clients

Law School in Action: Immigration Clinic

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

Boston College Law School gives its students a wide range of classes to take that are taught by some of the best scholars in the field. Yet, while learning about the law in a classroom is crucial to becoming a successful attorney, nothing prepares you for day-to-day practice more than getting hands-on experience before graduating. That’s where BC Law’s clinics come in.

Law students in their second and third years of study can apply for coveted spots in any of the school’s fifteen clinics. No matter what someone’s legal interest is, there’s a clinic for them! To help students better understand the opportunities available to them, the BC Law Impact Blog is highlighting each of these clinics this semester. Here is our interview with the director of the Immigration Clinic, Mary Holper.

Tell us about your clinic!

In the Immigration Clinic, students represent clients who are either physically separated from their families and communities through immigration detention, and/or risking further separation through deportation. Students advocate for their clients’ release from detention by preparing and arguing bond motions in immigration court; for some clients, students must also prepare and argue habeas corpus petitions in federal district court. Additionally, students defend clients against deportation by preparing and arguing defenses to deportation, such as asylum and other humanitarian protection, as well as waivers of deportation for long-term residents and legal status based on family ties.

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Project Entrepreneur

/ Melissa Gaglia / 1 Comment

Returning to Newton Campus for my final year of law school has been full of excitement. While there are numerous things I am excited about this fall semester, one of them is my clinic, Project Entrepreneur. 

Project Entrepreneur is designed to help returning citizens with criminal records successfully reenter society and supply them with a general knowledge of business law necessary for them to grow their business ventures. Having an undergraduate degree in business, I am excited to exercise what I’ve learned from both business school and law school, and I am looking forward to helping see someone’s ambitions come to fruition. 

While I have only had one class meeting so far, I am already eager for the rest of the semester. Like many other clinics BC Law has to offer, the class is set up to run like a law firm, with Professor Lawrence Gennari as managing partner. Students meet twice a week: once with our clients to discuss their entrepreneurial efforts and to conduct classes for them, giving them the fundamentals they need to be successful entrepreneurs in a “boot camp” format; and another class to debrief with Professor Gennari and to refine our skillset to successfully counsel our clients. 

The class culminates in a pitch session where the returning citizens pitch their businesses to potential investors. To learn more about Project Entrepreneur, check out this article from BC Law Magazine’s Winter 2021 issue.

Melissa Gaglia is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact her at gagliam@bc.edu.

People First, Lawyers Second

/ Roma Gujarathi / Leave a comment

“Mary’s gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and she gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish. ‘When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.’”

As part of the summer reading before my high school biology class, we were asked to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The book offers a fascinating take on the ethical issues surrounding the first immortalized human cell line, discussing the injustices at the intersection of class, gender, and race within the American research and medical system. What most resonates with me from the story – even years later – is the excerpt above. When Mary Kubicek, a lab assistant, is performing the autopsy on Henrietta Lacks’ body, she notices Lacks’ bright red painted toenails. For months up until that point, Kubicek had been focused on the scientific aspect of the HeLa cells and how significant they were for advancing medical breakthroughs. In that exact moment, she grasps the personhood and humanity of the woman whose body lies in front of her. 

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Gentleness, A Silent Strength

/ Roma Gujarathi / Leave a comment

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.” – Saint Francis de Sales

In the law, and especially in litigation, it can seem like being gentle has no place. The adversarial system is set up like a zero-sum game, and it can feel like softness is in direct contrast with winning in the courtroom. However, in a profession where we lawyers are painted as aggressive and combative, perhaps gentleness is a silent strength, particularly in our relationships with our clients.

I’m in the COVID-19 Housing Relief Clinic this semester, and we spent this first week in trainings. During these training sessions, we conducted role-play situations, both interviewing and counseling “clients.” In our training, the “clients” were just our supervising professors and the situations were merely hypothetical. Yet, these simulations reflected the very types of cases and clients that, as student attorneys at the BC Legal Services Lab, we might see this semester. For example, some of these scenarios included a wife trying to keep custody of her son in a divorce case with her potentially abusive husband or a landlord using unjust practices to force evictions.

At first, I wondered how useful this training would be. After all, how much is there to learn about just talking to clients? Turns out the answer, is a lot.

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