Rosalie Wahl\u27s Vision for Legal Education: Clinics at the Heart

Rosalie Wahl holds a special place in the hearts of Minnesota lawyers. Many women and girls, especially, were gratified when Governor Rudy Perpich appointed her the first woman on the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1977. There were no more than nine other women on supreme courts around the country at the time, and none on the U.S. Supreme Court. She served on the court until 1994, when the law mandating judges’ retirement at age seventy caused her to step down from the bench. This essay highlights the significance of Wahl’s work as a clinical legal educator and activist for legal education. It begins with a brief account of Wahl’s growth into her work as a lawyer. The article then focuses on her time as a clinical law teacher and, later, as a leader in the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. It closes with thoughts about what Wahl’s example means for law teachers

Valuing Small Firm and Solo Law Practice: Models for Expanding Service to Middle-Income Clients

While the profession focuses on ways to meet the critical legal needs of low-income citizens, the needs of the middle group are largely left for the market to fill. The painful fact is that the market has failed to distribute lawyer services to a majority of Americans with legal needs. Ironically, the legal needs of middle-income Americans have risen with the economic crisis even as unemployment among new lawyers has increased. A large supply of trained lawyers without work theoretically should translate into lower costs and more legal needs being met. Yet the cost of legal services has continued to rise. Great unmet need coupled with high cost of services and numerous underemployed new lawyers are allied problems that the profession can ill afford to avoid. The challenge is to use this tempest to rethink the profession’s approach to solving legal problems, lowering the cost of service, and expanding the distribution of justice. This article assumes that it is a legitimate goal of the profession to increase access to civil justice facilitated by lawyers - as contrasted with access facilitated by self or paralegals or document assemblers - and that the profession must chart alternatives beyond pro bono, legal aid and pro se justice for clients. That project is the focus of this article

U.N. Women\u27s Event Unleashed Powerful Ideas

Juergens describes her experience at the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum of the United Nations\u27 Fourth World Conference on Women, where a Platform for Action , the U.N. action plan for women and girls was created

Rosalie Wahl’s Vision for Legal Education: Clinics at the Heart

Rosalie Wahl holds a special place in the hearts of Minnesota lawyers. Many women and girls, especially, were gratified when Governor Rudy Perpich appointed her the first woman on the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1977. There were no more than nine other women on supreme courts around the country at the time, and none on the U.S. Supreme Court.3 She served on the court until 1994, when the law mandating judges’ retirement at age seventy caused her to step down from the bench. This essay highlights the significance of Wahl’s work as a clinical legal educator and activist for legal education. It begins with a brief account of Wahl’s growth into her work as a lawyer. The article then focuses on her time as a clinical law teacher and, later, as a leader in the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. It closes with thoughts about what Wahl’s example means for law teachers

Feminist Jurisprudence: Why Law Must Consider Women\u27s Perspectives

A growing number of scholars are asking how the law would be different if it took women\u27s points of view and experiences into account. Feminist Jurisprudence argues that we must look at the norms embedded in our legal system and rethink the law. It is about being inclusive of women, and of all people who differ from the norms of the law as it is today. The endeavor will necessarily shake up established relations between family, the workplace and the state. Lawyers, judges, and legislators should get ready for the changes

Teach Your Students Well: Valuing Clients in the Law School Clinic.

Law schools, teaching primarily by the casebook method, generally avoid the thorny issues that real clients pose.\u27 Recently, however, law review articles and the regular classroom have referred more frequently to real client stories. Law school clinics are a primary source of client stories. Despite increased attention to clinical programs, client interests are frequently subordinated to the goals of students, clinical law teachers and law schools. This article urges clinicians to constantly evaluate whether and how well they and their students take their clients\u27 interests and perspectives on clinical education into account. It argues that clinic teachers must learn to tolerate and maximize the tension that exists between their duty to their students\u27 education and the production of scholarship and their duty to their clients\u27 goals. Part I provides a brief view of clinical teaching methods, the tension between student education and client service, and the impact of the law school setting on clinic work. Part II acknowledges client interests that are well served by law school clinics. Part III discusses client interests which tend to compete with student and school interests. Part IV outlines concrete suggestions for balancing client and student interests and offers supervisory and institutional practices that can help to keep clients\u27 interests where they should be: first among equals. This article concludes that the struggles with client interests in the clinical setting should inform the rest of the legal curriculum

Using the MacCrate Report to Strengthen Live-Client Clinics

Clinical teachers can use the MacCrate Report —the Report of the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap and its Statement of Skills and Values—in a variety of ways to help live-client clinics. This paper assumes that the reader has basic background knowledge of the MacCrate Report. It also makes a fundamental judgment about the value and role of live-client clinics: it assumes that strengthening live-client clinics is important for the future of legal education. Strategies for negotiation for educational change, of course, must be tailored to each negotiation\u27s context. Each law school has its own history, mix of faculty and other teachers, places where its graduates tend to practice, and geographic location. This essay is not intended as a blueprint, but only as a sketch for clinicians and proponents of skills training who are negotiating for changes along the lines suggested by the MacCrate Report

Lena Olive Smith: A Minnesota Civil Rights Pioneer

Lena Olive Smith and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) created a spirited partnership in the public interest during the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout their long collaboration, this woman lawyer, her clients, and the Minneapolis branch of a national grassroots organization faced similar challenges: to stay solvent, to end segregation and increase equality, and to live with dignity. This article is divided into four sections. The first three roughly correspond with stages in Smith’s life and work. Part II briefly chronicles Smith’s first thirty six years, 1885 to 1921, as a single African-American woman in the north searching for meaningful and remunerative work. It sketches the formation of the NAACP and the legal and social context that framed Smith’s life and the civil rights struggles that followed. Part III covers 1921 to 1926, from the time Smith became licensed to practice law to the year she developed as a leader in the Minneapolis NAACP. Part IV focuses on five events during Smith’s leadership of the Minneapolis NAACP. In the conclusion, the article outlines a few simple lessons for today’s lawyers and those working for social justice