Clinical & Externship Programs
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Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University Scholarly Commons at Hofstra Law Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship 2007 Clinical & Externship Programs Jennifer Gundlach Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University Robert Dinerstein Irene Bowen Kerie Gould Christine Griffin Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/faculty_scholarship Recommended Citation Jennifer Gundlach, Robert Dinerstein, Irene Bowen, Kerie Gould, and Christine Griffin, Clinical & Externship Programs, 15 Am. U. J. Gender & Soc. Pol'y & L. 817 (2007) Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/faculty_scholarship/559 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons at Hofstra Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons at Hofstra Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CLINICAL & EXTERNSHIP PROGRAMS ASSISTING LAW STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN THE 2 1ST CENTURY: BRASS TACKS PANEL 2: CLINICAL & EXTERNSHIP PROGRAMS Washington, D.C. Thursday, March 8, 2007 MODERATOR: ROBERT DINERSTEIN Professor and Director, Disability Rights Clinic, Washington College of Law PANELISTS: IRENE BOWEN Deputy Chief, Disability Rights Section, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice KERI GOULD Assistant Professor, Clinical Education and Assistant Dean, Professional Skills, St. John's University School of Law CHRISTINE GRIFFIN Commissioner, U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission JENNIFER GUNDLACH Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Disability Advocacy Clinic, Suffolk University Law School 818 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 15:5 PROCEEDINGS: ANNOUNCER: The following podcast is a production of The Washington College of Law at American University. Any unauthorized use or distribution is strictly prohibited. ROBERT DINERSTEIN: Good morning. My name is Bob Dinerstein. I did not pay the Dean for those remarks earlier but I appreciate his making them. I am a Professor of Law here at Washington College of Law and Director of our Disability Rights Law Clinic. We have a wonderful panel for you today. Our plan is going to be a little different from that of the last panel in the sense that we are going to go speaker by speaker and then at the end provide an opportunity for questions for all of them. You have in your packet a description of each of the speakers so I will not go into great detail about them but suffice it to say they are all highly accomplished in their fields. To the far right on the panel, is Jennifer Gundlach, who is a Clinical Professor of Law at Suffolk University School of Law. She is a teacher in and creator of the Disability Advocacy Clinic at Suffolk. She is a graduate of this law school and also has taught here in both our Legal Rhetoric program and in our clinical program. Next to Jen is Keri Gould, also a graduate of the Washington College of Law. That really was not our criterion for having people here, although it certainly makes us proud institutionally that both Jen and Keri have done such great work since leaving us, owing it all, of course, to the people who taught them. Keri is Associate Dean for Professional Skills, Director of the Center for Professional Skills, and Associate Professor of Clinical Education at St. John's University School of Law. She teaches in and is responsible for, in an advisory way, the externship program at St. John's as well as Trial Advocacy and Lawyering Skills and does a lot of work both domestically and internationally in the disability area. Our third speaker will be Irene Bowen, who is Deputy Section Chief in the Civil Rights Division, Disability Rights Section. Among other things she was involved in the drafting and creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA"),' which I think brings us up to about one hundred people who claim authorship of the ADA. Success has a lot of parents. She has also had many important experiences in the disability law area in addition to being at the Department of Justice, including having served as Deputy General Counsel of the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, to which she is currently a liaison from the Department of Justice. Last, but certainly not least, is Christine Griffin who is a 1. 42 U.S.C. § 12101 etseq. 2007] CLINICAL & EXTERNSHIP PROGRAMS Commissioner of the EEOC, where she has served since 2006. She has, in the past, also served as an Attorney Advisor to the former Vice Chair of the EEOC, Paul Igasaki, and from 1996 to 2005 she was the Executive Director of the Disability Law Center in Boston. I think you can tell from the range of their experience and backgrounds, which are elaborated on in your program, that our speakers not only are very knowledgeable about Section 5042 and the ADA in terms of what the law and regulations require, but also have a range of direct experiences dealing with people with disabilities in the employment or educational context. I am very excited to moderate this panel and to have it as part of this conference because, as a few of us were talking about beforehand, there really is not much out there, and certainly almost nothing written, about accommodating and dealing with students with disabilities in externship and clinical programs. We heard from the first panel about some of the challenges involved in providing accommodations in a classroom setting, challenges that certainly are very real. But in some ways, taking it to the externship and the clinical area (and I should say in using clinical here I am really talking about in-house programs), we really face some additional challenges that I know the panel will speak about as they make their remarks. These challenges include: what does it mean to represent a client while also having a disability and how do we deal with that in our educational context? In particular how do we deal with the fact that we are concerned not just about the person with the disability and the teacher, but we have added in a third party, the client or clients, or supervisors in the workplace? What does it mean with respect to accommodating students with disabilities when you have them work in teams of two, in which one student comes to a clinical supervisor, as has happened to me, and says, "I have a learning disability. I want you to know about it, but I do not want you to tell my partner about it. Deal with it." This problem is one that we have had in our clinical program and it raises interesting some questions, not only for the clinic itself but, of course, for future work experiences that students will have in which they will be working collaboratively with other people in the workplace. Working collaboratively is something that we do too little of in law school, but the clinic is often the first place where they are doing consistent collaborative work. Faculty and students have to think about how the student's disability affects or does not affect that work. If you are talking about students who are placed in externship or internship programs, who is responsible for providing the accommodations to the students, both the actual delivery of the accommodations and, of course, the financial support for them? What are the legal rules regarding these issues, but, in addition, what is the best practice with respect to those kinds 2. 29 U.S.C. § 794. 820 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 15:5 of questions? To reiterate, the panel has a wealth of experience that they will be able to bring to bear on this topic so we will be hearing from each one of them in turn and at the end we will leave a good amount of time for questions. I will just remind you when we get to the question stage, please come up to one of the microphones because not only is this being podcast, but we are going to produce a transcript of the conference so that would help us be able to do that. So without further ado, Jen Gundlach. JENNIFER GUNDLACH: Thank you for inviting all of us here today, Bob. It is always a real pleasure to come back to my law school not only where I have taught, but where I was a student and to see how it has changed. It was interesting to hear the panel this morning because as a clinical professor and a disability rights advocate, I really come at these issues very differently than a Dean of Students Office or Disability Support Services Office might be approaching this. They are thinking about the bar that they need to meet as far as all the cases go. And what they were saying is true, that unfortunately a lot of those cases that are litigated really are in favor of the law schools regarding the choices that are being made about reasonable accommodations. I tend to be a bit of a critic of some of those cases and feel like we can actually be raising the bar significantly higher still without a lot of undue burden to the law schools. We should not be shooting for that low bar, but we can be raising it a lot higher, especially within the context of clinical legal education. For those of you who do not have a real clear idea of what clinical legal education is, it can take on a number of forms, but it usually means that there is some capacity where students are practicing as lawyers. In many cases they are actually representing clients, though not in all cases.