Child and Family Law Clinic Dependency Handbook
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CHILD AND FAMILY LAW CLINIC DEPENDENCY HANDBOOK CHILD AND FAMILY LAW CLINIC UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA JAMES E. ROGERS COLLEGE OF LAW 1145 North Mountain Ave Tucson, AZ 85719 (520) 626 - 5232 Revised January, 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I PAGE INTRODUCTION TO THE CLINIC 2 ABOUT THE HANDBOOK 6 GETTING STARTED 8 RULE 38 (D) AND THE ROLE OF THE SUPERVISING ATTORNEY 9 TEN RANDOM THOUGHTS ON GOOD LAWYERING 11 A LITTLE BIT ABOUT CHILD PROTECTION 14 DEPENDENCY PROCEEDINGS 15 THE PLAYERS 20 25 THE ROLE OF THE CHILD’S LAWYER 44 THE ROLE OF FEDERAL LAW HOW A DEPENDENCY PROCEEDING GETS STARTED 46 DCS CRITERIA FOR RESPONDING TO A REPORT OF 49 MALTREATMENT 52 THE PPH PROCESS THE COURSE OF A DEPENDENCY 66 CLINIC PROCEDURES FOR A NEW PPH 69 PPH FOR PRIVATE DEPENDENCIES 101 INDIAN CHILD WELFARE ACT 104 THE SETTLEMENT CONFERENCE 111 MEDIATION 120 DEPENDENCY ADJUDICATIONS 122 TOP TEN THINGS YOU OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT EVIDENCE IN JUVENILE COURT 137 DISPOSITION HEARINGS 139 DEPENDENCY REVIEWS 139 PERMANENCY HEARING 148 PERMANENT GUARDIANSHIPS 154 SEVERANCE PROCEEDINGS 158 ADOPTIONS 167 INTRODUCTION TO THE CLINIC Welcome to the Child and Family Law Clinic. You are about to engage in a unique and special learning experience -- one that will not only help you develop your skills as a lawyer but will also challenge you to engage in a journey of self-discovery. What is the Child and Family Law Clinic? The Child and Family Law Clinic is a working law office in which law students are the lawyers. The Arizona Supreme Court allows law students who have completed three semesters of law school to represent persons in court under appropriate supervision.1 In the Clinic, students perform all aspects of that representation for our clients. We also believe that law practice is inherently multi-disciplinary. No legal proceeding or contract negotiation or policy initiative is conducted in a law bubble. There are always substance or evidence or policy considerations that are outside the law. Lawyers regularly work with other professionals – accounting, medicine, engineering, chemistry, psychology . It’s a pretty long list. Whether these other professionals are clients, collaborators, advisors or expert witnesses, you will need to develop your skills in working with other professionals in order to be a quality lawyer. As our name suggests, our clients are mostly children who are involved in child abuse and neglect (dependency) cases in the Pima County Juvenile Court. Occasionally, we are asked by the Juvenile Court to represent parents as well -- usually teen parents. And, once in a while, we asked by the Superior Court to represent children in private custody disputes when there is an allegation of abuse or neglect. This semester, we may also interview and provide advice to adult victims of intimate partner violence. This Handbook is about Dependencies. If we represent victims of domestic violence, we will provide you all with other materials. The Child and Family Law Clinic is assigned clients directly from the Courts. The Clinic has a contract with Pima County to provide legal services to children and to a few adults. In rare situations we might take a client on referral from another agency, but only where there is a unique learning opportunity. What is the Student’s Role in the Clinic? The Child and Family Law Clinic is a live-client experience. By that, we mean that you will be working with real people who have real legal problems. The clients will be your clients and the cases will be your responsibility. We want you to make the key lawyer decisions, choices, strategies and implementations in your case. We don’t 1 Rule 38, Arizona Rules of the Supreme Court. There are a number of other conditions that apply including internal law school requirements. 2 want you to be the assistant to a more experienced lawyer; we want you to be the lawyer. Representing clients for the first time can be heady stuff. For some, it may be exhilarating. For others, it may be frightening or unsettling. For some, it may be both at the same time. We offer no predictions for you. We do, however, know that one of the best ways to learn professionalism and good lawyer judgment is to practice them in a setting that is designed for and focused on your learning. That does not mean that you will be swimming alone. Quite the contrary, the Clinic faculty and staff will be there with you to help prepare you, guide you, and offer constructive feedback. We are a collaborative law office where all of us work together for the benefit of our clients and for the professional development of our students and