Each semester, the Clinic teaches law students the difficult
legal and non-legal skills needed to manage, and derive deep
personal and professional satisfaction from, a poverty-law based
legal practice.
The Clinic brings students in to
advocate for abused and neglected children—but little do you know
coming in that the world you are being lead into is difficult,
harsh, and intricately complicated. Of course, you expect to
get cases and interview clients and appear in court, but you
certainly don’t anticipate the poverty, the lack of resources, the
brutality, and the reality that a lot of families in New York City
endure everyday. As a law student, I am truly grateful for
this experience, but as a person, I am even more thankful because
it has brought an awareness that I never would have had in any
other clinic or law class.
– Jamie B., fall 2008
Students conduct independent investigations, sometimes
unearthing troubling new facts previously unknown to the Court or
the child welfare agency, such as these:
[One neighbor] told us that she
and a group of other neighbors smashed open Carolyn’s door on a
previous occasion after hearing screams from the apartment. She had
photographs to show us of deep scratches on [the child’s] neck,
which the neighbor said Walter caused by grabbing her and dragging
her across the room.
– Justin B., fall 2008
The students also conduct extensive interviews with clients,
witnesses, and opposing counsel. Here is an excerpt from an
account of an interview one student conducted with a nine year old
one week after she entered foster care:
At this point I’d like to say
that my heart was pouring out for her, but my mind was more racing
about what to do next[.] I don’t think I consciously
felt anything, I was too busy thinking about how to help her. I
ended up getting down on the floor in front of her (we had been
sitting on a bed and she was sitting on a little chair in front of
us) and telling her it was ok, and that we were there to help, and
I understood she loved and missed her mom - [but I also]
asked her if she was scared to go home, too. Then I
waited. She eventually nodded and kept crying. I
suggested to her different options – she ended up emphatically
selecting the choice of not going home until mom got better.
After that her guard was back up, she was little Ms. Tough again,
but she answered our questions truthfully. And she was thrilled
when I gave her my card and I smiled as she programmed my number
into her defunct cell phone.
I have sat through some difficult
interviews thus far in my life, rapid-fire OCI interviews as well
as marathon callback interviews at firms, and I can honestly say
I’d never had a harder interview in my life. […] To step back
and realize I was able to connect with a 9-year-old who had been
beaten literally for as long as she could remember is just a proud
moment for me and a testament to the strength of this clinic
because when I didn’t know what to do or how to proceed I fell back
on everything I learned here (“tell me more,” focus on the child,
instructions so they answer truthfully, rapport building, pausing
for children to think and answer and the “we can’t tell your mom”
approaches) and it worked. Further, she was happier, she kept
talking to me the rest of the time we were there, she thought we
had made a connection as well. It was very rewarding.
(…Later… I felt the emotion of the situation hit me. And actually
even more so now that I’m thinking about it and writing about
it.)
-- John P., Spring 2009