Toby’s blog

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.”

Someone just sent this clip my way. Professor Fried talks with Joshua Cohen of Stanford. Thought you might find it interesting. It’s an hour, but you can select clips on different subjects.

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

From time to time, the Law School celebrates its rich history with the a little pomp. The Caspersen Room, formerly known as the Treasure Room, opens its doors and students, faculty, and administrators come in to sit among the ancient texts and legal artifacts. We look up at the portraits of men in wigs and think to ourselves, “Gee, we really are at Harvard!” (well, maybe no one really says “Gee” any more, but you get the idea)

On this particular occasion, we came to hear Professor Janet Halley give her chair lecture as she is assuming the Royall Professorship. The legacy of Isaac Royall is complex, especially when one considers his dual status as a colonial slaveholder and preeminent donor to what later became Harvard Law School.

“Harvard Law School was founded and endowed on the proceeds of Royall’s estate,” explained Dean Kagan, “How do we grapple with his issue? In the act of occupying this Chair, Janet will transform it.” Upon taking the podium to accept her professorship, Professor Halley mentioned that she was humbled by what she termed “the strenuous aspects” of her position. “The legacy of Isaac Royall is intrinsically tied to HLS history.”

She stood under a large portrait of Isaac Royall, Jr., and his family and discussed his life and times. In many ways, she said, we are the beneficiaries of the production of a slave-owning culture, even beyond Royall’s bequest. But perhaps Royall’s legacy is also that of the descendants of his slaves, one of whom operated a local stop on the Underground Railroad.

How do we square the values of today’s Harvard Law School with its being in some ways the progeny of a slaveowner? Certainly we didn’t come to any conclusions during Professor Halley’s talk. But to ask these kinds of questions is why we’re all here.

Diana Banks, 2L, broadened her horizons this summer while working with WomenPowerConnect, a women’s rights organization seeking gender equality through legislative means in New Delhi, India.

“I found my job by attending a panel on going abroad during the 1L summer. The previous WomenPowerConnect intern spoke at the panel and I talked with her afterwards. I really wanted to go to India because it is a rapidly developing nation and on the brink of great changes and I wanted to see for myself. And I wanted to do something in international women’s rights. I liked WPC because they are an umbrella organization for all the grassroots women’s rights group in India. WPC lobbies Parliament to get favorable legislation for the women of India. This complements the efforts of smaller organizations that work on the ‘front lines’ of helping individual women and families. For instance, WPC played a key role in the passage of the Domestic Violence Act in India, which outlaws abuse between husbands and wives. The smaller member organizations that worked directly with women and law enforcement felt that existing penal codes were not effective in addressing such crimes, so WPC lobbied and got the bill passed. The previous intern (Meredith Petrin, now an HLS 3L) talked with WPC and got me the internship offer. I also debated going to the Centre for Applied Legal Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“I was responsible for researching and drafting position papers on some of the organization’s key areas of concern: female infanticide, human trafficking, and the 33% women’s reservation bill (an attempt to get a quota for women in parliament as current representation is only 8%). I also wrote some lobbying documents that WPC will use to lobby with current Members of Parliament.

“The biggest thing I learned from the summer was that law is meaningless if not enforced by both the government and the social norms of the community. Of course, I’d already learned this in Criminal Law but it was something else to see what it really meant in a society. For instance, the use of ultrasound technology to determine the gender of a fetus is outlawed. Yet, every year, thousands of female fetuses are aborted after ultrasound scans. Child sex ratios in some states in India approach 700 to 1000 (girls to boys). Yet only 1 doctor in all of India has gone to jail for disclosing the sex of a fetus.”

“I actually do go to class,” insists Sandy Pullman, founder of HLS chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. But the point is, she does so much more than just go to class. She also goes to downtown Boston to do clinical work in employment civil rights. She works with legal groups representing sexual harassment cases. She’s involved with a literature and arts initiative on campus. “I was a creative writing major in college,” she says. “It’s hard to give that up and just be expected to write legal briefs.”

So how did this 2L add “founder and leader of the campus ACLU chapter” to her list of pursuits? It’s a long story. “I wanted to spend a year hanging out with my friends in New York for a year before starting school, ” she explains, “but in addition to the side jobs that helped me pay the rent, I wanted a legal internship.” As an admit, she turned to the HLS Office of Public Interest Advising for guidance, and they connected her with the Women’s Rights Project at ACLU in New York, where she interned for a year. The following summer, Carol Rose, head of the ACLU in Massachusetts, asked her to set up a chapter on the Harvard campus.

