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On Temple Lawyers, Mentorship, and Starbursts: Notes from the Breakfast of Champions

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Before law school, I was a community organizer for the Children’s Defense Fund, a national child advocacy organization founded and directed by the extraordinary and inimitable civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman.  In her book, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, Edelman writes of “the crucial influences of the natural daily mentors” in her life, whom she refers to as “lanterns” who lit her path from her small hometown in Benettsville, South Carolina, to Spelman College, to Yale Law School, to the front lines of the civil rights struggle, to the founding of the Children’s Defense Fund.  Like Edelman, the path of my own career has been lit by mentors, who showed me what was possible and bolstered my confidence along the way.  I would not have decided to attend law school or pursued a public interest career were it not for my own mentors.  And I have done my best to light the path of others.  I am grateful that my role as a clinical professor at Temple Law affords me an ongoing opportunity to …

IP Moot Court: Leaving your Comfort Zone

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This year, I had the honor of being one of four team members to represent Temple Law in the American Intellectual Property Law Association Moot Court Competition. Temple traditionally fields two teams of two students, and this year’s regional competition was held in Boston. Intellectual property is an umbrella term covering several discrete areas of law. This year’s problem had a patent issue and a jurisdictional issue. The problem was released in the fall of 2017 and my teammate and I started working on it in October. We were fortunate enough to be coached by Temple Law professor Don Harris and Assistant Dean Shyam Nair. The first thing we had to do was write two briefs, one for each party. It took a certain amount of mental gymnastics to advocate for one party and then switch to the other side. The patent issue was one of obviousness. In order for a patent to be valid, it has to be non-obvious. “Obviousness” is the subject of much litigation and a great deal of research had to …

Liberty and Justice: Moving from Some to All

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When the Democratic National Convention was in Philadelphia, I was interning during my 1L summer at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. ACLU-PA had sent the ACLU of Ohio a care package to survive the Republican National Convention, so ACLU-OH returned the favor. It contained the following magnet: I snagged it—it remains on my fridge. Like many of us, I grew up pledging allegiance to a flag that is supposed to represent ideals of liberty and justice for all. I decided to go to law school after I began to recognize the extent of our generational failure to achieve those ideals. One barrier in moving toward justice for all is the desperate lack of legal representation for those who cannot afford justice. Choosing public interest law is typically not a wise financial decision; I have had the privilege of being able to do so, knowing my first salary will be less than half that of some of my classmates, and even less than my first teaching salary was ten years ago. Temple Law gave me the privilege of …

Temple Owls are Everywhere – XXIII Olympic Winter Games Edition

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My name is Christina and I am a 3L at Temple University Law School. For my last semester of law school I am participating in the Japan study abroad program, which I highly recommend. Living in Tokyo for the semester has been an amazing experience and allowed me to see parts of the world I never imagined visiting. I knew one place I had to visit was South Korea for the 2018 winter Olympics in PyeongChang. I love watching both the summer and winter Olympics and when I realized I would be 3 hours away I had to go. My school schedule in Tokyo allowed me to go Friday to Monday. Wearing USA gear head to toe, I was ready to go. There is something really special about visiting another country and experiencing their culture. The small city in South Korea was filled with Olympic pride. I met so many people not only from the US but from all over the world. There were plenty of interpreters and volunteers, the language barrier was not an issue. …

The Justice Lab Clinic: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

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For me, coming to law school was not a decision based upon a childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, or an attempt at fulfilling a family tradition. My desire to learn about the law and effect change on a systematic level, only happened after a period of self-development during my sophomore year of college. As I learned more about implicit bias, collateral consequences, and covert forms of racism that were continually perpetuated through the unjust system of mass incarceration, I became enraged. After careful thought and consideration, I made it my goal to transform that anger into action, and make a meaningful difference in my community. Taking part in the Justice Lab Clinic at Temple has given me the wonderful opportunity to start working on this goal. In that respect, the Clinic has been more than simply a class for me, it has been a transformative experience that continues to shape my perspective on social justice. My experience with Justice Lab began during the fall semester of my 2L year. I was on a team …

The Community Lawyering Clinic: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

