Delivering Water Justice: Case Studies In Respectful, Sustainable, Multi-Semester, Nontraditional Lawyering

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Session Type: Lightning Sessions

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Access to clean, affordable drinking water is an urgent issue for urban and rural communities throughout the country. Water justice work demands multi-semester, creative, legal, and non-legal engagement that respects the diversity of affected communities while dismantling barriers to water access. Clinicians from Baltimore, California, West Virginia, and Michigan will discuss how we have grappled with these issues and will share teaching strategies that are replicable in other settings in relation to: • Structuring projects that span multiple semesters and that meaningfully transfer and build upon the work done by each student team. • Developing our students’ lawyering skills through work that falls outside the traditional model of individual client representation, including administrative advocacy (working on petitions for rulemaking, rule changes, and their implementation), community education projects, strategic and community-based research projects, and legislative advocacy and other projects aimed at addressing water affordability. • Helping students to respectfully engage with diverse communities. • Creating and sustaining meaningful interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships with a wide range of organizations. Our collaborators include the communities we serve, as well as students in business school, social work, public health schools, land use planners (WVU’s clinic has in-house land use planners), Canadian law schools, local governments, water systems operators, environmental policy organizations, community organizers, legal services organizations, community associations/schools/churches, and others.