All posts tagged: Law School Clinicals

Social Justice Lawyering: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

As a 1L selecting courses for my second year, I immediately gravitated towards the experiential learning opportunities: things like clinics and internships that would allow me to figure out how to use what I was learning to serve the values I hold. My first year was difficult, but not in the ways I expected. Law school teaches us that the law is a neutral force, but I knew that to be false. I struggled to learn the first-year curriculum and simultaneously hold on to the people and values that had motivated me to come to law school in the first place. I found out about the  Sheller Center’s Social Justice Lawyering Clinic taught by Professor Lee through the course list. I was immediately interested based on the clinic’s name, so I looked through the Sheller Center’s  website and asked friends who had taken the clinic before for their opinion. Everyone said the clinic was an incredible opportunity, so despite the fact that I was terrified that I would do a bad job, I filled out …

Couple Hugging

Hugs I’ve Received, Hugs I’ve Given

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 …

Students in the classroom

Case Selection and Secondary Trauma

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 …