Navigating New Boundaries in Teaching Lawyering and Supervising Students

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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Teaching and supervising students remotely during the pandemic affords us, particularly as parents and caregivers, the opportunity to reflect on what we might want to bring with us from this experience into the future. Clinical supervision and client representation in this context has meant increased transparency regarding the challenges of balancing the many demands on our lives. Students and clients have a window into our homes. And we, in turn, have had a bigger window into theirs. This forced intimacy has led, by necessity, to greater information sharing about our personal lives, challenges and circumstances. At the same time, we have had to reckon with our prior notions of the meaning of client-centered, community and critical lawyering and question whether our conceptions of various models of lawyering undermine boundary setting or lead us to compartmentalize and minimize other demands in ways that were detrimental for our students, clients, communities and professional identity. In this session, we will focus on what can be learned from this increased transparency. In the context of these new, more malleable boundaries, we will explore the possibility of a new paradigm of lawyering, where we can all be present as whole people--lawyers, teachers, students, and clients, alike—integrated more fully into our communities. Our goal is to examine the changes wrought by remote learning in order to identify new models for student supervision, discussions of professional identity, and relationships with clients.