AALS Poverty and Clinic Sections’ Call-for-Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS – AALS 2014 Joint Program of the Sections on Poverty Law and Clinical Legal Education

In honor of the 50^th Anniversary of the “War on Poverty,” the AALS sections on Poverty Law and Clinical Legal Education will sponsor a joint program at the AALS Annual Meeting, entitled 50 Years After the “War on Poverty:”  Evaluating Past Enactments and Innovative Approaches for Addressing Poverty in the 21^st Century.

The program will explore the effectiveness of the federal “War on Poverty” programs in addressing/eradicating poverty, and participants will discuss how amendments to those laws have had an impact on their effectiveness.  The “War on Poverty” programs include: Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF,” formerly Assistance for Families and Dependent Children), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP,” formerly known as food stamps), federally funded legal services (originally under the Office of Economic Opportunity, and now the Legal Services Corporation), Head Start, and the No Child Left Behind Act (originally the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), among others. In addition, the joint program will explore newer ways that the federal government has attempted to address poverty, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Family and Medical Leave Act and others.

Among the questions to be considered are:  In what ways were individual “War on Poverty” programs effective and why?  How and why were those programs ineffective?  How did amendments to the War on Poverty enactments affect their efficacy in ameliorating poverty?  What impact have exclusions from the poverty programs on such grounds as immigration status had on poverty?  How do more recent federal laws affect poverty?  Do they work with or in opposition to prior federal laws?  Can the walls between federal poverty programs be broken down to more effectively address poverty? If so, how?   How have communities responded to the “War on Poverty” programs and what impact has their efforts had on reshaping the poverty programs?  What are concrete and innovative ways for the federal government to address poverty in the 21^st Century for both individuals and communities? In collaboration with the Boston College Journal on Law and Social Justice, the joint program seeks papers for presentation and publication relating to the program’s topic.  Submissions may include papers, on substantive law, interdisciplinary innovation or analysis, policy, empirical work, or clinical pedagogy, that either evaluate the effectiveness of the federal role in addressing poverty over the past 50 years, address how the federal government can address poverty in the 21^st Century, or both.

The Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice will publish selected papers, no more than two of which will be selected for presentation at the joint program in New Orleans.  Selected authors must agree not to publish their work in another journal.  Not all papers selected for publication will be presented at the annual meeting. 

Submission information:  Papers should be submitted by email attachment to aals.waronpoverty.papers@gmail.com.  As the Planning Committee will use a blind review process, a cover letter with the author’s name and contact information should accompany the paper.  The paper itself, including the title page and footnotes must not contain any references identifying the author or the author’s school.  The submitting author is responsible for taking any steps necessary to redact self-identifying text or footnotes.  Near complete papers should be submitted by August 9, 2013.  Authors of papers chosen for presentation and/or publication will be notified by September 27, 2013.  Final papers are due by December 2013.

Eligibility: Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Foreign, visiting (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school), and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Faculty at fee-paid non-member schools are also ineligible.

For more information, please contact Emily Suski, Planning Committee Co-Chair for the Poverty Law Section at esuski@gsu.eduor Hina Shah, Planning Committee Member for the Clinical Legal Education Section at hshah@ggu.edu.

For students (and maybe professors) because it is exam time.

A couple of fun videos to help keep perspective on law school and exams.

1. I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate.

2. F You Law Revue Parody.  (older but good).

3. I Patented Sex. (starring one of my former students).

4. Spongebob We Will Rock You.  (because I have a kid and this is an awesome way to get psyched for an exam).

New Article: “The Clinic Lab Office”

New Article: Jeanne Charn & Jeffrey Selbin, The Clinic Lab Office, 2013 Wisc. L. Rev. __ (2013).  Abstract below:

This essay describes the potential for law school clinics to serve as sites of empirical research to answer pressing questions about delivery of legal services in low-income communities. With others, we have noted the research imperative in legal services, made the case for infrastructure to support such research, and advocated for renewed ties between law school clinics and legal services programs. For reasons set forth in the paper, now is an opportune time for clinics to contribute to a growing civil justice research agenda. We call this opportunity the “Clinic Lab Office.”

