law Clinic TV

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One of the great pleasures of teaching in our law clinic is that every semester I meet a new group of wonderful people. In this clip you meet Cheryl Thill, Douglas Cuthbertson, Ilana Friedman and Phillip Wells, all of whom are enrolled in the Fordham Criminal Defense Clinic this semester. 

I think the clip conveys a bit of how interesting, insightful and smart they are and I can vouch for the fact that they are great to work with.  I can also assure you that my praise for them is not just my effort to validate a choice I might have made to let them into my clinic. 

Enrollment in the Criminal Defense Clinic is open to any Fordham Law student who has completed their first year at the law school and who has also taken our Fundamental Lawyering Skills course.  We give priority to third years over second years and we also favor those who may have applied in previous semesters over those who did not.  Although some students may have to wait a semester for a space to open up, most everyone who wants to take our clinic will have the opportunity in the course of their time at the Law School. 

I am just lucky to have great students.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

Arraignments - Meeting Our Client for the First Time

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Here are Phillip Wells, Doug Cuthbertson and Cheryl Thill, three students in Fordham's Criminal Defense Clinic, talking about the first time they went to court to represent a client at his or her arraignment, which is a person's first appearance in court after he or she has been arrested.

Our clinic meets new clients on Wednesday morning.  Our clients are typically arrested sometime on Tuesday afternoon or evening and have been shuttled through various holding cells for the 12 to 20 hours before we meet with them.  We arrive at the courthouse at about 8:15am, and by 9:00 or 9:15 we are in the interview rooms attached to the holding cell behind the arraignment courtroom, introducing ourselves and starting to interview. 

I very much identify with Phillip's comments about how hard some of us find the time leading up to the experience.  Like Phillip, I often find it easier to be performing than looking forward to the performance.  But my actor friends assure me that almost everyone feels that way and the goal is to come to terms with that feeling because most of us are never going to succeed in banishing it.   

Doug's first comment pivots on the moment when we actually meet our client.  As he notes, we learn some basic demographic information from the court papers, but the magic moment comes when we go in the back and yell out the person's name (yes, you have to yell it out and many first timers find that moment rather indecorous and perhaps inconsistent with the magisterial view of the law that law school offers).  At that moment, the whole abstract enterprise of practicing law becomes very specific.  That is when we begin to learn about the person who is our client. 

Cheryl's comment captures how quickly things move in arraignment.  Once we are in front of the judge, we have less than five minutes, often less than three minutes to work through all the formal notices required by law, accept or reject a plea offer, argue for our client's immediate release and determine the proper procedural posture of the case, if it is going to be further litigated.  It can be quite overwhelming, but Phillip, Doug and Cheryl each did a fine job for our client. They all got their clients released on their own recognizance and each is now at liberty, fighting the charges.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

Representing Groups - Another Opportunity to Think About Working With Non-Lawyers

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Fordham's Urban Policy Clinic was founded by my colleague Professor Liz Cooper. As Liz notes in a previous post, her clinic typically represents groups. That is just one aspect of the work that makes it different from the single client oriented litigation style clinic, such as the Criminal Defense Clinic I supervise with Prof. Cheryl Bader. 

In Liz's practice, as is often the case with my colleague Brian Glick's Community Economic Development Clinic, which is described in this post, lawyers face the challenges, and reap the benefits, of group decision making. They must think about who speaks for the group and how decisions are made. Lawyers can play a key role in facilitating effective collaboration among group participants, many of whom bring perspectives and areas of expertise which the lawyers must understand and appreciate. While our colleagues in our interdisciplinary clinic have thought more about interdisciplinary work than many of us, I think all of us are aware of the power of reaching beyond the law. 

In this clip, Sara Upton, a student in the Urban Policy Clinic, talks about her work on a team that represented a group seeking policy reform. The group she worked with was Fordham's Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy, a collaboration among our Law School, our Graduate School of Social Services and the Psychology Department of our Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Sara reflects upon how fulfilling it was for her to work with people who came from a variety of backgrounds to accomplish a common goal.

I think that is a common experience for all of us who work with other professionals to solve our clients' problems. As much as I respect the powerful role the law plays in
America, so many problems clients bring to lawyers have significant non-legal elements. The law often provides an entry point or a focus for action, but it does not provide the full answer. That is why so many of us in the Fordham clinical program think about interprofessional collaboration and urge our students to explore the challenges and rewards of working with people outside our own profession.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Interdisciplinary Clinic, Urban Policy, Child Advocacy, Family Advocacy, Collaboration

Students in a Policy Clinic - Seeing the Big Picture

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Here is Sara Upton, a student in Professor Elizabeth Cooper's Urban Policy Clinic,  describing one of her projects in the clinic. Sara does a fine job describing her work and communicating how much the experience meant to her, so I need not belabor that. But I will say that as I listened to Sara, I was struck by how brave she and her colleagues must be to take on such unstructured problems and work through the process of creating useful solutions.

