Clinical programs represent low income clients in a variety of substantive law contexts – including housing, benefits, disability, criminal, prisoners’ rights, child welfare, domestic violence, education, community economic development, immigration, and human rights – and seek to assist clients in navigating governmental systems that are often subordinating and oppressive. Both in theory and in practice, interlocking systems of regulation and control can create synergies that heighten the harms experienced by our clients, particularly along the lines of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. The emerging fields of “crimmigration, crimployment and the criminalization of welfare,” and conflicts in civil regulatory systems, such as differing eligibility requirements for state disability benefits and federal Medicaid coverage, raise the question of how clinics can teach future lawyers to perceive and account for intersecting systems of government regulation.
We will explore how these intersectionalities effect our assumptions about client representation and clinical education. Is the standard client-centered, zealous advocacy model (with perhaps some counseling about other implications at the end) sufficient to address the complexity that our clients experience? Should we engage in systemic reform work in partnership with clients to address both the underlying, foundational problems as well as the immediate ones? Assuming we seek to make this theoretical framework explicit, what are the practical, and the deeper implications for how we teach? We plan to structure this concurrent session by (1) presenting information and examples from our collective experiences to establish a shared context, (2) engaging in small group exercises so that session participants can brainstorm about the intersectionalities in their own clinic clients’ lives, and then (3) analyzing how various modalities of clinical teaching – such as supervision, case/project selection, seminar, clinical rounds, and overall clinic design – can be reformulated to meet the challenges posed by the various connections that cut through traditional practice boundaries.