Guest blogger Elaine Lin is currently a 3L at HLS.
Elaine with Adam Glenn HLS ’10 and fireman Nathan Barber in the Nantucket Airport.
Clinicals. And the random opportunities that come with that. My time at the law school generally. Where does one start?
I came to law school with an eye for family law because I had been working with a woman and children’s homeless shelter in California. I participated in the family law clinical, met with and represented clients in probate court, wrote affidavits and motions, met really snarky opposing counsel, and learned a ton. Just last week, I received notice that our client finally got full sole legal and physical custody of her daughter back after a four-year court battle! Definitely one of those “Wow, the justice system does work!” moments.
I also took the negotiation workshop my 1L year and loved it – but then the question was, what do you do with that? I got really involved managing projects for Harvard Negotiators, the student organization here at the Law School focused on Negotiation. We developed a best practices guide for negotiating custody arrangements for the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. We designed materials on how to have difficult conversations for at-risk teens in the DC Metro area. I learned how to develop a project idea, manage a team, manage a project, and have a quality deliverable for the client at the end of the semester. I learned about client development and client contact. As chair of Harvard Negotiators this year, I developed all these skills that have real world application while our clients have benefited from our work.
Because of our work last Fall, incarcerees in the Houston prison system will leave better equipped to navigate their business and personal lives, youths in the DC Metro area will be better able to have difficult life-altering conversations, and some child in the middle of the country will hopefully be better provided for despite the financial restrictions resulting from the economic downturn. Firemen and other union workers in Nantucket will hopefully be able to secure a better contract for themselves, and at a minimum, the animosity in their relationship with the Town has decreased. We’ve started a consulting project to help members of the Harvard community have more effective negotiations, we’re designing a negotiation curriculum for an after school program in the Mississippi Delta to add to their programming. We get great experience, they get great products – it’s a classic win-win, and it’s kind of awesome.
In the past year, I’ve taught negotiation to elected officials in the NAACP, to community leaders in the Mississippi Delta, to Firemen in Nantucket and business professionals in Germany. I’m currently working on designing a conflict resolution curriculum through the Negotiation and Mediation Clinical for youths who have lost loved ones to acts of mass terror – it will culminate with a camp in Belfast this summer with participants from 9/11, Israel, Palestine, Spain, Mumbai, Ireland, Northern Ireland. It’s seeing the threads of my life – the love for teaching, for youth, for peace, for negotiation – come together in a final law school project. I don’t quite understand how all of these things came to be – but I’m loving it and living it.
– Elaine
