Clinical Law Prof Blog

Visiting Clinical Faculty Position (2 years) in BostonCollege Immigration Clinic

Job Announcement:

Visiting Assistant Professor, Immigration Clinic

 Boston College Law School seeks a Visiting Assistant Professor to teach in the Immigration Clinic and Advanced Immigration Clinic for a two-year position.  The Visiting Assistant Professor will work as a supervising attorney in the Boston College Law School Immigration and Asylum Project and will teach the Immigration Clinic, Advanced Immigration Clinic and possibly an Advanced Immigration Law Seminar.  The position has a preferred start date of July 1, 2009. 

Principal Responsibilities: 

• Supervise students in the Boston College Law School Immigration Clinic in various types of immigration matters, including direct representation of non-citizens in removal proceedings (detained and non-detained) with various applications for relief;
• Teach client counseling, ethics and litigation skills during regular weekly meetings of the Immigration Clinic and Advanced Immigration Clinic;
• Co-teach an Advanced Immigration Law Seminar;
• Conduct “Know Your Rights” presentations for non-citizens detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Massachusetts with clinic students;
• Conduct intake interviews and screen cases for representation by the Immigration Clinic and Advanced Immigration Clinic;
• Work together with Professor Daniel Kanstroom and other faculty on various projects of the Boston College Law School Human Rights program, including the Immigration Spring Break Trips and legal and policy initiatives of our Immigration and Asylum Project;
• Participate in litigation, advocacy, attorney training, and consultations about detention and deportation issues.

 

Qualifications and Skills:

• J.D. or LL.M. from accredited law school, admission to a state bar and 3-5 years of experience representing noncitizens in immigration matters; preferably with significant experience in removal or detention work;
• Interest and ability in teaching and mentoring students;
• Excellent research, writing, and interpersonal skills;
• Strong organizational abilities and ability to “multi-task”;
• Proficiency in Spanish and/or Portuguese preferred.

 

Salary: Commensurate with experience, within the range of law school visitorships.  This is a full-time position, with benefits.

 

Application: Please submit cover letter, writing sample, resumé, and names of two references by April 24, 2009 to Daniel Maltzman,

Boston College Law School
885 Centre Street
Newton, MA  02459

 

Boston College is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Do you reveal personal information about yourself, and/or teachself-disclosure, as a lawyering technique?

Professor Vanessa Merton

Hi, colleagues –

At the end of this message is the description of a concurrent session that 

Janet Calvo

of CUNY and I will co-facilitate at this year’s AALS Clinical Legal Education Section Conference.

As we prepare, we would be very grateful to have the benefit of as much of your insight as you can spare.   Responses should probably come just to us unless for some reason it makes sense to post to the list instead.

What we’d like to know are your thoughts about this small, but significant, question (posed more simply here, more fully below):  is it good practice for a lawyer to inform a client when the lawyer shares certain characteristics or experiences with the client?  If the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no, how do we decide which, when?  What about if a client is curious and inquires about whether the lawyer is, e.g., an immigrant, a Christian, an alcoholic, or lesbian?  How does it affect the dynamics within a student team if a team member shares, or does not share, personal information with a client?   Does it matter whether the client is interested in characteristics or experiences that are in fact like the client’s – “have you, Ms. Lawyer, ever been fired?  Beaten up?  In a hospice?” -- or that merely seem pertinent to the client, but to the lawyer feel quite personal and private?

Second, what if anything do we teach our student attorneys about this issue?   Do we routinely address this topic when preparing to work with clients? 

Here are some specific questions we would love your feedback on – and understand that you may not have time to answer more than one or two:

1.  Have you ever deliberately disclosed personal information about your experience or characteristics to a client?  If so, for what reason or purpose? Did it “work” as a technique?
2.  Have you ever tried to avoid self-disclosure to a client?  If so, did the client figure it out anyway?   What happened then?
3. Give an example of a type of personal experience or attribute that you think could be good to share with a client.
4.  Have you ever raised the issue of appropriate or inappropriate self-disclosure with your student attorneys?  In seminar, simulation, or supervision?     
5. Have you and/or student attorneys deliberately planned some self-disclosure?
6. Have you ever observed unplanned self-disclosure by a student attorney that concerned you?   What did you do?   
7. Do you think that you as supervising attorney can and should engage in judicious self-disclosure to clients, but encourage student attorneys to refrain from it?  What is your rationale for this distinction?   
8. Do you engage in analogous deliberate self-disclosure about certain aspects of your own background or situation with your students?   Give a couple of examples of personal characteristics or experiences you have chosen to share with students.

___ 

Also, Janet and I are in the process of compiling some written materials on the topic, including some from other professions, and would greatly appreciate any suggestions.

