Showing papers in "University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class in 2013"

A Tale of Two Systems: How Schools and Juvenile Courts are Failing Students

Abstract: The author draws on her experience as a former high school teacher, a juvenile defender, and the co-director of a juvenile justice clinic to illustrate the failure of two systems – schools and courts – to work together to prepare the children to become law-abiding citizens. Children who misbehave at school suffer punishment at school, and are frequently excluded from their schools because of suspension or expulsion. These same children are then prosecuted in juvenile delinquency court based on the original misconduct at school. This double punishment by both school and court is developmentally unsound. Double punishment of school-children backfires because it is untimely, stigmatic, and unresponsive to the behavior. Sanctions by schools and juvenile delinquency courts are viewed as unfair and overly harsh by children, their families, and their communities. These punishments are disproportionately applied to marginalized groups of students, like those students who are disabled and belong to racial and ethnic minority groups, conveying a strong message of injustice. Ultimately, double punishment disincentivizes students to respect the law, perpetuating delinquency. The author explains the importance of collaborative lawyering and a holistic model of representation to intervene on behalf of children trapped in the school-to-prison pipeline. School and juvenile court systems should focus on the individualized circumstances of the youth in their care. Schools are best poised to address and correct student behavior problems with developmentally appropriate responses that teach and promote good citizenship. To reduce juvenile delinquency court referrals, the author proposes that schools, prosecutors, and courts institute policies to disfavor delinquency referrals when a student’s misconduct has been addressed at school or is related to a disability.

Promoting Language Access in the Legal Academy

Abstract: Since the 1960s, the United States government has paid increasing attention to the rights of language minorities and to the need for greater civic and political integration of these groups. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the issuance of Executive Orders, and intervention by the federal judiciary, progress has been made in the realm of language access. State and local courts have likewise taken steps (albeit imperfectly) to provide interpretation and translation assistance to Limited English Proficient persons. Most recently, responding to both lack of services and inconsistent practices, the American Bar Association has set out national guidelines on the subject. As language access rises in importance – within the government as a whole, and the legal system in particular – law schools have begun to develop strategies to promote language access within the academy. These strategies serve multiple purposes: to prepare students to identify, and respond to, issues of language difference in the context of legal work; to ensure that the policies and practices of law schools comply with language access norms; and to foment student awareness and advocacy on language access, as a key social justice issue. Indeed, educating future lawyers involves not just teaching law students how to read a case, interview a client or draft a brief, it also includes introducing them to the numerous ways lawyers seek to participate in and improve the justice system. Promoting language access in the legal academy offers numerous opportunities to expose students to a diverse set of organizations and skills, and to a community of advocates who have engaged on these issues. This article describes some innovations and best practices relating to language access in the legal academy. It opens with a description of the salience of language access in the current political moment, noting recent demographic trends, and the political importance of language access. It discusses the contemporary salience of language access and the ABA’s 2012 Standards for Language Access in Courts. The article reviews various models for incorporating language access into the law school curriculum, in both doctrinal and experiential settings, and positions bilingual instruction as a language access strategy. The authors describe how law schools can expand the pipeline into the interpreter professions by training and deploying bilingual college students as community interpreters.

School-Based Legal Services as a Tool in Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline and Achieving Educational Equity

Abstract: Advocates fighting against the "school-to-prison pipeline" pipeline have focused on resource starvation, zero tolerance disciplinary policies, excessive suspensions and expulsions, school policing, and high-stakes testing that affect youth of color once they begin attending school. Youth of color are disproportionately likely to be from low-income families, and they face particular challenges as a result of the interaction between poverty and racism. This Article has three aims: to analyze the way in which poverty makes youth of color particularly vulnerable to involvement in the pipeline; to argue that advocates should include poverty and its ill effects in the discourse around ending the pipeline; and to propose the establishment of more school-based legal clinics as one step toward ameliorating poverty's negative effects, and ultimately the pipeline.

"Harmonizing Current Threats: Using the Outcry for Legal Education Reforms to Take Another Look at Civil Gideon and What it Means to be an American Lawyer"

Abstract: Drawing from the broad and varied literature on legal ethics, the paper demonstrates that legal education and access to justice concerns can and should be addressed simultaneously in our current political and economic climate. Current threats to legal education, and to lawyering in general, present an opportunity for legal education transformation. Applying legal ethics theory to an analysis of these threats provides support for the creation of teaching law firms, similar in size and scope to teaching hospitals, that will employ clinical teaching methodology, substantially enhance ethics teaching and significantly address the issue of access to justice.