Teaching Upstream Lawyering

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan B

Floor: Ballroom Level

This session will explore ways to incorporate the public health and medical framework of “upstreaming” to legal practice and methods of teaching students to practice law upstream. The upstream model reframes systems advocacy to effectuate transformational change at the source. Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) have championed upstreaming as a legal practice. MLPs engage in upstream lawyering through alternative methods of identifying legal issues, creative interdisciplinary problem solving, and through integrating patients to policy practices to get at root causes of systemic causes of poverty, health inequities, and oppression.  This session will explore the concept of upstreaming and how MLPs have embraced it to create a culture of normalizing systems change work as part of legal practice. It will also explore methods of teaching students how to practice law upstream and engage the audience in sharing and developing creative upstream teaching exercises. Attendees of this session will 1) understand the public health concept of upstreaming and its application to legal practice; 2) hear examples of upstream lawyering utilized in medical-legal partnership clinics at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and University of Michigan Law School, and 3) develop upstreaming lawyering and case strategizing exercises to use in clinical courses.