ourselves. The bottom line, however, is that the final lawyer decisions are yours. What makes the Clinic different from other courses? First and foremost, your work is not theoretical or doctrinal. It is practical and experiential. That does not mean that doctrine and theory are unimportant. In fact, the opposite is true. We expect you to draw on all of your previous work in law school and apply it in action on behalf of your clients. One of the more exciting aspects of the Clinic is that it introduces you directly to the lawyer-client relationship. You will represent clients and they will rely on you to represent them well. Experiencing this reliance is the best way to appreciate the implications of the role of a lawyer, the foundations of professional responsibility, and the core values of the profession. You will need to draw on your previous law school experience, your life experience, and your common sense to perform tasks well. When someone is relying on you, you may face difficult strategic choices. Sometimes you may face ethical or moral dilemmas. Your faculty supervisor and your other clinical colleagues will help you make those choices for yourself. Thus, a second obvious difference between the Clinic and most of your previous courses is the relationship you will have with the faculty member who supervises you. Even if you have worked closely with an attorney in an outside job, you will find that there is a difference when the attorney with whom you are working makes what and how you learn a high priority. A Clinic course puts you in regular, sometimes daily, contact with a faculty member. Much of the contact is spontaneous and informal. You may feel some awkwardness about this relationship. We expect that. Nevertheless, be assertive and take advantage of the Clinic faculty's presence. Clinic faculty are expected to be accessible to you, but it is up to you to initiate the informal contact. Third, in the Clinic, we work collaboratively. Because we represent real people, we have to put their needs ahead of our egos. But isn’t that the task of a lawyer in any 3 event? No ego means there is no embarrassment. There are no dumb questions -- only the questions we did not ask. We encourage a frank and honest exchange of views. Only then can our clients be guaranteed the best legal services that we can offer. With those considerations in mind, the Child and Family Law Clinic has four main goals: (1) Enhancing Lawyer Skills. Through practical experience in the field and in classroom simulations, we want you to develop your skills and learn a little about the law. You will have a chance to interview clients and witnesses; to investigate facts; to research the law; to write motions and court reports; to negotiate; and to stand up and advocate in a real courtroom. (2) Learning how to learn from experience. In addition to cultivating lawyer skills, we want you to begin to master the lifelong skill of learning from experience -- not only about the law, but also about yourselves. We hope that we can help you help yourselves to become reflective lawyers – that is lawyers who are not only highly skilled professionals, but who also care and think about the quality of the justice, ethics, and morality of the profession. (3) Developing good lawyer judgment. In the process of (1) and (2) and drawing on lessons from all your other classes, we hope that your sense of lawyer judgment will develop and mature. By “lawyer judgment” we mean making the kinds of decisions -- both practical and ethical --that lawyers are called upon to make regardless of their area of practice. We want to you make decisions with a purpose and be true to the values of the profession and to your own moral compass. 4 (4) Delivering high quality, purposeful, legal services. Finally, we expect the Child and Family Law Clinic to provide the highest quality legal services to our clients. Our clients deserve nothing less. How do these goals affect you? One result of all this is that you have an opportunity to shape the agenda for your learning. A clinic is a more individualized learning experience than most other courses. As with most things, you will get out of this experience what you put into it. You play the primary role in establishing your working relationships within the Clinic. You have significant control over the content of the learning within the context of the issues and tasks presented by your cases. If you take the initiative, you can make this a great experience. You have heard that in law school, you learn how to “think like a lawyer”. That is certainly one of the goals of this clinic. But a clinic experience is about more than thinking. We want you to explore how to act as a lawyer, how to make decisions as a lawyer, and how to relate to clients as a lawyer.