LawClinic.TV

What We Learn In A Clinic Semester

In this clip, my colleague, Cheryl Bader, and I, talk about where students often start and where they end up.  As I listen, I am struck by how much we are talking about feelings and relationships and how little we have to say about rights, the law and all that.  It reminds me that the clinic is just one part of law school and is best understood as part of that larger institution.  Although some of my clinical colleagues may disagree, I would not want law school to be all and only the clinic or if it were, the clinic would be very different.

Our students come to us already steeped in the discourses of rights, obligations and process.  The first year of law school is a powerful experience.  Some think the clinic should help students unlearn first year, but I think the clinic should leaven, broaden and deepen first year.  I guess I am still a very traditional law professor and lawyer.   I can stress lawyer role and relationship in the clinic because my students are already thinking about rights and rules and our legal work reinforces those messages.  When I teach first year, I stress the abstractions, because that is the time for them and I know my first year course, like my clinic, is just one part of the whole that makes up a legal education.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

The Process is the Punishment

In this clip I start from the title of Malcolm Feeley's classic study of the lower criminal courts, The Process is the Punishment.  First published in 1979, the book remains a defining text for anyone interested in how minor crimes are treated in America's courts.   It captures a central truth for most of the clients we represent in Fordham's Criminal Defense Clinic.  Whatever happens in the case, most of our clients receive their punishment before their case is resolved.  The night they spend in jail before their arraignment is likely to be the only jail time that results from the case.   Their repeated court appearances are likely to be all the contact they will have with the court, as so many of the cases are eventually dismissed or resolved with dispositions that result in no formal sanction.

Although I don't say this in the clip, I am not sure it is a bad thing that there is frequently no punishment beyond the process of resolving the case.  Some data suggests that almost all the crime control benefits of the enforcement of minor crimes (to the degree there are crime control benefits) come from arrest, with conviction and sanctions flowing from conviction adding very little, if anything.  In this era of serious collateral consequences, when people can lose their jobs, apartments or immigration status after conviction of a minor offense, letting the process be the punishment may make for more proportionate and effective punishment.

But as I go on to note in the clip, the punishment exacted by the process can be very onerous and seem illegitimate.  So many of our clients could receive a summons and a predictable sanction could flow from that summons, but that is not how it is done in New York City.  Many folks spend the night in jail after a minor transgression, which can shift the focus from their transgression to the system's overreaction.  From a teaching standpoint, there is much to be learned from the highly charged hours my students spend with their new clients, soon after their arrest.  From the policy perspective, I am not sure it is the best way to run a criminal justice system.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

Students Reflect on Justice and Guilt

In this clip, Phillip Wells, Doug Cutherbertson, Cheryl Thill and my colleague, Prof. Gemma Solimene, offer reflections on the question that people I have just met at cocktail parties most commonly ask me when I tell them I am a criminal defense lawyer - how can you defend those people.  I think people usually mean, how can we defend people accused of crimes, many of whom are, in fact, guilty?   

Although many of us worried about that question when we first started doing the work, in my case many years ago, almost every criminal defense practitioner soon learns that clients are people in crisis, who have lots of other people working against their interests.  For some of us, there is the thrill of being that person's only partisan; others are motivated by a desire to buck the authority of government officials.  I have always been moved by the very human needs of the person in front of me. 

I agree with Phillip.  Everyone deserves an advocate. I suppose some may speculate on the psychological factors that push some of us toward defense work  and some of us toward prosecution, but whatever gives rise to those differences, the system depends on vigorous lawyers on both sides.  I think most people understand that intellectually, but when they first meet a criminal defense lawyer, their hearts often ask - how can you defend those people - and it is important for those of us who do the work to remember how the experience changes us.

-- Ian Weinstein

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