Summary of Work and Accomplishments
2007-2008
In its sixth year of operation, the Children's Law Clinic at Duke Law School continues to be a powerful learning opportunity for law students and a significant community resource for low-income children with legal needs. The Clinic responded to 90 requests for legal assistance during the year, which provided law students a broad range of experiences from offering quick legal advice to engaging in lengthy litigation.
The Children's Law Clinic continues to specialize in cases involving special education for children with disabilities and school suspensions. This year, however, the Clinic also handled several child custody cases and children's claims for government benefits. Students provided more than 2,500 hours of free legal services to children who otherwise would have been without representation.
Many of the cases handled by the Clinic were referred to us by local pediatric medical providers engaged with us in the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children in Durham. This partnership involves an interdisciplinary collaboration between doctors and lawyers designed to provide more holistic care for children. In Durham, the Duke Children's Law Clinic joined with Legal Aid of North Carolina, Duke Primary Care for Children, and Lincoln Community Health Center to create a synergistic partnership in which medical providers are trained to spot legal issues and the legal providers accept referrals from them.
Core Work of the Children's Law Clinic
The Clinic has two basic missions: to provide opportunities for law students to learn the practical skills they will need to effectively represent clients and to provide high quality, free legal help to low-income children in the Durham region. During the six years the Clinic has existed, it has become highly specialized in representing children in disputes arising under the special education laws and the school discipline laws. Few lawyers in North Carolina practice in these areas, making the Clinic's service a particularly critical community resource. The Clinic Director and the Supervising Attorney, both on the Duke Law faculty, are sought-after experts in these fields. Both the law students and their clients draw on this expertise for help in solving the issues faced by the children.
As special education lawyers-in-training, the Clinic students must develop a significant array of skills. First, they must master the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that requires all school systems to provide appropriate educational services to disabled children in the least restrictive environment. Then, they must learn how the law applies in any of a great number of situations, from informal advocacy to litigation. At the same time, the students must become familiar with the disabilities that affect children and the psychoeducational testing that dictates the types of special education services that children with disabilities need.
In school discipline cases, which involve children facing long suspensions from school, additional skills come into play. After learning the law that applies in school discipline cases, the students must work extremely quickly, because the child will usually have a due process hearing within a week of the initial meeting. Their work includes investigating the grounds for the school suspension, finding and interviewing potential witnesses, and developing a theory of the case. The student then prepares an opening statement, witness examination and cross examination, and a closing argument. If the initial due process hearing is unsuccessful, there are opportunities for written advocacy to the school superintendent and oral advocacy before the local board of education.
The Clinic took on several custody matters this year for the first time. This foray into family law got several law students into the local courts, filing pleadings, engaging in negotiation and, in one case, handling a custody trial. The Clinic also took on a number of claims for children's Supplemental Security Income benefits. These cases require a highly complex analysis of a child's medical condition, a successful collaboration with the child's medical providers, and representation in the complicated appeal process developed by the Social Security Administration.
While they are learning the substance of the law and its context, the law students must also focus on basic lawyering skills. Each student in the Clinic must learn to conduct a sophisticated interview, which can be particularly challenging when the client is a child with autism, a language disability, or attention deficit disorder. The students must learn how to gather relevant information, investigate facts, analyze legal claims, and counsel clients. The law students enrolled this year advocated at school meetings, negotiated solutions with opposing counsel, represented clients in mediation, and prepared for and handled administrative hearings.
The Clinic students were successful on many fronts during this year. One special education case provided a particularly challenging opportunity for the students. It involved a high school girl with complex disabilities who was struggling in school. With the Clinic's advice, the girl's parent had been trying for more than a year to obtain special education services that would help her daughter succeed. When she was unsuccessful, she enrolled her daughter in a private reading program and requested reimbursement from the school system. One Clinic student spent a semester analyzing the potential legal theories and necessary evidence that was needed to support the claim. The next semester, two students were assigned to represent the girl and her mother in a "due process hearing" at the North Carolina Office of Administrative Hearings. The case lasted the whole semester, and gave the students the opportunity to fully develop a trial strategy, take and defend depositions, work with expert witnesses, respond to pre-trial motions, and engage in settlement negotiations. They also were fortunate to work with an experienced pro bono counsel whose firm paid the Clinic's litigation expenses. A favorable settlement was reached in the case just as the students were completing their semester. One of the students commented, "The twin elements of my Clinic experience - the reward and the challenge - operated together to make this semester feel unlike any other semester I've had."
