New Article: The Poverty of Clinical Canonic Texts

Anthony V. Alfieri, The Poverty of Clinical Canonic Texts, 26 Clinical L. Rev. 53 (2019). Abstract below:

This essay revisits the foundational vision — the deep stock story — of poverty and the poor in clinical legal education against the backdrop of the new sociology of poverty. Long imparted by clinical faculty and invoked by student advocates in defense of the indigent, that stock story adverts to mainstream social science descriptions of impoverishing structural forces (discrimination) and individual deficiencies (pathology) in litigation and transactional representation yet omits thick descriptions of the systematic, impoverishing effects of race, inequality, and disenfranchisement on place-based client groups and deep-rooted client communities. Reiterated in hearings, at trial, on appeal, and in transactional negotiations, the story catalogues the effects of economic marginalization, gender hierarchy, and racial subordination on individuals without fully elaborated reference to the politics, cultural and social history, and economics of a specific time, place, or community. The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that this descriptive omission, a kind of narrative incompleteness, pervades certain of our canonical texts, and, by extension, our classroom pedagogies and fieldwork methodologies. Most notable in the early and middle volumes of the work of David Binder and Susan Price spanning the formative period of clinical education from 1977 to 2004, this structural omission distorts our understanding of poor clients and impoverished communities and, equally important, renders our legal-political advocacy on their behalf less effective.

The essay proceeds in four parts. Part I describes the recent community supper meeting of tenants and homeowners organized by the Coconut Grove Village West Housing and Community Development Task Force at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Miami, Florida. Part II explores the foundational conception of poverty and the social construction of poor clients and impoverished neighborhoods in conventional clinical pedagogy typified by Binder and Price. Part III examines an alternative, more complex vision of poverty and the poor portrayed in the emerging new sociology of poverty. Part IV extends the new sociology of poverty to the classroom pedagogy and fieldwork methodology of clinical education to better understand, and more effectively represent, poor clients and impoverished communities.