Miami\u27s Medical-Legal Partnership: Preparing Lawyers and Physicians For Holistic Practice

The University of Miami’s Law School and Miller School of Medicine have for much of the last decade explored innovative and collaborative ways to educate future professionals and to deliver quality care to underserved populations. In 2011 we experimented with a pilot course that brought faculty and clinical students from both disciplines together for a weekly hospital-based clinical practicum supplemented with interdisciplinary didactic sessions. The interdisciplinary clinic was designed to foster collaborative team-based interdisciplinary work to identify, assess and treat the medical and legal needs of patient-clients. The purpose of the didactic sessions was to provide clinical students from the law school and the medical residents cross-training in each others’ disciplines to the extent necessary to engage in the joint clinical practice. The interdisciplinary collaboration between the schools has now grown into a joint clinic, and clinical rotation offering for medical students. Beyond the clinical offering, we now offer a four-year pathway of emphasis, or area of scholarly concentration, for medical students interested in health law. This essay will briefly describe our interdisciplinary Medical-Legal Clinic, and discuss some of the lessons we have learned from our collaborations. It will conclude with a discussion of the promise we believe academically-based medical-legal partnerships and especially clinics hold for the education of tomorrow’s lawyers and physicians

Encouraging Race-Based Advocacy in Legal Services Practice

Every legal services program has a waiting room, some newly furnished, others with old sofas and tattered chairs. The families, children, and elderly sitting in these waiting rooms consistently are disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities. Despite this constant reminder that those seeking legal assistance for their perceived wrongs are disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities, legal services programs are bringing fewer and fewer affirmative challenges that incorporate race-based antidiscrimination claims. In this article we explore possible reasons for this lack of affirmative race- and national-origin-based discrimination claims and suggest some ideas for preserving or restarting this type of advocacy, ideas that advocates in legal services programs throughout the country are using. First we describe some examples of race-based claims that frequently arise in any busy legal services practice; we do so to demonstrate that situations that give rise to race based claims--both simple and complex-- present themselves every day and to show that advocates easily can overlook those claims. We then discuss four elements that are necessary for encouraging increased race-based advocacy and litigation in a legal services practice; these elements are based on our interviews with advocates from fifteen legal services programs throughout the country and our own experience with legal services programs

Unfinished Business: The Case for Continuing Special Voting Rights Act Coverage in Florida

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been described as “the most effective civil rights statute enacted by Congress.” The portions of the Act which have had the most impact in Florida are Sections 2, 5, and 203. Two of these provisions – Sections 5 and 203 – are scheduled to expire in 2007 unless reenacted by Congress. This Article reviews and analyzes Florida’s history under the Voting Rights Act since the Act’s last major re-enactment in 1982 and concludes that the special protections afforded Florida’s racial and language minorities under Sections 5 and 203 are needed now more than ever

A Tale of Two Clinics: Similarities and Differences in Evidence of the 'Clinic Effect' on the Development of Law Students’ Ethical and Altruistic Professional Identities

Based on educational theory, and anecdotal evidence, law clinicians and those interested in the ethical development of law students have long maintained that live-client law clinics are an extremely effective--if not the most effective--means of developing an awareness and understanding of and commitment to legal ethics (what can be called an "ethical effect" and/or developing or at least sustaining an altruistic commitment to use their legal skills to serve those most in need of legal services (an "altruism effect"). Here, Newman and Nicolson argue that law schools need to give pro bono programs a high profile and integrated them into the general curriculum