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After I completed my first year at Temple Law, I wanted to experience different areas of the law to better understand my own career path. I spent my first summer in an internship doing policy work, after which I decided to also gain some experience providing direct services to clients. Being that my focus is on health law, I was immediately drawn to the Community Lawyering Clinic, operated from Temple’s Legal Aid Office. The clinic, taught by Professor Spencer Rand, serves individuals with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses seeking representation in Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability hearings. Clinic students also draft life-planning documents for clients, such as wills, standby guardianship forms, power of attorney forms, and more. During the clinic, students are matched with a community organization through which they can do outreach. Depending on the organization, this outreach can take on a number of different forms. My community outreach site was Community Living Room, an organization providing psychiatric rehabilitation services for individuals living with HIV and a mental health diagnosis. During my time …

The Family Law Clinic: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

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Working within the Temple University Legal Aid Office, Family Law Clinic has been, without a doubt, my most rewarding experience in law school. Temple’s Family Law Clinic gives law students the opportunity to work as a legal advocate for clients under the supervision of an attorney and law professor. This gives a student, who may have no prior legal work experience, an opportunity to work within a law office, as a certified legal intern. A certified legal intern works along side the supervising attorney interviewing and counseling clients, drafting and filing documents, negotiating with opposing parties or opposing counsel, and going to court and arguing on behalf of the client. Clinical work is supplemented with an academic course, in which students are taught substantive family law, complete case rounds, and discuss any issues or interests that may come up as a result of working within the clinic. What sets the Family Law Clinic apart from a typical law school course, an internship, or an externship, is the combination of academic study and practical application. For …

The Elderly Law Project: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

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Part of the reason I went to law school was to learn to help people I know navigate the very confusing world of growing old. The Elderly Law Clinical gave me the chance to apply the knowledge I had acquired in my Law & Aging class to real-world situations faced by Philadelphia Seniors. To get the most out of the Clinical, taking Professor Kroll’s Law & Aging class is a critical prerequisite. The class gave me a basic understanding of many issues that came up in our discussions of client issues – social security and healthcare planning, long term care issues, etc. Additionally through our discussions in that class, I learned to think about issues specific to senior clients which, normally, I wouldn’t have considered. I would never have  thought about tuning the aesthetics of an office for aging eyes and ears, or for accessibility. Professor Kroll used real life examples to stress the importance of realizing who our client truly is, and the difficulty, yet critical importance, of assessing capacity. These discussions in the …

Walking While Black – A Reflection

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Before the beginning of my last semester at Temple Law, I braved a very cold, windy, and snowy day to take part in the screening of the documentary “Walking While Black: L.O.V.E. is the Answer.” The film attempted to take a balanced approach in discussing the deep-rooted problems in America when it comes to the distrust that many Black Americans have with law enforcement, and the dysfunctional relationship between the two. The film attempts to humanize the Black victims of injustices propagated by law enforcement by focusing on some of the incidents that have gotten a lot attention, and many that have not. The film also attempts to humanize members of law enforcement by using primary sources to give the viewer insight into what it’s like to be a member of law enforcement in this current criminal justice reform environment. Ultimately, the film ends with a call to action, for victims of injustices, their families and communities, to engage in a reconciliatory approach with members of law enforcement for the purpose of creating a relationship …

Running for State Representative – Q&A with Maggie Borski and Nick Elia

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At Temple Law, students don’t wait for graduation to start chasing their dreams and building their careers. Currently a third-year law student, Maggie Borski is running to represent the 177th District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She and her campaign manager, fellow 3L Nick Elia, sat down with Temple Law for a Q&A last month during finals to share their experiences so far. Temple Law: What made you decide that you wanted to run for district representative? Maggie Borski: I actually did an internship with State Representative Donna Bullock last spring and it was wonderful. I got to know her pretty well, and her staff. I had mentioned to her that, maybe down the line, pursuing public service, public office, would be something I’d be interested in. When the semester began, literally the second week of classes, I get a Facebook message from Donna and it was an article saying my representative, John Taylor, was not seeking reelection. It was kind of like a light bulb went off, you know, if there’s ever a …