Holding class in the dark during a recent power outage left Prof. Spencer Rand and his students energized and recharged. He wrote about the experience on Clinical Law Prof. Blog. Read more at Clinical Law Prof Blog.
Professor Spencer Rand authored this guest blog post on Clinical Law Prof Blog. Read the Blog Post
A client hugged me last week and I was happy. I still am and am still thinking about it. The man did not really even have to come in for an appointment and I was not really sure why he was there. Over five years, my students and I had represented him in an Supplemental Security Income (SSI) case and had stuck with him. We had finally won with him. He had severe health problems that slowed him but they did not obviously qualify him for benefits. He was often too sick or disorganized to go to his doctor, meaning his medical records were not very supportive. He often missed appointments with us. His fiancé helped him drink, a vice I could absolutely forgive him as he tried to find a way to live with no income in a state with no General Assistance and little other help. Judges and the law were less forgiving. His drinking only made his case harder. But we stuck with him, and eventually convinced a judge that he needed …
Yesterday, I made a spectacle of myself, and I am trying to decide if I need to teach my students to do the same. I didn’t set out to do it, but I was just so down. I always am this time of year, but this year seems worse. It’s been in the 20’s and 30’s the last few days, after a snowstorm blanketed the area a few weeks ago. I come to work in the dark or at daybreak and leaving in the dark. It feels like there is no life. It was time for some self-care. My students are experiencing the same blah feelings now, too. It is not uncommon in the legal and academic world for people to feel low this time of year. The holidays are done, and there is little else exciting on the horizon until graduation day for some and Memorial Day for others. Students and teachers are in a rut, repeating for the next several months the patterns into which they have fallen this year—1L’s know how to …
I am the commuter many of you hate. Maybe I see you alone at the bus stop reading a book that looks interesting and ask you about it. Perhaps I see you looking a little confused on the train platform and ask if you need help figuring out where you are going. Or maybe I see you wearing that Phillies shirt on the train after the game and ask you the score, why you aren’t a Cubs fan like you should be, and how the Phillies will ever improve. In short, I am the overly interested in you transplanted Midwestern type that you may be trying to avoid, trying to draw you into a longer conversation to learn about you. You will succeed in chasing me away with a one-word answer—I am also Midwestern enough to know to leave you alone based on your response—but we’ll miss something. We’ll miss the chance to get to learn a little more about the world and each other together, to possibly become friends (it happens this way!), to …
I don’t relish my student’s traumatic experiences. I am happy, however, that they are happening with me there to support them. Perhaps I should be a little less overtly honest about it with my students. As they came in over the last few weeks to relay some of their traumatic experiences to me, maybe I should not have moved so quickly to tell my students how much I thought they were learning from it and instead commiserated more on how bad it must be to experience clients’ trauma for the first time. One student, on meeting his SSI client for the first time, had her tell him it wasn’t worth living once she was denied benefits and that she had considered killing herself over the case. Another student went before an ALJ quite convinced that her severely mentally ill client should win only to have the ALJ badger her and the client about drug use that seemed truly irrelevant. Like many clinicians, I have sent students to see dying clients, had clients insult and run …
On marriage, people lose welfare benefits abruptly. It is devastating to them, diminishing and in some cases overwhelming any economic benefits of marriage. It makes marriage unattainable and a status for the rich alone. It is also a surprising and unintended outcome of policymakers, who since at least Reconstruction and with much fanfare in the 1996 welfare reform touted marriage for the poor as a self-help measure and poverty cure. It is these same government policy makers, however, who make marriage impossible. Low-income people tend to marry each other. Both incomes need to be brought into the home to raise people out of poverty. When people lose welfare on marrying, the family’s combined income is often lower than if they had stayed separated or chose to live together without marrying. They cannot survive. Unable to marry, they are statistically less likely to remain together as long. They lose out on statistically more long-term relationships, long-term spousal government and employee benefits, and legal protections on the dissolution of their relationships from divorce and estate laws. “When …
Clinical teaching and lawyering for the poor can both be hard, and having a sense of humor can help with both. Or so I am told. I am also told I have no sense of humor. My family often struggles to explain me to others. They sometimes say to our friends after I tell a joke “Okay, let me explain to you what I think he’s trying to say and maybe you’ll think it’s funny. Then again, maybe you won’t.” My son has his “No Dad Jokes” t-shirt, which I of course bought him to support him for having to listen to way too many of them from me. A judge, a prosecutor, two law students, a cow, and a duck walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “What is this, some kind of joke?” Now you’re seeing it, too. I tried humor earlier this week in my teaching. I was teaching about letter writing. I wanted to make a point that writing short, clear sentences could be helpful. I also wanted to help …
I try not to share too much of my personal life with my students. I already feel that sometimes the clinic is a little too much all about me. I tell stories about old cases that I think help prove points. I teach alone so am the go to person for questions students have. I select a lot of our client work and share my values with my students by helping them pick cases that meet clinic goals, which as much as I like to say are our goals we develop together are often mine. Lately, I feel I need rules to decide what personal things I should share. Is it only things that will help them lawyer? Is it things that make me seem human or approachable? What if I just want to? What helps and what is just forcing them have to learn about me whether they want to or not? A few years ago, I had no choice about revealing part of my personal life. On the front page of the Philadelphia …
Maybe I am not that old. Yet sometimes I feel that way with my students. Perhaps last week did not help. In my clinic, we were talking about what students wear to interview clients when they dress down during the day for school and then have to see clients in the office. I told them about my first legal aid office in Cleveland in the mid 80’s. We all thought we had to dress down for our clients but knew we had to dress up for court. To solve this problem for women, we had the denim wrap-around skirt in the closet—any woman who found herself running to any court could use it and all of a sudden seem somewhat professional. My students laughed at it. Really? They wore those? That was dress up? As the discussion moved to other topics, they kept saying, “Is that how they did it in the land of the wrap around skirt?” The problem got worse a few days later. I moved from my clinical class to my poverty …
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