 Thanks, Vanessa

Title:  “When Is the Personal, Professional?”

Co-facilitators:

Professor Janet Calvo, City  University  of New York School  of Law
Professor Vanessa Merton, Pace University  School  of Law

Brief Description:

In this concurrent session, the specific problem we examine is how student attorneys [SAs] should and do handle potential identification with the predicament of a client (or, perhaps, a witness, adversary, juror, or judge – but in our limited time, we will focus on clients), e.g., when an immigrant SA represents immigrants; when an SA representing domestic violence survivors was herself a DV survivor; or an SA who has been fired has a client claiming wrongful discharge?  When does drawing upon or revealing personal experience become a vehicle for empathy and passionate advocacy, and when does it endanger rational decision-making and lead to fallacious presumption?  Might it seem artificial or distancing not to disclose that an SA shares certain key attributes or experiences with the client, such as when the SA’s immigrant origin is "obvious" and the client is likely to recognize and wonder about how the SA’s immigrant status/experience may affect the representation?  Then again, what if ethnicity or accent suggests to the client that the SA is an immigrant when that is not the case?  In determining the appropriate range of self-disclosure, does it matter how “personal” the information is, i.e., age? sexual orientation? political opinion? disability? level of prior lawyering experience or expertise? HIV+ status? bipolar disorder?  Is it different if the supervising professor shares certain characteristics or experiences with the client?  There is a rich literature about secondary trauma and self-disclosure in the medical, social work, and psychiatric literature, so we will look to other professions for their insights.

We also want to explore how these issues may affect case assignments and the dynamics within case teams.  What if one team member is perceived, accurately or not, as having “instant rapport” because of a personal attribute or experience shared with the client?  Or, on the contrary, is personal congruence with a client’s position, or a strong emotional reaction to a client’s particular suffering, a reason not to assign an SA to that client’s case?  Should information about an SA’s similarities with a client be shared within the case team, even if not with the client?  Should SAs be encouraged to express their emotional response to a client’s situation, again at least to the rest of the case team, if not to the client? 

We will try to engage the work-group in formulating ideas and techniques for engaging and working with students on the complexities of this tricky topic.  Perhaps if we cannot determine when the personal ought to be professional, we can at least decide when it should not.      

 Professor Vanessa Merton
Faculty Supervisor, Immigration Justice Clinic

John Jay Legal Services, Inc.
Pace University School  of Law 
80 North Broadway 

White Plains NY 10603

914 422 4333 (office) 
914 422 4391 (fax) 
800 836 7223 (free call)
vmerton@law.pace.edu

Washington University School of Law Clinical Education Program, Alternative Dispute Resolution Program, and Journal of Law and Policy to host scholarship roundtable and publish volume dedicated to New Directions in Clinical Theory, Teaching, and Practice - and

New Directions in ADR Theory, Teaching, and Practice

  The Washington University Journal of Law and Policy is a highly regarded law journal that, over the past decade, has published articles by a number of top dispute resolution and clinical legal educators and practitioners, including Jane Aiken, Jim Anaya, Margaret Martin Barry, Frank Block, Brenda Bratton Blum, Juliet Brodie, Susan Brooks, Luke Cole, Kim Connolly, Nancy Cook, Ken Feinberg, Lynda Frost, Maureen Hackett, Carol Harding, Carolyn Copps Hartley, Martin Geer, Toby Golick, Danny Greenberg, Maureen Hackett, Bill Ong Hing, Emily Hughes, Eric James, Mike Jenuwine, Susan Jones, Catherine Klein, Ved Kumari, Peter Joy , Ann Juergens, Jean Koh Peters, Kate Kruse, Bob Kuehn, Janet Lessem, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Mary Medcalf, Angela McCaffrey, Charles Ogletree, Michael Perlin, Carrie Petrucci, Bill Quigley, Asha Ramgobin, Spencer Rand, Dina Schlossberg, Abbe Smith, Nina Tarr, Tony Thompson, Karen Tokarz, Rose Voyvodic, Anita Weinberg, and Steve Wizner.

 In fall 2007, the Washington University School of Law Clinical Education Program sponsored a very successful scholarship roundtable on New Directions in Clinical Theory, Teaching, and Practice. Papers from that roundtable were published in fall 2008 in volume 28 of the Journal of Law and Policy. You can access this outstanding volume at http://law.wustl.edu/Journal/index.asp?ID=6826  

 In fall 2009, the Clinical Education Program will collaborate with the law school’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Program to host a follow-up scholarship roundtable on New Directions in Clinical Theory, Teaching, and Practice - and New Directions in ADR Theory, Teaching, and Practice.  At the roundtable, we will have presentation of drafts and discussion among the ten selected ADR and clinical faculty and practitioners, and several local commentators.  We anticipate that approximately five of the articles will focus on ADR and five on clinical education – or a combination thereof.  The Journal of Law and Policy will publish the papers from that roundtable in volume 34, scheduled to be published in fall 2010. The goal of this volume is to highlight and advance scholarship about innovative, interdisciplinary, and international ADR and clinical theory, practice, and teaching. 

