Pedagogical Tools for Client-Centered Lawyering in a Movement Context: Examples from Immigrant Rights Advocacy

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan B

Floor: Ballroom Level

This panel will explore the lessons from movement lawyering for clinic curricula involving individual client representation. In the last two decades, a growing number of clinics have embraced the value of a docket that includes both direct representation of individuals and collaboration with grassroots groups, collectives, and others to provide support for broader organizing campaigns. Drawing from the speakers’ experiences teaching in immigrant and workers’ rights clinics, the panel looks at how clinical curricula can bring these parts of the clinic docket together and better prepare students to lawyer on behalf of social movements. It will examine both movement driven ways to rethink the teaching of canonical lawyering skills, as well as new non-canonical skills needed to advance movement-driven engagement in clients’ cases. It will consider how canonical lawyering skills, such as interviewing, counseling, fact development, and theory of the case may be enhanced by considering how an individual client and the client’s situation are situated within movements or are connected to the concerns of movements. It will also look at non-canonical skills that are essential to representation in the overlapping space of client representation and movements seeking to build power and effect change. These include, for example, work with defense committees, developing materials for teach-ins, engagement with media and social media, and, more generally, working with organizers. The panel will be structured around key topics for bringing a movement perspective into teaching students to represent individual clients. The speakers will address the importance of movement work to oppose repressive regimes; how a movement-based perspective can alter the way we teach canonical skills; how a movement-based perspective requires the teaching of non-canonical skills; and how a curriculum can offer a learning arc for students that include both sets of skills, building classes around case examples that emphasize combined strategies.: