Religious Values, Legal Ethics, and Poverty Law: A Response to Thomas Shaffer

Stephen Wizner provides a response to Thomas Shaffer\u27s article on his pursuit of social justice through using religious figures as role models. Wizner argues that Shaffer is clearly right in asserting that there is much in the prophetic literature, and, indeed, in the entire Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that could serve as a moral impetus for social justice lawyering. One can find considerable support for Shaffer\u27s religious thesis in the texts that he cites, and in the words of the prophets he looks to as role models. Nevertheless, Wizner presents a skeptical response to Professor Shaffer\u27s thoughtful essay. He argues for skepticism for using religion as a blueprint for what is to be done in law

Measuring Justice

The research imperative of refining ways to measure justice is important and necessary. Our work as lawyers improves the more we know about our effectiveness and the more our choices are evidence based. Nevertheless, quantifying the work of a lawyer is not easy. How do we ensure that any measure of justice captures outcomes for both trial-based advocacy and non-trial-based advocacy on behalf of clients, including negotiated outcomes? How do we quantify the role lawyers play in listening to our clients, explaining the systems in which they operate, and supporting them through often very difficult times in their lives? How do we ensure that any measure of justice includes a client’s sense of the process as well as the outcome? How do we make sure that what we measure does not suggest the limits of what is possible or desired

Teaching and Doing: The Role of Law School Clinics in Enhancing Access to Justice

This Essay revisits the issue of the role that law school clinics can, and should play, in expanding access to justice. To do so we need to cast a critical eye on what we do, who we are, what we have become, and whether we need to rediscover, redefine, and reimagine our professional role as law school clinical teachers

Rationing Justice

A national survey of economically disadvantaged Americans, conducted prior to recent reductions in and restrictions on government-funded legal services programs, found that 80% of the legal problems of the poor were handled without legal assistance. Undoubtedly, the current reductions and restrictions have only made matters worse. The widespread and pervasive denial of legal assistance to the poor has profound political and moral implications for our social order. In his classic study Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that [s]carcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question. He further asserted that in the United States the power of lawyers extends over the whole community

Walking the Clinical Tightrope: Between Teaching and Doing

The University of Maryland School of Law has made a truly remarkable commitment to clinical legal education. The purpose of this conversation is, first, to acknowledge and describe tensions that are inherent in our dual roles as teachers and legal services providers, and, second, to think about the role that law school clinical programs can play in expanding access to justice for unprivileged and underserved clients and communities. Although these remarks are given in celebration of thirty years of clinical legal education at the University of Maryland, we are also here to talk about the role that law school clinics can and should play in expanding access to justice

Homelessness: Advocacy and Social Policy

On March 20, 1990, the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed a decision of the New Haven Housing Court in Savage v. Aronson, a case brought by the Yale Law School Clinical Program. The trial court had issued a state-wide injunction on behalf of all homeless families residing in emergency housing, ordering Connecticut\u27s welfare commissioner to stop enforcing the state mandated one-hundred-day maximum on emergency housing assistance. The trial court found that high rents, low levels of Aid to Families with Dependent Children ( AFDC ) benefits, and lack of rent subsidies had prevented these families from obtaining affordable housing. After finding that families lodged in welfare motels as an emergency measure had been unable to locate permanent residences, the trial court enjoined the welfare commissioner from evicting them except to permanent housing. In so holding, the trial court accepted the plaintiffs\u27 interpretation of the Connecticut AFDC statutes, that the state was required to support dependent children and their caretaker relatives in a home, and that for those clients, the welfare motel was home

The Law School Clinic: Legal Education in the Interests of Justice

Felix Frankfurter once claimed that the law and lawyers are what the law schools make them. One need not agree completely with this statement, insofar as it may exaggerate the effectiveness of law schools in teaching professional skills, in instilling professional values, or in affecting the functioning of the legal system, in order to recognize that legal education has an important role to play in all of these areas. There is an important relationship between legal education, the practice of law, and the functioning of the legal system. While this proposition should appear obvious to legal educators, it remains a somewhat controversial assertion within traditional academic faculties of law. Some legal educators believe that the law school should be an academic department of the university like all others, where the pursuit of truth, research and scholarship, and the transmission of knowledge, are the only proper intellectual activities. Some remain skeptical of the claim that a law school, as a professional school, also has an educational responsibility to prepare its students to be competent practitioners, to socialize and acculturate its students into the values and norms of the legal profession, and to charge its students with a responsibility for addressing malfunctions in the legal system. In this brief essay I propose to make, and defend, three related claims: (1) that there is a vital connection between legal education and the public interest because lawyers use their education, for better or worse, in the real world; (2) that the public interest requires law students to learn they have a social and professional responsibility to challenge injustice and to pursue social justice in society; and (3) that the law school clinic is the primary place in the law school where students can learn to be competent, ethical, socially responsible lawyers. In order to do this I will need to provide a description of clinical legal education and an account of its history, and then to situate it within the law school curriculum

On Youth Crime and the Juvenile Court

In a thoughtful and provocative essay, Abbe Smith has provided a forceful defense of the juvenile court in response to critics who predict or advocate its demise. She tells a poignant and compelling story of urban youth deprived of their childhood and hope for the future by poverty and racism, drugs and violence, decaying neighborhoods and blighted housing, bad schools and destructive peer influences, parental neglect and abuse, and lack of opportunity. But it is these very youths who cause residents of urban areas to feel increasingly insecure for their personal safety. Compassion for disadvantaged youth does not eliminate our fear of them, and understanding of the apparent causes of juvenile lawlessness does not substitute for effective law enforcement, humane or otherwise. The juvenile court is only a part of the system of law enforcement for juvenile offenders. It is no secret that the majority of crimes, especially crimes against property, go unsolved. And this appears to be true whether the perpetrators are adults or juveniles. Many juveniles who commit crimes (like their adult counterparts) do not get caught. This is one reason why neither the adult criminal justice system nor the juvenile justice system has proven effective in controlling anti-social behavior. It would seem to follow that changes in either system, whether by giving the adult criminal courts jurisdiction over some (or all) juveniles, or by retaining all juveniles in the juvenile court, will have no overall effect on the crime problem (except for incapacitating for longer or shorter periods the few offenders who happen to be caught, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced)