Miriam Gohara ‘97 argued before the 11th Circuit and won on behalf of NAACP Legal Defense Fund client Herbert Williams, who was sentenced to death nearly 20 years ago in Alabama.
Read more about the case at the NAACP website here.
Another day, another summer adventure! Before coming to HLS, 2L Michael Zabelin was a member of Americorps*VISTA, taught English in Ecuador, and was an intern at the Center for American Progress. In the fall he will begin working as a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.
“I found my summer internship with the Legal Assistance Foundation by taking advantage of the individual advising from the OPIA (Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising). In my meeting, Director Alexa Shabecoff suggested several options in the handful of geographic areas I was interested in spending the summer. Not only did Alexa provide names of organizations but also the names of HLS alumi and current students who had worked at these various places. After speaking with an alum who is currently working at LAF and a current student who had spent a summer there, I realized that LAF was going to be a great fit for me.’
“When preparing for my phone interview, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the LAF supervisory attorney in charge of hiring interns was an HLS grad. This connection allowed us to have an easy start to the interview. He was especially impressed with my involvement with the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review of which he was an active member in his law school days.’
“Before coming to law school, I had done both a semester long internship and a year of Americorps*VISTA in the field of low-income housing. This experience led me toward the Home Ownership Preservation Project at LAF. We are a very busy project this summer as the bulk of our work is in mitigating the effects of foreclosure. From advising people of their rights when they are first foreclosed upon to bringing suit against fraudulent parties who cheated clients while claiming to be rescuing them from foreclosure, I am part of a team that is doing real work to make a difference for people who are being effected by this very real headline-grabbing problem. I leave work feeling good most days knowing that I was able to have at least a small part in making the system a little more fair for the people who have been left behind or treated unfairly in the past.’
“Aside from the interesting substance of the work that I am doing, I am also learning a great deal about the day-to-day life of a public interest lawyer. Everything from filing documents at the Daley Center Courthouse to scouring depositions for something useful to our case has become part of my lawyerly repertoire because of this summer. I’ve even caught myself applying things from first year Legal Research and Writing and Civil Procedure that, at the time I learned them, I was certain I never would actually need to know.’
“I look forward to bringing the skills I have gained this summer back to Cambridge in the fall. I am sure they will be helpful as I begin my first year as a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.’
…Stephanie Robinson. You probably thought I was going to say Barack Obama. But there’s a more imminent election to replace Tavis Smiley as commentator on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Stephanie is a lecturer here at Harvard Law School as well as an HLS alumna and the CEO of the Jamestown Project.
Thanks to Professor Ron Sullivan for the heads up on this!
(L-R) María Luisa Romero 3L, Tim Mayhle 3L, Professor James Cavallaro
As her tenure at HLS begins to wind down, 3L María Luisa Romero stopped in to chat with staffer Julia Foresman about her human rights advocacy in Panamanian prisons. In the fall of her 2L year, as a student in Clinical Professor James Cavallaro’s Human Rights Advocacy seminar, María Luisa already had a project on Panama’s prisons in mind. She’d found there had been few international reports on the topic since Noriega’s ouster. During an independent clinical, met with prison system officials and members of the government, including the attorney general.
Last March, Cavallaro, Romero and two other students visited six prisons. María Luisa estimates these facilities hold more than 70 percent of Panama’s prisoners. During her research, she found, among many other abuses, flagrant corruption, overcrowding, and sanitation problems.
In Fall of 2007, María Luisa returned to Panama with Cavallaro returned to meet with other officials from the correctional system. The culmination of her efforts, which included the submission of a report to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, came a few weeks ago during a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
To watch the recording of the hearing on March 7, 2008 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, visit their website. The title of the hearing is “Human Rights Violations in Prisons in Panama.” Please note that the hearing is in Spanish.
Professor Jim Greiner just sent me an e-mail about a major project he’s undertaking in the next few months. See the attached document for a description.
Jim says the following:
Students can be involved in various ways with the Election Improvement Project, with credit/incentives consisting of pro bono hours against the HLS 40-hour graduation requirement, cash, or academic credit.
1. As an exit pollster/external poll watcher. HLS students would be part of a team administering an exit poll to voters as they leave polling areas and would document any violations of election law they observe. The time commitment is about 10 hours total, a 1.5-hour training session + a 7-hour shift at the polls + approximately 1.5 hours transportation time to & from the polling location. Students can receive pro bono credit (against the 40-hour graduation requirement) for this time.
2. As a “Precinct Captain” of an exit polling team. Students would lead a group of 3-4 exit pollsters/poll watchers (as described above), with the other members of the team comprised primarily of undergrads from local area colleges. The time commitment is about 12 hours total: 1.5 hour training session + 2 hours meeting with the team and traveling once (a day or two before election day) with its members to the polling location + a 7-hour shift at the polls + approximately 1.5 hours transportation time. Students can receive EITHER pro bono credit OR be paid by the hour at the standard HLS research assistant rate.
3. As a member of the “crisis team.” The crisis team will do as its name suggests, namely, respond to emergencies as they arise. The time commitment is less predictable but generally longer than that of a Precinct Captain. Pro bono credit or by-the-hour payments available.
4. As an organizer. Students can become involved in the construction and implementation of the Project. Pro bono credit and/or academic credit (if the student’s involvement is folded into a paper on election-related issues) is available.
