Toby’s blog

Anyone considering HLS for whom the allure of law school is sweetened by the promise of never having to endure Science again might be advised to consider the number of fields in which scientific research is altering the way law is administered. Take child advocacy work, for instance. A recent panel of experts including Charles Nelson, the Richard David Scott Chair in Pediatric Developmental Research at Harvard Medical School, and Cindy Lederman, a judge of the Miami/Dade County Juvenile Court joined HLS Professors Charles Ogletree, Martha Minow, and CAP Director Elizabeth Bartholet in exploring the short and long-term effects of toxic stress related to child abuse and neglect, parental substance abuse, maternal depression, and exposure to violence.

To frame the issue, Dr. Nelson provided the clinical background for examining maltreatment and neglect. “Early experiences have a particularly strong influence,” said Nelson, “Timing of abuse, the nature of it, and one’s genetic predisposition can be long-lasting due to fundamental changes in mental circuitry.” To illustrate his point, Nelson explained the findings of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized trial of foster care as intervention for social deprivation associated with the institutionalization of nearly 200 children in Romania. “Due to negative experiences as infants, many of the children had stunted growth, anxiety disorders, and reductions in brain activity.” Nelson stressed that we must improve our understanding of the neurobiology of early adversity to improve the court’s understanding of neural plasticity… we must translate science to policy.”

Judge Lederman agreed with Nelson and admitted that the cases she sees involve, by and large, parents unengaged with and apathetic to their babies. “Mothers that come before me are there as a last resort; they don’t understand why their children have been taken away from them,” she explained. “We’re forced to make clinical and mental health decisions all the time. Dealing with the deterioration is not something they teach you in law school.” Judge Lederman insisted that to properly attend to the needs of children jurists must become students of the science of early childhood development.

Presented with the clinical side of child maltreatment, Professors Bartholet and Minow weighed in. “I see two very important policy implications arising from these social science findings,” said Bartholet. “It involves enabling as many parents as possible to be able to nurture and support their kids… and it further involves intervening early and coercively to place abused children under foster care.”

“We know that when the phrase ‘in the best interest of the child’ is uttered with a lawyer in the room that it’s already too late for these kids,” explained Minow. “We’re looking now for the least worst thing that can happen…time matters when you’re talking about kids, and new brain research can help us facilitate their well being.”

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.

During her Winter Term, 2L Lauren Birchfield traveled to Delhi, India to work with the Human Rights Law Network on the Right to Food Campaign. Upon her return, she shared her story and photos with us.

“I spent January 2008 interning at the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) in Delhi, India, working on the Right to Food. The Human Rights Law Network provides pro bono legal services, conducts public interest litigation, participates in advocacy, and collaborates with social movements and human rights organizations. Maintaining both litigation and publishing departments, HRLN works on issues such as Right to Food, Women’s Justice, Dalit Rights, Disability Rights, and rights for persons living with HIV/AIDS.

“Along with my colleague Jessica Corsi, I investigated and documented the history of the Right to Food Campaign, its accompanying case, PUCL v. India & Others, and the post-litigation implementation of India’s constitutional right to food. Our time in India was spent largely traveling around Delhi and other parts of the country conducting interviews with activists involved with the Right to Food Campaign. The fact-finding, research, and interviews conducted are currently being incorporated into a final document, which will be completed by June 2008. In our forthcoming paper, we intend to address not only the campaign and litigation, but also larger questions about the right to food, as well. These larger issues include food sovereignty, the effects of neoliberal economic policy and trade liberalization on the rural poor, and the relationship between food security, agricultural production, and employment rights.

“While in India, we had several opportunities to travel. These photographs document the time we spent in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, as well as some of our excursions around Delhi. Our first week in Delhi, we observed and assisted on a fact-finding mission in the villages of rural Uttar Pradesh. The objective of this mission was to collect data on the status of food security in U.P.’s Banda district, and to assess how Supreme Court mandated food and employment orders were being implemented. These images depict some of the villages and the stone quarry we visited while in Uttar Pradesh.

Directly upon our return from Uttar Pradesh, we departed for Rajasthan, where we spent several days interviewing some of the key social activists involved with the Right to Food Campaign. Our first days in Rajasthan were spent in Beawar at a National Right to Information Youth Convention, where we had the opportunity to participate in a candlelight vigil commemorating the first Youth Convention that had taken place in Beawar several years earlier.