“So we got some beer,” explains Pullman, and gathered some people, and started an ACLU chapter on the HLS campus centered around three chief goals:

1. To perform legal research for ACLU Massachusetts.
2. To teach a civil liberties education program in local high schools.
3. To have educational events on campus.

The group brings a notable range of speakers to campus. Brenda Fagan, co-founder of the The Women’s Rights Project with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was one speaker on campus. And, pornographer Larry Flynt was another. “That was controversial,” laughs Pullman. But Flynt arrived, and orated about his precedent-setting Supreme Court case.

“He had a gold-plated wheelchair,” she says. “The event went smoothly, but was followed up with a lot of talk about free speech and the first admendment.”

Pullman has managed to figure out how she learns best, and it’s definitely not at the library. “I study on my couch in front of the Patriots games.” How did she figure out a good way to adapt to law school?

“The first semester of law school took a little settling in,” she says. “Just learning how, most efficiently, to do reading, and to prepare for a class, for an exam. But after really just a month or two, that anxiety about ‘I’m not doing it right’ fades away, and you do it however you want to and however suits you. I’ve been lucky enough to do everything that I want to here.”

This summer, she’s splitting her work between two firms. One is “purely public interest” with a small firm focused on the public sector, and the other is a medium-size firm with a mixture of work. “The most important thing to me is that they don’t have a corporate branch, so they can choose their clients,” she says. “If there’s a lawsuit at Citibank, they won’t worry that they one day might want to represent a billion-dollar merger at Citibank and so shouldn’t take class action against them.”

“I’ve always thought I would work in the private sector. I never saw myself…wearing Birkenstocks and being in a nonprofit all the time. I did see myself as a cutthroat lawyer. And yet I want to practice the type of law that I want, and want to represent the type of people that I want, and corporate law is about the furthest thing from my mind.”

Podcast: Sandy Pullman (12:53)

CORRECTION: An ACLU chapter had previously existed at HLS, but had lapsed.

It’s hard to believe, but February 1 is fast approaching. As is usual, we prefer that you get your applications in by the deadline, but as our staff is saying a hundred times a day on the phone, “As long as we believe we can fairly review your application, we will do so.” So I guess that makes February 1 a soft deadline. Nevertheless, the longer you wait, the fewer spots remain. Will we look at applications that are held for the February LSAT? Sure, but the longer you wait, the fewer spots remain.

As of last week, applications were up a bit this year, which is encouraging during these good economic times. I’m guessing that you are all as excited about everything going on at HLS as I am. (Though that would be a bit hard!)

One last thing: I noticed recently that I neglected to post the actual audio file for the interview I did with Diane Rosenfeld on her work here on law & gender and domestic violence issues. Visit this link to check out the corrected entry.

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)

Robert Greenwald is the senior clinical instructor at the Legal Services Center, the largest clinical program at Harvard Law School. The center offers programs in domestic human rights, including clinics in domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, health law, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender issues, and law related to improving the lives of children and teenagers. The center’s projects involve 80 or 90 students, with an emphasis on hands-on skill-building experience.”I think it really serves the students well to start to develop lawyering skills while they are still in law school…(such as) counseling, interviewing, negotiating.”

That’s why the Center encourages students to work on direct legal service cases: projects that can be resolved in a 6-month or 1-year period of time. “Students get to work on the whole case,” says Greenwald, “including the beginning, the discovery, the motions, and the full trial.”

While addressing an already-wide range of community issues, the Center continues to evolve and grow to become more responsive to community needs. The traditional family clinic, for instance, grew into a domestic violence clinic. “We started to see, particularly in low-income families and communities of color, that our clients missed appointments, that there was resistance to providing information.” After gaining education around the issue of domestic violence, the Center began screening their clients more closely for evidence of domestic violence. Everything changed. “We saw our traditional practice change and people started to talk to us about what was really happening in their lives, like the need to get restraining orders, like the need to protect their children.”

Similarly, the Center’s HIV/AIDS clinic evolved to provide counseling for people living with other debilitating conditions. The first law school-based clinic providing services to people with AIDS and HIV has always been very busy; it started in 1987 and “the phone has not stopped ringing since,” says Greenwald. But as the work of the clinic became more successful, it attracted attention from programs focusing on other issues, such as breast cancer. “Now we represent anybody with a disabling chronic terminal medical condition in our health law center.”

Whether working on issues around housing, families, employment, predatory lending, or mediation, students are exposed to a wide swath of community law, and best of all, they get a clear view of the whole picture. “Students get to work in teams,” says Greenwald, “and provide holistic service to clients.”

Podcast: The Legal Services Center (9:48)