February 8, 2007
Uniquely Washington: She uses the law to help vulnerable young people
Editor’s note: Uniquely Washington is a bi-weekly column featuring one of the University’s most important resources — our people.
While other third-year law students at the University of Pennsylvania were interviewing with the large law firms that came to campus, Lisa Kelly was sending her resume out to public interest law firms all over the country.
“I knew I wanted to work in public interest law,” she says, “and those agencies usually can’t afford to send recruiters all over.”
She landed a position as local counsel to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU in Pine Bluff and Little Rock, Ark., and 25 years later she’s still doing public interest law — the last five as director of the UW law school’s Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic.
The clinic, Kelly explains, provides legal representation for children who have been taken out of their homes because of abuse or neglect allegations. Clients are usually between the ages of 12 and 18, although they’ve had clients as young as 4 and as old as 20.
Why does a young person need a lawyer? Many reasons, Kelly says. For example, children in foster care are frequently separated from their siblings, so a lawyer might get involved in winning visitation rights. If a child needs services such as medical care and is not receiving them, the lawyer can step in. The UW clinic encourages a model of representation that is holistic, meaning that the lawyer represents the child in all areas of the law, which always includes where the child will live and who she will visit but sometimes also includes other issues like educational advocacy.
Students in the UW clinic take a preparatory class that Kelly teaches and are enrolled in the clinic for all three quarters of their third year. The first quarter they spend a lot of time in class, Kelly says. But starting with the second quarter, they meet with clients, do a lot of negotiating on their behalf and go to court when necessary.
Working with kids who have very difficult lives can be challenging for the students, whose first impulse may be to just take care of the child, Kelly says. “I tell them, ‘We’re not here to be the system; we’re here to make the system work.’ So if a client isn’t getting needed services, we can be the nag. We can tell the people who are required to provide the services that if they don’t fulfill their responsibilities, we’ll set a hearing and have the judge hold them accountable.”
Kelly is joined in clinic supervision by Lecturer Kim Ambrose, which allows her to spend time on curriculum development and networking — both on campus and off. She frequently brings in guest speakers from other departments for her class and has partnered with the School of Social Work on a grant-funded project to help reunite foster youth with lost family members. She’s the chair of the statewide Children’s Representation Work Group — which is charged with reporting to the state Supreme Court on ways to improve children’s representation — and she’s been asked by the Administrative Office of the Courts to create a training program for judges who will have children in their courtrooms.
Kelly says she loves getting students excited about public service and seeing them succeed. “The wonderful thing about a year-long clinic,” she says, “is you can see so much growth in a student, and that’s very satisfying.”
Perhaps the best measure of her success is that her early graduates are now joining the advisory board. “They tell me the clinic was the best thing they did in law school, and that feels really good.”
