As the days get longer and the weather gets warmer, it’s a sure sign that the school year is rapidly coming to an end. Graduation is nearing, and part of me feels like I’ve been at Boston College forever by now, but another part feels like three years have passed by with a blink. As I reflect on what is likely (definitely) my last year ever as a student, there are some experiences that I’m grateful to have had, but also some opportunities that I wish I hadn’t let slip by. If you have more than four weeks left in your time at BC Law, here’s a list of things I did that I would recommend to anyone, along with some things I wish I did when I had the chance.
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Human Rights Field Trip: From BC to DC
“We of this Western Hemisphere, by movements such as that symbolized by this building, have taken great strides toward securing permanent peace among ourselves.” These were the words of Teddy Roosevelt dedicated to the Pan-American Union Building built in 1910. Only a few blocks from the White House, it now stands as the headquarters for the Organization of American States and was the setting for the BC Law Human Rights Elective and International Human Rights Practicum field trip in 2024.
The Pan American Union, a sort-of United Nations exclusively for the Americas, would transform into the Organization of American States in 1948. All 34 independent nations of the Americas hold membership within the organization and while it does not loom large in the American political imagination, it holds greater significance to Latin and Central American and Caribbean nations.
Continue readingLaw School in Action: Family Justice Clinic
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 Family Justice Clinic (and BC Law alum) Claire Donohue, who also serves as the director of the school’s social service advocacy program.
Tell us about your clinic!
In the Family Justice Clinic, students advise and represent low-income clients in civil and administrative matters related to family law and child welfare. This means students are in probate and family courts to litigate traditional family law matters: divorce, custody, alimony, and child support. But, we also represent families who have been accused of abuse or neglect and are subject to surveillance and regulation by the state. We even represent kin who have been denied the opportunity to provide kinship foster placements to their grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc.
Our students are court-certified as Student Attorneys and handle all phases of their clients’ cases, from client interviewing and case planning to fact investigation, discovery, client counseling, negotiation, and courtroom advocacy. We also work closely with masters of social work students to provide responsive, holistic representation to our clients.
Continue readingLaw School in Action: Boston College Innocence Program
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 Boston College Innocence Program, Sharon Beckman.
Tell us about your clinic!
Students in the Boston College Innocence Program work as a team to free clients wrongfully convicted and imprisoned in Massachusetts. They meet with clients, interview witnesses, investigate crime scenes, work with forensic experts and co-counsel, research and write motions and memoranda of law, and assist in court hearings. They also collaborate with community partners and all three branches of state government on systemic reforms aimed at remedying and preventing wrongful convictions.
Continue readingLaw School in Action: Housing Justice Clinic
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 Housing Justice Clinic, Alan Minuskin.
Tell us about your clinic!
The Civil Litigation Clinic: Housing Justice (Housing Justice Clinic) advises and represents tenants who can’t afford lawyers in several types of housing cases. Our primary focus is eviction defense, as we use our knowledge of the law and the courts to prevent tenants from being evicted when they have viable defenses and counterclaims to litigate. The clinic also represents clients contesting unlawful rejections or terminations from public housing, and sometimes brings affirmative lawsuits against landlords for inappropriate conduct and/or substandard living conditions. These are front-line litigation matters that move quickly from client interview to fact investigation, case assessment, client counseling, and resolution by negotiation (if possible) or adjudication at trial or via dispositive motion. Students in the clinic are certified to practice law in Massachusetts under close, supportive supervision, and they perform all lawyering activities needed for each case. Even though the focus of this clinic is on housing matters, the litigation skills and ethics considerations integral to our practice apply to all civil litigation matters!
Continue readingLaw School in Action: Civil Rights Clinic
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 Civil Rights Clinic, Reena Parikh.
Tell us about your clinic!
The Civil Rights Clinic is a movement-lawyering clinic focused on advocating for the civil rights of low-wage workers, immigrants, incarcerated persons, and communities of color throughout Massachusetts. We spend a good deal of time thinking critically about the roles of lawyers, clients, and communities in the fight for racial and social justice. Our docket has both litigation and community advocacy/policy matters on it that support the organizing efforts of grassroots and membership-based organizations.
Continue readingLaw School in Action: Community Enterprise Clinic
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 one of the directors of the Community Enterprise Clinic, Paul Tremblay.
Tell us about your clinic!
The Community Enterprise Clinic (CEC) is a transactional clinic in which students represent both for-profit and nonprofit small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups for business-related matters. Unlike most other BC Law clinics, which are litigation-focused, we never go to court or engage in formal dispute resolution. Instead, we give advice about how to establish and operate businesses lawfully, and we offer many necessary services to the founders and managers of these businesses. We set up entities, apply for trademarks, get our clients tax-exempt statuses from the IRS, offer employment guidance, and draft the contracts and similar documents that businesses need.
Continue readingProject Entrepreneur
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.
Reminding Ourselves Why We “Do” Law School
Writing an Impact post at the beginning of the semester is never easy. How to recapture the excitement for school after a month’s vacation and a return to campus in the middle of a Boston winter? 1L’s gearing up for round 2, 2L’s grinding away, and 3L’s wondering why we are still on campus. In addition, with the latest Covid surge, another round of “when will this all be over” doesn’t exactly help the cause.
But in this case the answer of what to write about seemed clear to me: my experiences in the Innocence Clinic working for my client. While I am not able to disclose many of the details about his case, I can say that my client had a clean record both before and after the arson he was wrongfully convicted of, and that our clinic recently filed a motion for new trial looking to overturn his conviction using newly discovered evidence that demonstrates his innocence nearly twenty years later.
Continue readingMaking an Impact: Working in the International Human Rights Practicum
Today I am hosting a guest post by BC Law student Marija Tesla about her experience in BC Law’s new International Human Rights Practicum.
I have taken many international law and human rights courses at BC Law, and have loved them all: International Law with Professor David Wirth; International Human Rights: The Law of War, War Crimes, and Genocide (or what is more commonly known as humanitarian law) with Professor Allen Ryan; Immigration Law and the Human Rights Interdisciplinary Seminar with Professor Daniel Kanstroom; International Legal Research with Professor Sherry Chen. I came to law school because this is my calling in life, and every experience I got here (after the slog of the very provincial 1L experience), further proved to me that this is what I was meant to do.
All those courses were amazing, but what I have loved most of all is my experience in the International Human Rights Practicum with Professor Daniela Urosa.
I loved working on the amicus brief that we submitted to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) with Professor Urosa and my amicus partner, Nadia Bouquet, because I got to think about and analyze a technical area of international human rights law while having an opportunity to be creative and to think outside the box (I wrote an earlier post about our visit to the IACtHR; read it here). My aim in everything I do is to challenge the status quo and to focus on how the law can challenge systems of oppression and create societies in which every person can and does live a life of dignity. Human rights law is aspirational and sometimes it creates standards that are not at all lived on the ground by the people who are most marginalized in our societies. Yet, if those of us who dare to remain idealists in a world often run by realists stop aspiring and working towards creating a more just and equitable world, then where will we end up as a collective? What I love about human rights law is that it cares deeply about individual life while caring about the collective. In a world of great economic inequality, environmental and racial injustice, human rights law is not just necessary, it is a difference of not just life and death, but a difference of what it means to live and to be alive.
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BC Law: Impact 