 If you would like to participate in the roundtable and publish in this volume, we invite you to submit a minimum one page abstract to the Journal no later than May 15, 2009 to Megan Kokontis, Managing Editor, at mmkokontis@wulaw.wustl.edu with carbons to Annette Appell, Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs, at arappell@wulaw.wustl.edu, and Karen Tokarz, Director, Alternative Dispute Resolution Program, at tokarz@wulaw.wustl.edu. Beginning and experienced dispute resolution and clinical faculty are encouraged to submit abstracts. Selected authors will be notified by June 1 and will be required to submit first drafts of their articles by October 1, 2009 and final drafts by February 1, 2010. Authors will be expected to present their papers at the scholarship roundtable, scheduled for Thursday afternoon and Friday, November 12-13, 2009.  The volume will go to press in summer 2009. 

We look forward to hearing from you.

Karen Tokarz

Charles Nagel Professor of Public Interest Law and Public Service

Director, Alternative Dispute Resolution Program

Washington University School  of Law
One Brookings Drive
Saint Louis, MO  63130  USA 
Office: 314.935.6414, Cell: 314.422.0354
AY 2008-09: Visiting Scholar, Harvard Law School  Program on Negotiation

Professor Ron Whitener to Receive the 2009 M. ShanaraGilbert Award!

From Carol M. Suzuki, Associate Professor of Law, University of New Mexico School of Law

The Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education is proud to announce that Professor Ron Whitener from University of Washington has won this year’s M. Shanara Gilbert “Emerging Clinician” Award.  Professor Whitener is Assistant Professor of Law and the Director of the Tribal Court Criminal Defense Clinic at University of Washington School of Law, where he has been teaching in the clinical program since 1999. 

 

Through the Tribal Court Criminal Defense Clinic, Ron Whitener has made access to justice a reality for countless clients and has helped to train a new generation of advocates for American Indians.  For many American Indians, the Tribal Court Criminal Defense Clinic is the only source of representation for those facing criminal charges because tribal courts are not required by law to provide legal representation.  Professor Whitener saw this pressing need, started this clinic, and has helped to expand its reach through fundraising.  In addition, Professor Whitener has helped to build the clinical program at University of Washington and has been a resource to other clinical programs.  Professor Whitener also is an engaged scholar, authoring or co-authoring three journal articles focused on legal and health issues affecting American Indians.

 

Professor Whitener is actively involved in American Indian legal issues.  He began his career as Legal Counsel to the Squaxin Island Tribe, of which he is a member, and he has done lay advocate and other legal training for nearly a dozen other tribes in addition to direct representation of clients.  He frequently speaks about treaty rights, tribal jurisdiction, and other legal issues affecting American Indians.  He has also promoted international clinical legal education efforts through his collaboration with the Afghan Legal Educators Program, a program of the Asian Law Center at the University of Washington.  Afghan law faculty participating in that program visited tribal courts and attended meetings with faculty and students in the Tribal Court Public Defense Clinic.

 The M. Shanara Gilbert Award will be presented at the Conference on Clinical Legal Education at a special ceremony on Friday, May 8, at 9:00 a.m., in Cleveland, Ohio.  The Award is for a recent entrant into clinical legal education who has demonstrated all or some of the following qualities:

 1) a commitment to teaching and achieving social justice, particularly in the areas of race and the criminal justice system;

 2) an interest in international clinical legal education;

 3) a passion for providing legal services and access to justice to individuals and groups most in need;

 4) service to the cause of clinical legal education or to the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education; and

 5) an interest in the beauty of nature.

 This year, as in past years, the Section’s Awards Committee had a very difficult task, choosing among many incredible and superb nominees.  The Executive Committee would like to thank the Awards Committee for its work in the selection process: Gordon Beggs (Cleveland State); Deborah Epstein (Georgetown); Miye Goishi (UC-Hastings); Zelda Harris, Acting Chair for this Award selection (Arizona); and Peter Joy, Chair (Washington University) (please note that Peter Joy did not participate in the deliberations or selection for this Award due to a conflict of interest).

 

We look forward to seeing you in Cleveland and honoring Professor Whitener for his creativity in addressing a pressing legal need for an underserved community and his outstanding contributions to clinical legal education.