“Once we arrived back in Delhi, we spent our last ten days in India tracking down and interviewing human rights activists, economists, Supreme Court Commissioners, professors, and lawyers who had either worked directly on or were invested in food security in India. During our last few days, we also managed to squeeze in a few sight-seeing excursions. We toured the Taj Mahal, as well as some sights around Delhi, such as the Jama Masjid Mosque (Delhi’s principal mosque, which can hold up to 25,000 worshippers).

“Overall, words cannot really express how much I enjoyed both working at HRLN and my winter term experience. At HRLN I met incredibly passionate and qualified people, and was accepted into an office that recognized each of its staff members as important components in its vision for change. There was never a dull moment at HRLN - we were constantly on our feet, putting in calls to human rights activists, scheduling meetings, and traveling all over the country to interview those activists whenever and wherever they could meet with us. I greatly appreciated how much HRLN invested in us and in our project, and how much freedom is gave us regarding the project’s construction and implementation. I found HRLN a fantastic organization to work for, and I was pleased to walk away from the internship having recognized that this – this kind of work, this kind of project – is what I want to pursue as a career.”

The Iraqi refugee crisis looms ever larger. With 2.5 million external refugees currently living in large numbers in Jordan and Syria and another 2 million internally displaced peoples, the international response just seems inadequate to many. Refugee Program Director for Amnesty International Sarnata Reynolds and documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam visited HLS recently to discuss the humanitarian emergency and to screen an excerpt from her documentary “Between Earth and Sky.”

At the close of the final scene in which an Iraqi claimed to have “lost himself since the beginning of the War,” Mam insisted tearfully that more interest in the refugees has to be mobilized. “Everyone I talked to, all their stories had a common thread: their national identity has been lost… they never imagined that things, as bad as they were before the war, would be so dire now,” she said. “For Jordan and Syria, those countries harboring refugees, we desperately need more humanitarian and bilateral assistance.”

For Amnesty International, the problem is clinical. Reynolds, who also chairs the Iraqi Refugee Working Group, is working with that coalition and with Amnesty International on efforts to allow more refugees into the United States, to support refugees and asylum seekers already in the system, and most importantly, she said, to reopen Iraq’s borders.

With millions of Iraqis trapped inside the country and millions more living without adequate healthcare and education in Jordan, Syria, and several other countries, the plight is enormous. “Detention is on the rise,” said Reynolds, “and eviction is becoming more hostile as countries are fed up with the ‘protracted guest’ situation.” Furthermore, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are not signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention, giving refugees very little legal protection, are banned from working, and subject to changing requirements for entry and stay.

Reynolds also debunked the return of refugees to Iraq as a harbinger of better security. “The government paid each refugee $800 to return…people ran out of options and money elsewhere.” According to Reynolds, the Iraqi government has preyed on their peoples’ desperation only to welcome them back to a country in which the borders of 11 out of 18 governorates are closed. “The protection space has narrowed, and humanitarian organizations are barred due to security concerns.” Reynolds insisted that the U.S. has an obligation to spearhead the international response and begin to offer thousands more Iraqis asylum. “It’s hard for Iraqis to have hope, but they really do try… we need to honor their trust.”

“On a bi-partisan basis the educational policy of this country is to get results for minorities and disadvantaged people,” said Professor Michael Rebell in opening during my class visit in his second-to-last discussion of the winter term on No Child Left Behind. For nearly three weeks, Professor Rebell’s class had been analyzing the role of the courts in educational policy making and the impact of legal interventions on the educational process using sources that include Rebell’s recent book, Moving Every Child Ahead.

“If we are going to have an effective policy, the three branches [of government] need more effective dialogue,” explained Rebell. “It is also that we reexamine our goals.” The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the latest in a series of legislation reforms targeting standards-based education. Among the goals of the NCLB are the right of children to fair and equal education and to ensure that all children reach minimum proficiency on challenging achievement by 2014. “NCLB continued the work of President Clinton’s education-reform subcommittee on President [George H.W.] Bush’s Goals 2000.” During the course of his lecture, Rebell questioned whether the government hasn’t lost sight of ensuring meaningful educational opportunities. “The Opportunity-to-Learn concept was part of Goals 2000… its standards are necessary to help close the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students and it must be reinstated.”

For Elena Medina, a 3L and former Teach for America Corps member, the class has reinvigorated her excitement about education law. “I would like to pursue a career in education law so I was very excited when I learned that Professor Rebell would be teaching a winter term course. It’s been an incredible experience for me. Professor Rebell is an accomplished litigator and scholar. Therefore, his course provides a dynamic combination of doctrine and theory along with actual litigation strategies. Due to his practical experience, he provides a unique legal perspective because he’s actually litigated cases about meaningful educational issues.”