Another special education case, one referred to the Clinic by one of our partners in the Medical-Legal Partnership, involved extensive negotiations and informal advocacy rather than litigation. The case was on behalf of nine-year-old "Sally" who was seeing a clinical psychologist at Duke. The parent told the psychologist how frustrated she was with the daughter's new school, because the teachers there said her daughter was not eligible for special services to help with her reading even though she was getting F's on her report card. The psychologist referred the family to the Children's Clinic, which took up advocacy for Sally. Armed with information obtained from her medical providers at Duke, the law students involved were able to make a powerful case that Sally indeed needed additional specialized services at school. Ultimately, the Clinic negotiated a broad array of special education services for Sally, who made dramatic improvements in school, as well as financial reimbursement for testing that had been done to prove the case. Her mother said, "I feel like a weight has been lifted off of both of us and I am so happy to finally see my daughter soar."
One the school discipline front, the Clinic had a number of successes, resulting in reduced suspensions for students who appealed the discipline imposed by the schools. For four students, their suspensions were reduced by more than 100 school days, which allowed them to pass their grades rather than having to repeat them the next year. In a few cases, the Clinic was not successful in mitigating the suspension, but nevertheless, the cases provided rich lawyering experiences for the law students involved. One student was able to fully develop a hearing strategy, conduct an administrative hearing, and then make an oral argument before the board of education. As he reflected on the experience, he had this to say: "This experience taught me that the law is not, as my grandparents think, an innately unethical profession full of cheaters who care only about making a buck from unwary clients. The law can be fulfilling, it can be about helping people get what they need, if that means only having their story told before an impartial decider. I look at what I did and what my colleagues in the Clinic did and cannot help but feel that we helped real people in real need."
Other law students in the Clinic were similarly insightful about the Clinic experience. Here are some of their comments:
"These are new shoes I'm wearing and every step I take in them is an accomplishment. Before taking a new step, I am nervous. Once I do, I recognize the importance and significance in taking such a step. This is the closest thing I have ever experienced to being an actual lawyer. I am excited about everything I learn and every small accomplishment is made bigger because I feel that I am building skills that I will need for the rest of my career."
"Interviewing turned out to be a lot harder that I expected it to be. The questions I needed to ask didn't always come naturally and it was hard to figure out what to ask on the spot. After doing a few, though, I can see that I have definitely improved."
"Participating in the Clinic gave me the opportunity to use some of the skills that I have learned thus far in law school, to develop them, and to gain new skills as well. The simple act of having to read a statute, interpret it, and apply it to a client's case was exciting and challenging."
Although our theoretical law school classes can be interesting, I feel like lawyering is one of those things that I learn better from doing it - working with a set of facts and researching the law and figuring out what can be done for a client based on these things. I would recommend the Clinic to everyone in law school."
Outreach
The Children's Law Clinic engaged in several projects during the year to broaden its impact. It enhanced its website by creating two related sites. One focuses on the Medical-Legal Partnership, and provides the medical practitioners access to general information, training power-point shows on various legal issues that could be relevant to their patients, and a mechanism to refer patients to the Clinic. The site can be viewed at http://www.law.duke.edu/partnershipforchildren/ . The other focuses on school discipline. It provides extensive information to attorneys and to parents to assist them in preparing for and handling school suspension hearings. It can be viewed at http://www.law.duke.edu/childedlaw/schooldiscipline/.
Clinic director Jane Wettach spoke at several meetings and conferences during the year. In September, she participated in a clinical law conference at the University of Tennessee Law School, delivering a paper on "The Law School Clinic as a Partner in a Medical-Legal Partnership." In January, she was a member of the faculty at a national academy for administrative law judges that preside over special education cases. In March, she was a presenter at a conference on special education law for North Carolina school administrators. Also during the spring, she gave workshops at the annual meeting of the North Carolina branch of the International Dyslexia Association and at the Wake County Special Education Parent-Teacher Association.
Conclusion
The Clinic is committed to continuing with its dual core missions of providing individual representation to at-risk children and training law students in critical professional skills. Since the Clinic opened its doors, more than 100 law students have been exposed to the striking legal needs of children, and have contributed to meeting those needs while developing skills and exploring their own styles of lawyering. Over four hundred families have directly benefited from the work of the Clinic, and many more have indirectly benefited from the community workshops and seminars offered, and the expertise of the Clinic faculty that is shared widely. The Clinic continues to be a highly valued resource for vulnerable children in our community as well as a rich training ground for the law students.