All posts tagged: Sheller Center for Social Justice

Sheller Center Students File Tort Claims for Families Separated at the Border

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The Trump administration has engaged in a policy of family separation, which it ramped up in 2018. Under that policy, families apprehended for crossing the border outside of a port of entry were forcibly separated. Parents were placed in adult detention while their children were sent to shelters for unaccompanied minors. They were frequently subjected to cruel conditions of confinement, including overcrowding and the inability to obtain adequate nutrition, hygiene, medical care or mental health services. Notably, the administration expressly announced its family separation policy as a tactic to deter Central American migrants from seeking safety in the United States. In these facilities, parents and children endured weeks or even months without contact with one another. Parents and their children did not know when or if they would be reunited because immigration officials would not provide any information. The separation of parents from their children has predictably caused significant and long-lasting trauma to these families who had sought refuge in the United States. Through the Sheller Center for Social Justice, we represented eight families in …

Social Justice Lawyering: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

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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 …

Being a Prepared and Flexible Advocate

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My law student partner and I recently represented a client at an arbitration hearing through the Sheller Center for Social Justice’s Advanced Social Justice Lawyering Clinic. Our client was a low-wage worker who had not been paid minimum wage and overtime by her former employer, for whom she worked for seven years. Her case had been ongoing for several years and she wanted a chance for her story to be heard — regardless of the hearing’s outcome. I was tasked with cross-examining the opposing party with an interpreter. To prepare for my cross-examination, I looked through depositions and documents, then crafted short and leading questions that I hoped would result in admissions that supported our case theory. The thing I did not anticipate was under what circumstances I would be conducting my cross-examination. Once it was time for my cross-examination, the arbitration had been in progress for approximately four hours and the panel was noticeably impatient. I wound up cutting a significant portion of my cross-examination on the spot because the witness was unable to read the documents that I’d …

Looking Ahead at Climate Change and Federal Policy

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It has been a rough six months for climate change advocates. The policy changes from former President Obama to the new Trump Administration have been like night and day. In an effort to help digest these changes, Temple Law School’s Sheller Center for Social Justice hosted its fourth lecture in a series titled Making Sense of the Legal Headlines, focusing this time on Climate Change and Federal Policy. Temple Law Professor Amy Sinden facilitated the lecture, with assistance from third year law student Alec Zucker. Professor Sinden and Mr. Zucker did an excellent job at summarizing the major concerns associated with the current climate change crisis while bringing the audience up to speed regarding recent policy changes from our nation’s capital. With regard to the climate crisis, the bad news is that global temperatures are continuing to rise in the aggregate (2016 was the hottest year globally on record), and the change goes beyond warming. It includes both more extreme and more unpredictable weather patterns—droughts, floods, snow storms, heat waves, wildfires and so on. As …