In case you missed it on the home page, Cass Sunstein ‘78 is coming to HLS. Read the article here. Rumor has it that he may be offering a 1L reading group in the fall (but I could be wrong).

Assistant Professor of Law, Jeannie Suk, recently sat down with me to discuss her principal areas of research in interrelated topics of family law, criminal law, and criminal procedure.

In her Yale Law Journal article, Criminal Law Comes Home, Suk outlined the changing model for defining domestic violence through the lens of criminal law. As she wrote, “The growing criminal law use of protection orders to prohibit the cohabitation and contact of intimate partners is a form of state-imposed de facto divorce that subjects the practical and substantive continuation of intimate relationships to criminal sanction.”

Jeannie Suk: 11:35

Winter term is normally a quiet time here in the Admissions office. With 1L exams underway, and with 2Ls and 3Ls engrossed in various projects or courses, campus activities by and large come to a halt. However, in light of the chaos surrounding Kenya’s December 27^th Presidential Election, the Human Rights Program invited Visiting Fellow and native Kenyan Joseph Mwaura to speak about the political situation, the contexts of the violence, and the media frenzy.

“It’s a shame,” said Mwaura, “Kenya has done well economically and socially with its cohesion. It had become the pride of Africa, the beacon of hope.” Since its independence and during the restoration of democracy after a 24-year dictatorship in 2002, Kenya maintained stability under the leadership of popular incumbent President Mwai Kibaki. Still, according to Mwaura, the economic gap between the rich and the poor has widened over time, and Kenyan communities have become wary of the credibility of government institutions that have long neglected their need for schools and hospitals.

“When the election results were questioned, Kibaki didn’t back down because he didn’t want to look like a coward… he did not follow the law, he followed his anger and has lost much respect,” said Mwaura. The aftermath of what most believe was a rigged election has only fueled the anger and tension that existed among tribes during the campaign. “The fact that the government has allowed protests is reckless,” said Mwaura. “There are of course genuine electoral protestors who feel violated of their right to vote fairly… but you also have the tribal protestors who only want to kill, displace, and seize property.”

As a way forward, Mwaura recommended pressure on the Kenyan government to own up to rigging the election and schedule fresh elections and negotiations. “Both sides are still fighting and there are accusations on both sides of genocide, the images of which are plastered by the media encouraging more violence. We need to restore peace, trust, and confidence.”

The folks in the WilmerHale Legal Services Center just sent me a new video they did showcasing student involvement in the Center. The LSC is the home of many of our clinical programs. Take a look (you’ll need the Real Player).

Diane Rosenfeld teaches gender justice and women’s rights at Harvard, which means she must also pay close attention to the cultural interpretation of those rights. Her reading group ‘Power, Beauty, Sex and Violence’ is one part women’s studies and one part media studies. The group studies the “intersection of those concepts to see what they produce in culture and in law,” says Rosenfeld. “We can identify different locuses for change…So much sexual violence is technically illegal but culturally tolerated.”

Rosenfeld also runs the Gender Violence Clinical Workshop, and offers a reading group for first-year students called ‘The Feminist Experience and the Common Law,’ which asks the question, “How would your 1-L year look different if it was taught from a feminist legal perspective?” This group, she explains, primarily focuses on how rape is taught in criminal law classes.

Reading groups are a relatively new development at HLS. With only 5-15 people, the groups offer a more intimate setting as well as a greater opportunity for participation, not to mention the cultivation of leadership development. Each week, a different student leads the discussion under Rosenfeld’s careful guidance.

Taught from a young age that the law can be used for social justice, she’s busy putting her ideas into action in Louisiana, where she’s advocating for the construction of detention centers for housing men who are abusive to women. “We hear a lot of questions like “why doesn’t she leave when she’s being battered?” says Rosenfeld. “A responsible victim is expected to leave a violent domestic situation.” She asks a simple question: Why doesn’t he leave instead?

Students are very active in that project, as well as in another project with more international breadth. She is working with international organizations on a “five-country comparative study on child protection laws and female genital mutilation, seeing which African countries are really enforcing their laws and what they need in addition to laws in order to stop female genital mutilation.”

She uses her wealth of experience to support students pursuing these important questions. Under President Clinton, she served as senior council for the Office of Violence Against Women. When Harvard students began appealing to Dean Kagan to include more studies on gender justice and women’s rights, the Dean’s swift response sparked the popular reading groups. And with an ideal teacher. After all, we think Rosenfeld personally provides the counterbalance to a cultural problem that she argues is in immediate need of a solution. “Women aren’t getting the message about being strong and intelligent.”

Podcast: Diane Rosenfeld (17:16)