Public Interest Commons^™

Recusal Reform: Treating A Justice's Disqualification As A Legal Issue, Michael J. Broyde, Hayden H. Hall

Faculty Articles

This article addresses the pressing issue of recusal in the U.S. Supreme Court. It critiques the current practice of Supreme Court Justices deciding individually whether to recuse themselves from cases, highlighting the flaws and potential biases inherent in this practice. The authors advocate for a reform where initial recusal decisions are made by individual Justices but then are subject to review by the Supreme Court as a whole.

The article offers several arguments to support this proposal. First, the authors explore the evolution of recusal laws, focusing on the significant amendments to 28 U.S.C. § 455 in 1948 and 1974. …

Genetic Property Rhetoric And The Public Domain, David Fagundes

Faculty Articles

Among the many themes that illuminate Jorge Contreras’s The Genome Defense, this Essay focuses on property. It considers the rhetorical role played by property in convincing both courts and the public that patenting genetic data was legally and ethically objectionable. This Essay begins by locating property—and public property—as a major theme in the dialogue surrounding the Myriad litigation. It then situates this rhetorical move in the context of property-talk generally, highlighting the distinctiveness of leveraging public rather than private ownership as a means of accessing moral intuitions. Finally, this Essay reflects on what the use of public property rhetoric …

Teaching Client Counseling In The Shadow Of Homelessness, Gregory Zlotnick

Faculty Articles

Working with clients at risk of or experiencing, homelessness teaches personal and professional humility like few other experiences in law school or the practice of law. Yet such sensitive work also provides an opportunity for law students to develop both a keener understanding of their own professional identity-with its capacities and limitations and critical counseling skills. This essay draws upon experiences gained in three distinct law school projects that work with clients at risk of or experiencing, homelessness.

After providing a brief overview of each project, the essay will explore methods used for training and supervising students during their counseling …

Lawyers, Power, And Strategic Expertise, Colleen Shanahan, Anna Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Articles

This empirical study analyzes the experience of the parties described above, specifically the power, representation, and strategic expertise they bring to a dispute. Our analysis of these factors clarifies how representation may be a solution to the access to justice crisis. We find that a representative helps most parties most of the time. We also find that the other party’s representation and the representative’s strategic expertise are significant factors for understanding representation for civil litigants. This study analyzes a database of 1,700 unemployment insurance appeals in the District of Columbia over a two-year period, the broadest and deepest collection of …

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen Shanahan, Anna Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Articles

Access to justice interventions that provide a little representation, including nonlawyer representation and various forms of limited legal services, may be valuable solutions for low- and middle-income Americans. However, a thoughtful approach to improving access to justice efforts should recognize that a little representation may have risks. In particular, one potential risk of a little representation is that while it provides assistance with a discrete legal need in a specific moment, the nature of the assistance is incompatible with challenging the law. As a result, individual litigants do not have the benefit of legal challenges in their own cases and …

The Project Model Of Clinical Education, Anna Carpenter

Faculty Articles

In clinical legal education, there is growing interest in the development of project-based clinical work, which includes a broad range of activities, such as legislative and policy reform, community economic development and community legal education. In the project model, students use non-litigation advocacy strategies to solve challenging legal problems for clients and engage a broad range of multidimensional legal skills, including complex problem-solving, strategic planning, project management, and professional communication skills. Clinical scholarship on project-based learning has suggested that key pedagogical methods, particularly maximizing role assumption and student ownership of clinic work, must be compromised in projects due to the …

One Day, All Americans..: Considering A Tfa-Style Lawyer Corps, Gregory Zlotnick

Faculty Articles

This Note argues for the creation of a public interest recruiting and placement organization like Teach for America, in the tradition of Edgar and Jean Cahn's call for federally funded neighborhood legal services and TFA founder Wendy Kopp's call for the creation of a national teacher corps. Part I argues that such a recruiting and placement organization should be implemented now, in light of the constitutional and legal limitations of federally funded legal services; an excess supply of lawyers coupled with a disparity in those receiving legal services; cutbacks in public interest positions such as legal aid and public defender …