LawClinic.TV

The History of “Corroboration”

Clinical Legal Education offers the opportunity to learn on so many levels.  In a recent post Ilana Friedman talked about some big issues in criminal justice and criminal defense practice in America. 

In this clip, Cheryl Thill talks about a more technical matter, the requirement in New York law that every misdemeanor charge be supported by a sworn statement from a person with first hand knowledge.  Known in courthouse parlance as "corroboration," this procedural step looms large in our practice in New York County Criminal Court and listening to Cheryl's discussion reminds me how many important legal concepts are embedded in this simple procedural requirement.

The requirement for first person knowledge, as opposed to second hand or hearsay evidence, reflects the long settled distrust of hearsay evidence in Anglo-American law and our broader concern about both the quality and quantity of evidence used to prove a point.  The ancient common law had concerns about hearsay evidence - rules regulating hearsay began to firm up in the late 17th Century, developed through the 18th and took a form familiar to contemporary lawyers by the early 19th Century.

In our cases, New York State Law requires that the state file a charging document with every element of the offense supported by evidentiary facts sworn to by a person with firsthand knowledge.  Person number 1 repeating what person number 2 said about what he or she saw is not good enough.

The legal obligation for the prosecutor to support a criminal charge with some evidence (whatever the quality of that evidence must be) in order to bring a case on for trial is older still, with the grand jury (which must pass on whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a felony case to trial) traceable to 1166, just 100 years after the Norman Conquest of England.  We have long been concerned about the burden of being brought to trial, even if one is acquitted, and we fear the power of an accuser to simply accuse without any substantial proof. 

Cheryl also talks about the time limits within which the prosecutor must file a corroborating affidavit. Time limits are another ancient feature of criminal law, with statutes of limitations, constitutional speedy trial requirements and statutory speedy trial rights each having long pedigrees in Anglo-American law. Time limits loom very large in our practice and in many other busy lower criminal courts in America, where there is often significant pressure to process a large number of cases within strict time limits. 

Although Cheryl is talking about a rather technical point of New York State Criminal Procedure, she is also tapping into a rich vein of learning and ancient tradition in our law.  One of the things I so enjoy about being a lawyer who teaches and practices in a legal clinic is the opportunity to see the law from many different perspectives - in this case from the ground and technical detail up to the heavens and the most abstract and ancient of concerns.

-- Ian Weinstein

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

 

Step-by-Step: From Client Arrest to Release

In this clip Phillip Wells tells you about how the student lawyers in the Fordham Criminal Defense Clinic meet their clients. 

One of the things that gives that process such power is that all of our clients are in jail when we first meet them and our first goal is to get them released. Walking out the back door of the courtroom with a client who came in from the jail cells behind the judge's bench still gives me a thrill. 

Phillip's comments strike me as admirably concrete and client-centered. I like the way he recognizes the intensity of the arrest and release experience for many clients and the ways that experience can shape a client's behavior. So many of us start out thinking that our clients are responding primarily to us. A clinical legal education experience can be a great way of helping us start to get past our fascination with ourselves and start thinking about things from other perspectives. 

-- Ian Weinstein

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

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

Hands-On Fighting Homelessness - Working to Help NYC's Poorest Residents

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In this next clip, John Feerick (see earlier post) talks about the impact his work as one of three Special Masters on Homelessness appointed by the city of New York (here’s a New York Times article about the impact the Masters’ work has had on him.  I find it extraordinary and inspiring that this fantastically accomplished man sought out these experiences and was so open to really seeing and learning about poverty in NYC at this time in his life.  His frank admission that despite all he had done and seen, he really had not had this kind of first-hand experience with the conditions under which too many live in New York strikes me as so very honest and insightful.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic,  Legal Education, Homelessness, New York City

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

Interdisciplinary Clinics - The Lawyer's View Is Not The Only Perspective

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Two earlier posts discussed the importance of collaboration and teamwork between and among lawyers. But lawyers also need to work with other professionals, although we are not always so good at it. I recall one of my law school professors, Steve Gillers, a leading voice on lawyer's ethics and professional responsibility, noting that lawyers divided the world into lawyers and non-lawyers and then asking whether we should also divide the world into dentists and non-dentists. We all laughed, but I took him to be warning us against insularity and the point stuck with me.

Clinical legal education fights lawyerly insularity in many ways, I hope. Its historic commitment to training us to try to see things from the client's point of view, the much discussed client centered approach, was a big advance in the 1980s and is still a central insight, for which we all owe thanks to our UCLA colleagues David Binder, Paul Bergman and Susan Price.

More recently, the burgeoning movement toward interdisciplinary work has struck another blow against insularity. Interdisciplinary work in clinical education takes multiple forms. At Fordham we have been fortunate to have Professor Lyn Slater, a member of the faculty of our School  of Social Servicesat the law clinic and engaged in team teaching in our interdisciplinary Family Advocacy Clinic. Lyn brings so much to our work in the legal clinic.

One of the key things Lyn has taught me is that when lawyers work with other professionals, we should understand that other professions have distinct modes of analysis which should be celebrated, not subsumed. Too often lawyers try to tell other professionals how they fit into the legal work, rather than thinking about how the other professionals can help the lawyers re-conceptualize the legal work or how the other professionals can offer services and add value in ways that are beyond what lawyers can offer.

As evidence for the success of my colleagues engaged in interdisciplinary work, I offer this insightful comment by Amanda Raboy, a student in the interdisciplinary clinic who is blessed to start out with a broad, inclusive view of the value of working with other professionals, rather than the more common lawyer-centric view of the professional world.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Legal Ethics, Professional Responsibility, Family Advocacy, Paul Bergman, School of Social Services, Interdisciplinary Education