When the state claims to protect a sensitive interest such as the well-being of a child or national security, it becomes especially easy to compromise individual rights, particularly when the rights at issue belong to individuals from black and brown communities. This session will draw on the experiences of clinicians teaching students in seemingly disparate fields, with clients impacted by comparably pernicious labels: Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians called “terrorists,” and parents of children in foster care ostracized as “child abusers.”
Clinics focused on child welfare expose their students to proceedings legendary for their lawlessness. Family Court is widely known as a “Wild West” of secret hearings in which the law is a mere suggestion. Students who represent parents seeking to recover their children from foster care feel caught, with their clients, in a Kafka-esque nightmare of injustice. Similarly, students who work with communities targeted by national security policy confront watch-list designations, severe immigration delays, and overzealous law enforcement, which can leave students and their clients feeling that the invocation of national security wipes away their clients’ legal protections.
Law school clinics are in a unique position to introduce students to the meaningful challenges of working with clients from embattled and marginalized groups, where the targets of state intervention are sometimes ostracized within their own communities, and even in some social justice circles.
This session will explore the risks, rewards, and parallels between child welfare and national security as vehicles for clinical education. Consider, for example, the legal and social stigma a client might experience after being dragged into court under allegations of child abuse at threat of losing rights to her child. How is this similar to and different from the experience of a woman confronted on her doorstep by a swarm of FBI agents inquiring about conversations she may have overheard at her mosque?
How can we help students counsel clients navigating some of the state’s most coercive instruments, which happen to also be some of its most broadly accepted? In fields pervaded by racial and ethnic bias, with limited procedural protections, what lessons do students learn about law and lawyering?