Building for the Future and Advancing Social Justice in the Community Through Collaborative Impact Litigation and Systemic Reform

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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Clinicians can use our academic independence and our unique roles in the community and the legal profession to engage in broader impact work that helps individual clients while also bringing about systemic change. Such systemic change can be effectuated through litigation on behalf of an entire group of individuals facing a similar legal problem, through high-level engagement with the stakeholders in a given system (judges, legislators, other policy makers), and through cutting-edge tools like court-watching. This session will help participants identify systemic injustices and will provide models for confronting these issues. The session will include discussion of the pedagogical and practical considerations that accompany work of this nature, including resource constraints and considerations in clinical teaching; how to resolve any tensions between these approaches and the “individual client” model; and how to choose between different strategies to effect systemic change. Each participant will leave the session with concrete ways of thinking about creatively tackling systemic problems, and with a new plan for collective change.