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

Riding Circuit: Bringing the Law to Those Who Need It

This article surveys the Access to Justice movement in the United States and proposes including more types of professionals to develop longer term solutions that will alleviate barriers to the court system. This article discusses the need to expand the access to justice concept to reach beyond the courthouse to address civil legal issues before they blossom into litigation. Mobile outreach providing preventive lawyering and early treatment of societal problems can prevent delays and the bottleneck that many courts are seeing with the vast numbers of Self-Represented Litigants. A team of professionals including lawyers, social workers, nurses, counselors, translators and law librarians, working with a network of public librarians, can make a significant impact into the everyday lives of the working poor and folk of modest means in underserved areas

Access to Justice Through Limited Legal Assistance

This article describes an empirical survey of a limited legal assistance program designed to assist low-income individuals with family law matters. It begins by exploring the need for such research, given the nation’s shameful level of unmet legal needs, and the lack of rigorous evaluation of strategies designed to address those needs. The article discussion then describes the methodology of a survey of Alaska Legal Services’ limited legal assistance program, and the survey’s major findings. Among the most critical conclusions are that limited assistance is a cost-effective use of resources, but that more effort should center on provision of hands-on assistance in form completion. A final section of the article places these findings in the context of broader strategies to increase access to justice for those who need it most

Breaking Down the Silos that Harm Children: A Call to Child Welfare, Domestic Violence and Family Court Professionals

The intersection of domestic violence and child maltreatment has been the subject of research and reform efforts focused on the need to integrate a better understanding of domestic violence into child welfare system practice. But a similar effort at integration of domestic violence and child maltreatment concerns has never been directed at family courts adjudicating private custody litigation. And while such courts’ responses to domestic violence have been analyzed and discussed extensively in the literature, legal discussions of custody courts’ responses to child maltreatment are few and far between. At the same time, there has been an explosion of traumatic narratives on social media and in the literature describing family courts’ refusals to keep children safe from a parent alleged to be dangerous. This article examines the legal system’s siloed responses to domestic violence and child maltreatment, with a focus on family courts in custody cases. Newly published data have affirmed the growing outcry about family courts frequently rejecting child maltreatment allegations and removing custody from mothers who make such allegations. Custody court judges’ resistance to adjudicating child maltreatment is widespread and helps explain these patterns. Yet child welfare agencies, as well as reformers seeking to reduce reliance on foster care, trust family courts to protect children that come before them. We argue that systemic changes are needed to break down the silos between family courts and child welfare agencies to better protect children. We propose three practicable, concrete reforms to achieve this. We hope that this article will awaken those who care about children’s safety to the real dangers in family court adjudications, and encourage specialists in domestic violence, family court, and child maltreatment to collaborate in effectuating these much-needed changes

Law School Clinics and the Untapped Potential of the Court Watch

This is a time of enormous creativity and innovation in civil access to justice. It is now widely recognized that scarcity is reality in the provision of legal services and that overburdened and technologically retrograde courts are struggling to meet the demands of case processing in a fair and efficient manner. Accompanying the proliferation of various interventions is a growing call for empirical research on civil access to justice. Recently, the idea that law school clinics might serve as sites or architects of a civil justice research agenda has been advanced. Building on these proposals, this Article suggests that “court watch” research, involving live field observation of court proceedings, may serve as an ideal point of entry for law school clinics to participate in the advancement of evidence-based civil justice policy. While most civil justice research focuses on the retrospective review of written decisions, numerous issues—including the conduct of judges, the challenges faced by unrepresented parties, and the disconnect between the law in action and the law on the books—can only be studied through contemporaneous observation of live hearings. Additionally, court watch research can yield important pedagogical benefits that serve law school clinics’ dual teaching-service mission. Accompanied by reflection and discussion, court watch research have the potential to expose law students to a broad swath of justice issues, acculturate students to the norms and habits of court actors, and introduce students to the study, design, and critique of institutional systems

Child Support Cost Tables: The Case for Second Household Adjustment

In theory, child support is an amount of money payable by one parent to the other to make sure that a child is cared for and shares, to some degree, the standard of living enjoyed by both parents. This theory is quantified in child support guidelines statutes where the actual amount of child support is calculated using economic data. Current guidelines for child support awards in most states are based upon economic data regarding the spending levels of intact households. The data used in states’ child support guidelines are not merely advisory as the phrase “guidelines” may suggest to many. Federal regulations require that guidelines be presumptive in child support determination. That is, the presumptive award is based upon formulas which incorporate economic data on child costs. State presumptive formulas typically apply the intact family child cost data to parental incomes and number of children—and then add other factors, such as health care insurance premiums and child care costs. The presumptive award is the actual award unless one of the parties rebuts the presumption on which the award is based. The intact family economic data used to calculate child support are misleading because of the failure to consider the economic reality of the existence of two separate households. Parents divorce, families split, and partners leave, and where there once was a single, intact household with two parental figures, there now are two households with separated parental figures. Consequently, this means that there is less discretionary income available across the two households because of an increased level of expense required to maintain two households rather than a single, intact household