In Part I, we map the common origins and current landscapes of the legal services and clinical legal education movements. The movements have drifted from their early, common agendas in order to achieve a measure of stability and security. In Part II, we identify the need for civil justice research to inform a complex, decentralized legal services delivery system. We lack critical information about the demand, supply, and efficacy of existing models, but new national efforts bode well for the future of such research.

In Part III, we argue that law school clinics are well positioned to undertake empirical research and provide examples of some early projects. Clinics have much to offer legal services in the research dimension and much to gain. Such engagement can improve clinic work, deepen student learning, and make a distinct scholarly contribution. We conclude by identifying challenges to realizing the full potential of the Clinic Lab Office.

Essays on law school and becoming a lawyer

A student who wants to do work on social justice came to my office and after I emailed him Bill Quigley’s essay, Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice, he sent me a link to Dean Spade’s essay, For Those Considering Law School.   Both are worth reading by those considering law school — and even those in law school or teaching at law school.  Three somewhat more dated essays include Duncan Kennedy’s Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (a canonical classic), Robert A. Williams, Jr.’s Vampires Anonymous and Critical Race Practice (a favorite of mine), and my On Becoming “Professor” (mine, though it is the weakest link in this list of essays).

Photo Copyright Ezra Rosser 2013

IRP “Teaching Poverty 101 Workshop” Call for Applications

Wisconsin’s IRP is offering a “Teaching Poverty 101 Workshop,” June 2-6, 2012.  The deadline for the Call for Applications is Jan. 4, 2013.

Call-for-Papers: “The Rise of Mandatory Pro Bono Programs in Law Schools” and “The Future of Marriage Equality”

The American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law has issued a call-for-papers on two topics (the first is the fall symposium): “The Rise of Mandatory Pro Bono Programs in Law Schools” and “The Future of Marriage Equality.”  The deadline for submissions is Oct. 1, 2012 and full call for papers can be found here: JGSPL Call for Papers 07-2012.

Elizabeth Warren Controversy — somewhat tangential post

I have resisted posting anything about the Elizabeth Warren controversy regarding her having claimed to have been Native American for a while.  In part, I did so because the connection to poverty law is somewhat limited, but it is a topic that I think deserves attention and is relevant to law professors, regardless of their particular specialty.  Another reason for my being unable to resist saying something about it is that in addition to poverty law, I teach Indian law.  But, let me add so that there is no question, I am non-Indian, though I did grow up in part on the Navajo Nation.

Preliminaries aside, I am troubled both by Warren’s claim/explanation and by the way fellow progressives have rushed to defend her or pretend such a claim shouldn’t matter.  As Kevin Noble Maillard noted in the N.Y. Times:

Looked at from the inside, however, the Warren controversy is all new. When the Brown campaign accused Elizabeth Warren of touting herself as American Indian to advance her career, this was news to Native law professors. We have a good eye for welcoming faculty to the community and identifying promising scholars. We know where people teach, what they have published and we honor them when they die. Harvard Law School named its first Native American tenured professor? Really? In our small indigenous faculty town, we would have heard about it already.

There are of course many who give good reasons for questioning the attention the right has given to this topic and Brian Leiter in particular has engaged in a rigorous defense of Warren (see here, here, and here).  But my view is best captured by two op-eds published by Indian Country Today:

• Suzan Shown Harjo, What’s the Deal With Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee?, Indian Country Today, May 15, 2012.
• Steve Russel, Elizabeth Warren: Box-Checking for Fun and Profit, Indian Country Today, May 16, 2012.

To claim you are Indian without having a tie that goes beyond “family lore” – ie no proof of tribal membership or other ready proof – is questionable.  Of course for some people, particularly members of tribes that were terminated, their identity could well remain Indian and appropriately so, even if they do not have ready proof such as a census card.  But that doesn’t appear to be the case here.  So even though I largely agree with her politics, I am troubled by her self-identification based on what appears to be a very limited connection to Indian communities.  (It goes without saying that being phenotypically white does not mean you cannot be Indian.)  Vine Deloria Jr. had a great discussion of this topic in Custer Died for Your Sins and considering the limited number of Native Americans who are law professors and the continued marginalization of Indian law in most law schools, I think it is fair to look into this aspect of her career.  And so far her answers do little to support what sounds like either (a) best case scenario: careless indifference to the significance of tribal identity or (b) worst case scenario: box checking for career gain.  Even if the best case scenario is what happened (who doesn’t want to have people to go to lunch with — one of her explanations, along with high cheekbones, believe it or not, for saying she was Indian), I do think progressives have been quick to rush to her defense because of her politics in ways that would not have been the same had she been a conservative politician.  (Finally, I do not think saying she earned her promotions and lateral offers on the merits, independent of her having self-identified as Indian, is responsive nor something worth debating.)