It seems to me that the policy lawyer faces the awesome blank-sheet-of-paper-problem: what is the best, or least a better way, to deal with this issue? In my work, criminal defense, the stakes can be high and creativity is always required, if not always found, but we know we will defend our clients in court and the case will turn on law of some sort or historical facts. The policy lawyer's choices, however, can range across many kinds of institutions and modes of analysis. From my perspective, it seems daunting and I admire Sara and all the students who take on these challenges. 

-- Ian Weinstein 

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

Contacts and Context - The Bonds That Make for Memory

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I have been thinking lately about the power of experiential learning as I have been finishing an article that will soon be published in the Clinical Law Review, “Teaching Reflective Lawyering in a Small Case Litigation Clinic: A Love Letter to my Clinic.” I have tried to describe how the shared experience of a clinical semester helps my students develop a complex, nuanced and deeply moral model of lawyerly problem solving.

I think the relationships my students develop with their clients and with each other, are a very important part of the process. When it works well, reflection on the professional aspects of those relationships is at the core of the clinical experience. I think that is how I refined my professional interpersonal skills and I think that is part of the reason why the friendships formed in clinics and other active contexts are often deeper and more long lasting than other law school friendships. That is what I hear in the comments of Sara Upton and Gina DelChiaro in this clip.

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In this clip, Gina DelChiaro talks about how her clinical experience came up in interviews and was one of the things that gave her a foothold when she first started work. Both those observations hold true for many people and reflect an important feature of clinical education. Clinics present us with the kinds of real, complex and textured situations that confront lawyers. Interviewers often ask about experience with real problems so they can listen to whether the interviewee "sounds like a lawyer" -- one of those “I am not sure I can define it, but I know it when I hear it” sort of things.

I hope this will motivate the thought I am offering: Complex lawyering situations are analyzable into simpler constituent parts or elements, as we often call them in the law.

For example, a client will present a problem that requires analysis of a statute, understanding the client's goals and helping the client make a decision. The classroom can provide a good setting in which to learn to analyze a statute and also think about client autonomy and the process of decision making. But the clinic is the place where you can put those elements together and see how the whole, complex, interdependent process fits together.

The whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts and, in my experience, good lawyers add the most value through their higher order problem solving skills - the process of putting all the pieces together.

For me, that higher order integration has always had a strong intuitive feel; I either see the whole or I don't and while I have spent a lot of time thinking about that process, I still find it powerful and a bit mysterious. But I usually recognize that skill when I hear others exercise it and I also derive real comfort from the feeling of having a complex situation fall into a discernible pattern or present a recognizable path.

-- Ian Weinstein 

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

Preparing for the First Time with a Simulation Class - The Power of the Experiential Method

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Standing up in front of a judge for the first time was a powerful experience for me. I can still remember looking down and seeing my tie bouncing on my shirtfront, propelled by my racing heart. Clinical legal educators have a variety of approaches to the problem of preparing students for those first real lawyering moments. In my August 15 post I tell you how we prepare students. In this post, I am pleased to show you how we do it. 

In this clip you see three students currently in our Criminal Defense Clinic and a little of their work in our arraignment simulation class. In order of appearance, the speakers are Doug Cuthbertson,Cheryl Thill and Philip Wells. I am struck by how brave my students are. It is no small thing to stand up in front of your colleagues and execute a complex, multi-dimensional task for the first time. But they put themselves out there, and then they critique their own performances and try it again. In that class we did two full rounds of arraignment simulations with plenty of discussion and do-overs. It is so gratifying to watch them progress so far in just three hours. 

Doug's comment at the end is typically modest. He reports that at the end, he "felt OK." We did these simulations on a Monday. That Wednesday he went to court and represented two clients. Today he was in there again and did very nice work, as did all his colleagues. This experiential learning can be very powerful stuff.

-- Ian Weinstein 

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Experiential Learning, Simulations

Lawyers as Policy Advocates - Change at the Wholesale Level

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Here is my dear pal and visionary colleague Professor Elizabeth Cooper, who runs our Urban Policy Clinic. Toward the end of this clip Liz mentions, in passing, a legislative success from last spring. Her modesty is typical and becoming, but if you know anything about the New York State Legislature, you will appreciate how extraordinary an achievement it was for Liz, her students and her colleagues to shepherd a piece of legislation through Albany in about five months. 

The bill made it possible for young people between the ages of 18 and 21, who had been in foster care and whose legal guardians had died, to receive all the state benefits to which they were entitled while they remained in college. Until this legislative fix was enacted, those young people were denied benefits only because there was no adult through whom the benefits could flow. It was a wonderful piece of work by Liz, her students and the groups with which they worked.

-- Ian Weinstein 

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Urban Policy, New York State Legislature, Foster Care, Albany