Forging Clinic Collaborations with Non-Legal Partners: How Working Alongside Non-Lawyers Advances Student Learning

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Franciscan B

Floor: Ballroom Level

As the political climate becomes increasingly extreme, it is especially valuable for law students to learn how to collaborate with non-lawyers working on shared issues. Community groups and activists provide not only camaraderie and inspiration to law students, but also specialized knowledge and expertise about particular communities and non-legal problem solving. As lawyers and law clinics attempt to branch out to serve ever-growing populations of individuals impacted by draconian legislation and executive action, we must build coalitions with those organizing and advocating in non-legal capacities.
Each of the presenters is a clinic director who has designed or expanded the scope of her clinic to incorporate learning and collaboration with non-legal partners. We have each attempted to incorporate cases and projects that focus on access to justice for increasingly marginalized communities—individuals charged with or convicted of crime, immigrants, and victims of hate crimes. To do so, we have done more than assign students new types of work: we have brought members of impacted communities, community organizers, and movement activists into our clinics to serve as experts and educators. Students have thus been able to recognize that impacted individuals are not passive agents in need of our assistance, but skillful and resourceful change-makers who can educate and guide our role in their community’s resistance/revolutionary efforts.
Our goal for this panel is to use our experiences with non-legal partnerships as a springboard for large-group conversations around how to identify potential partners within the university and in the larger community, how to cultivate a relationship that is more robust and reciprocal than simply attorney-client, and how to ensure that both community partners and students are able to benefit from the partnership in meaningful ways.