New Article: “Fiat Flux: Evolving Purposes and Ideals of the Great American Public Law School”

New Article: Christopher Edley, Jr., Fiat Flux: Evolving Purposes and Ideals of the Great American Public Law School, 100 California L. Rev. 313 (2012).  Abstract below:

Let us suppose that we can choose and bring about what a great law school will be decades from now. A direction is not difficult to propose, and an audience might be persuaded by verbal performance. But the cliché that past is prologue provides a better basis for choosing our direction. If we consider the earlier course of both great law schools and their accomplished graduates, I believe a rewarding path forward lies just beyond the surrounding thicket of the everyday.

To discover that path, it seems fitting in this Volume to start with the thoughts of my predecessor, the founding dean of Berkeley’s School of Jurisprudence. One hundred years ago, at the dedication of Boalt Memorial Hall, Dean William Carey Jones began his formal remarks somewhat provocatively:

The law schools of this country have never faced their problems. Like most institutions coming down from generation to generation, they have been slow to inquire into the original justification of their plans and programs, or to seek to learn whether what was once justified still retained its reason for being.1

Reviewing the preceding one hundred years, Dean Jones stated, “[T]here is only one innovation of significant and essential importance that has been introduced.” This innovation was in the method instruction and was due mainly to the initiative of one person, Professor C.C. Langdell. The application that he made of the inductive method to the study of law has been well nigh revolutionary in its effects.2

Our Dean knew Langdell’s method not only added much needed scientific rigor to legal study, but also demonstrated to students the essential lesson that to practice law is by its very nature to reform it: “[L]aw is a living principle, even as medicine is an advancing science. Law is in process of constant becoming. It is ever being re-created, not only through legislation, but through a sort of self-reproduction.”3

To this I would add that a school of law—especially a public one—if it is to be and remain great, must be comparably dynamic. Indeed, it should be more so if it is to be not merely an echo of what the law is, but a clarion herald and perhaps agent of progress.

Part I of this Essay illustrates the evolutionary path the American Law School took during the twentieth century, from its early apprenticeship-based model to today’s modern university institution, enriched by diverse, Ph.D.-trained faculty. Part II provides three recommendations that collectively point toward a vision for the next few decades at the Great American Law School. First, we must embrace a curriculum designed to prepare students for legal careers outside the traditional practice of law. Second, we should strive to graduate effective societal problem-solvers—both lawyers and non-lawyers—by encouraging cross-disciplinary bonds across the research university campus. Finally, we must take seriously the Great Law School’s international role, and its duty to shape a global legal culture that will promote prosperity, security, and human dignity.

New Article: “A Place in the Academy: Law Faculty Hiring and Socioeconomic Bias”

New Article: Michael J. Higdon, A Place in the Academy: Law Faculty Hiring and Socioeconomic Bias, SSRN Feb. 2012.  Abstract below:

In the movie Moneyball — based on the Nationally bestselling book of the same name — Jonah Hill’s character, Peter Brand remarks, “People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws.” Although his character was referring to baseball players, the same could be said of those who attempt to secure jobs as law professors. In fact, many law students are later surprised to learn that their ability to secure a job as a law professor has much less to do with what they have might have done during their legal careers, and more to do with simply the law school from which they graduated. As noted in the recent book Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate’s Guide: “Like it or not, the data says that the most important aspect [of being a successful applicant] is having received a J.D. from an Ivy League or Ivy League equivalent law school.”

Blog Post: “A Defense of Affirmative Action”

Blog Post of Interest: Ediberto Roman, A Defense of Affirmative Action, Huffington Post, Feb. 27, 2012.