Young Law Students Getting Old Schooled
Addressing those gathered last week for the christening of a new office wing for St. John’s University Law School’s clinical programs, Dean Mary Daly cheered faculty members and administrators for helping move hands on education to the heart of the department’s curriculum.
The $1.2 million project, which will provide students with better resources and more business like space, represents a commitment to the program’s law clinics, including its oldest, largest and most reputable—the school’s Elder Law Clinic—as interest in the field mounts.
Serving the borough’s low and no income seniors, the now 12 year old program began with the vision of merging the school’s mission of service with a recognized need for in the field law practice.
“It’s a population that is so easily over looked,” said Afaf Nasher, an Elder Law Clinic alumni, of the program’s clients.
While the clinic has remedied the dilemmas of some of its 450 clients unconventionally—Nasher’s last client eventually had her house renovated by “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” after an underhanded contractor left it uninhabitable—the program affords students the opportunity to leave lecture halls and navigate traditional legal avenues. The students interview clients, stand beside them during court proceedings and work to unravel the webs of red tape in which seniors often find themselves entangled.
Just as environmental law emerged as a field in the 1980s with the growth of issue awareness, Ann Goldweber, the director of St. John’s Elder Law Clinic, explained that elder law is becoming an area students are increasingly considering as baby boomers age. This has come as law school deans are, like Daly, recognizing the importance of clinical law education.
Area law schools offer programs in subfields ranging from corporate law to battered women’s rights. But in Queens, where over 1 million seniors reside, students work in an environment where the emerging field of elder law is particularly pronounced.
Limited resources force clinic administrators on the school’s Jamaica Estates campus to refer 10 callers to other area programs for every client they take on.
Goldweber reported that while, in order to maintain ideal student supervisor ratios, the number of students admitted to the program has not changed, the applicant pool has steadily risen since her tenure began in 1998. Elizabeth Connolly, a second year law student enrolled in the Elder Law Clinic, reported that approximately 100 students interviewed for the 16 spots eventually filled this semester.
This interest at St. John’s has been mirrored at the City University of New York’s Law School. Associate professor and co supervisor of CUNY’s Elder Law Clinic, Joe Rosenberg, reported that increased demand for senior legal counsel started to noticeably translate into an increased interest in elder law approximately seven years ago.
While St. John’s program concerns itself primarily with issues of consumer fraud—one of Connolly’s two current clients had his home stolen by a younger woman—CUNY’s program, from its Flushing campus, handles many estate planning, Social Security, pension and Medicaid issues. CUNY’s clinic typically enrolls between 14 and 16 students a semester, who work with, collectively, between 50 and 60 clients a semester.
Rosenberg explained that even those alumni who don’t directly enter professions of social service leave the clinic with the understanding of the need for attorneys today to diversify their offerings.
Nasher had not entered a firm looking specifically to aid elders, as many law school graduates cannot because of sizable debt, but she regularly relies on her elder law experience as other attorneys take on cases that involve elder issues at her firm.
Both Connolly and fellow clinic member, Vanessa Hunt, were unsure of which subfield of law to pursue, but chose St. John’s Elder Law Clinic over other clinics offered, including a Child Advocacy Clinic and Securities Arbitration Clinic, in part because of the field’s emergence.
“I’m still testing the waters, but it’s definitely a consideration,” said Connolly of litigating for the elderly.
She reported that in a borough where so many sit on such enormous sources of equity, in the form of their homes, scams such as the one her current client has found himself caught in are not uncommon. Roughly 25 percent of the cases that St. John’s Elder Law Clinic takes on involve acts of impropriety, including predatory lending, home improvement contractor fraud and creditor scams.
For further information on St. John’s Elder Law Clinic, call (718) 990 6689.
[thanks to z-wire]