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To anyone still hunting for a rewarding summer internship, Harvard Defenders may have your answer. As a student organization that provides free representation to low-income criminal defendants not entitled to state-provided counsel, Harvard Defenders is the only legal service organization in Massachusetts that represents these low-income defendants for free in criminal show-cause hearings. Every summer, from a pool of dozens of applicants, the organization chooses three students to intern for ten weeks and work on a docket of several cases.
During a recent informational meeting, former Defender Phil Lee ‘00 recounted his summer experience. “I was defending a woman who had stolen diapers and a ham… I explained to the magistrate that the crime was not done out of greed, but out of true need,” said Lee. “You get to be a real advocate.”
While students handle all the case intake and the work is a team effort, the casework is supervised by attorney John Salsberg, who has served as Harvard Defenders Clinical Instructor for almost 30 years. The Defenders meet with Salsburg regularly for guidance and support in developing case strategy. “Overall,” said 2L Darnell Stanislaus, “the experience gives you great exposure to criminal law and litigation…and there’s no better feeling than having a truly appreciative client.” 2L Alex Davies agreed and emphasized that the skills developed through the Defenders are transferrable. “Because no one magistrate responds the same way to the facts of your case, you’re able to practice reading an audience and publicly making case-law arguments,” she said.
The Harvard Defenders are now taking resumes for their summer internship on a rolling basis. Anyone interested should contact Program Administrator Maria Hermann at mhermann@law.harvard.edu.
I just heard from a student, David Kessler, that an article he wrote under the supervision of Professors Warren and Stuntz was just accepted for publication by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Though students regularly publish “Notes” in law reviews and journals, it is more unusual for them to get articles published. It’s a credit to David and his advisers.
The article is titled “Free to Leave? An Empirical Look at the Fourth Amendment’s Seizure Standard.” Here is the abstract:
“Whether a person has been ’seized’ often determines if he or she receives Fourth Amendment protection. The Supreme Court has established a standard for identifying seizures: a person is seized when a reasonable person in his situation would not have felt free to leave or otherwise terminate the encounter with law enforcement. In applying that standard, today’s courts conduct crucial seizure inquiries relying only on their own beliefs about when a reasonable person would feel free to leave. But both the Court and scholars have noted that, though empirical evidence about whether people actually feel free to leave would help guide the seizure inquiry, no such evidence presently exists. This paper presents the first empirical study of whether people actually would feel free to leave in two situations in which the Court has held that people would: on public sidewalks and on buses. Drawing on a survey of 406 randomly selected Boston residents, this paper concludes that people would not feel free to end their encounters with the police. By the Court’s standard, respondents would be seized in both scenarios. The data also show that knowledge of one’s legal right to end the encounter with the police would not make people feel free to leave, and that women and people under twenty-five would feel less free to leave than would men and people over twenty-five. This initial empirical evidence suggests the need to rethink the current seizure standard.”
Keep an eye out in January 2009 for Mr. Kessler’s article!
I just got an e-mail from Professor Martha Minow telling me that one of her students, 3L Lena Konanova, would be arguing a case before the First Circuit as part of her work at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center Employment Civil Rights clinic.
I followed up with Lena to ask how this came about:
“The opportunity came up as a purely fortuitous coincidence of circumstances—it wasn’t something that I had sought out or worked towards accomplishing or ever even envisioned. I have been working at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center, in the Employment Civil Rights Project. My clinical instructor had the appellate argument in this case coming up in May and he asked me a few weeks ago whether I would be interested in arguing the case. A few of us had worked on the briefing, but I think he picked me because of my moot court experience—I was on the winning team in the Ames competition. I also took Tom Goldstein’s and Professor Larry Tribe’s Supreme Court Litigation workshop this winter and helped prepare Tom for his Supreme Court argument—I think that fact helped the First Circuit and the client agree to this unusual situation.
“In any case, I am quite excited about it and just trying to focus on preparing for the big day.”
Q: How many years of experience do you have in advising students on public interest careers and what is the advantage of that length of experience?
A: I have been doing public interest advising for 14 years (not including the semester I spent as a Wasserstein Fellow-in Residence at HLS) before joining the office. My longevity offers HLS students a lot of benefits that advisers who haven’t been doing public interest advising as long just can’t match even if they have a lot of public interest work experience.
First, doing this work for a long time has allowed me to build up expertise in a wide range of practice settings and types of work beyond my own expertise. I was a poverty lawyer before joining HLS but because I have learned so much from our student and alumni experiences, I now have expertise in such divergent areas as the hiring practices of the Department of Justice and how to break into the competitive world of civil rights and civil liberties advocacy.
Perhaps even more importantly, I have a network of lawyers that I can call upon to give students insider advice about their areas of practice and sometimes an extra leg up in the application process. One service we provide to many students is to give them personal referrals to alums or other lawyers working in their area of interest from my own “mental rolodex” or from more formal databases. That network has been built through 14 years of meeting panelists and visiting Wasserstein Fellows (some of whom aren’t HLS grads but with whom I have a connection), through working with employers around the world and through knowing graduates who have cycled through OPIA. The many graduates who used our services while in law school and have personal connections to our staff are especially loyal.
