Access to Law and Justice

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan B

Floor: Ballroom Level

This concurrent session will briefly present three essays that clinicians contributed to a special issue of Daedalus (published by the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences) focused on Access to Justice. The goal of the session is to get clinicians to think about how their client work can be translated into scholarship that helps inform a national conversation on access to law and justice. The discussion will engage clinicians in an ongoing conversation about the importance of translating individual client work to systemic reform. It will also help clinicians distinguish access to law from social justice. In doing so, we will discuss the role of various types of public interest lawyers and the need to train community-engaged lawyers, regardless of where they end up practicing after law school. Since community-engaged lawyering calls for working with the community, not for the community, we will brainstorm ways to train our students how to be a partner to communities seeking social change. We will end our roundtable discussion by asking the group to identify existing clinic models, and envision new ones, that help address issues before clients end up in courts. This part of the discussion is informed by our research that shows broken court systems that do not facilitate access to law and justice, and our view that as lawyers and clinicians we may be relying too heavily on law as a solution to economic and social inequality. The goal of the conversation is to have clinicians think more critically about their work and the role that clinics and law professors play, or can play, in redefining access to law and justice in the United States.