Adam Pulver had just started law school last September when he and millions of other Americans watched on television the horrendous events that developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. People evacuated their flooded homes, chaos ensued, and thousands of residents were hustled onto buses headed to parts unknown.
Pulver sensed that law students were especially equipped to contribute to the relief efforts, so he circulated an e-mail to his 1L classmates at Columbia Law School. “It’s an issue of human rights and civil rights,” the message basically said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
Initially, Pulver volunteered on a toll-free hotline from New York City, providing referrals for displaced callers who ended up in Texas, Florida, and other safety zones. Students at other schools staffed legal aid tables at disaster relief centers and collaborated with volunteer lawyers in resolving the jumble of legal problems brought to them.
On this one-year anniversary of the storms, law students would be mistaken to assume that such volunteer opportunities are no longer available. Hidden behind Mardi Gras and other successful tourist events is a Gulf Coast that remains in disarray. In the communities they hit, the hurricanes created an overwhelming need for legal services that isn’t expected to recede for years.
Hundreds of law students—working from home and by traveling to the region—have contributed countless hours of legal research and provided direct legal assistance to hurricane victims. The organizing force behind their efforts is the Student Hurricane Network, which is affiliated with more than 60 law schools. This school year, the network is gearing up for more critically needed relief efforts.
“Collectively, we’re able to do so much,” says Morgan Williams, a law student at Tulane University and a founder of the hurricane network.
Williams emphasizes that the rewards for student volunteers go beyond the satisfaction of helping others. “It’s an amazing education, and you make amazing contacts,” he says. Student volunteers work alongside dedicated public interest and pro bono lawyers who set inspiring examples for what students can do with their careers, he explains.
“The students have performed in every phase of the civil and criminal system,” says Loyola University New Orleans law professor Bill Quigley, who is also the director of its law clinic and poverty law center. He has deployed hurricane network volunteers to help flood victims facing evictions, foreclosures, rent gouging, and other housing issues. Other law students have traveled to prisons across Louisiana to track where inmates had been shipped and to investigate their conditions in preparation for civil lawsuits.
“[The students] were extraordinarily useful,” says Pamela Metzger, director of Tulane’s criminal law clinic. “I think for those who went to law school wondering if there was still a chance to be law heroes, the answer is in the affirmative.”
Many other students have discovered that they don’t need to be in New Orleans or other affected areas to be of valuable assistance and gain substantive legal experience. For instance, under the Student Hurricane Network umbrella, law students from New York University partnered with the Brennan Center for Justice to create “Katrina Legislation Tracking,” an e-mail update of legislative initiatives related to the hurricane. Law students from Northwestern University and Rutgers University are helping the Public Interest Law Project verify the accuracy of a wiki web site about the Federal Emergency Management Agency called FEMA Answers (www.femaanswers.org).
“The students have provided a tremendous amount of assistance for people in desperate situations,” Quigley says. But, he adds, “Even with their help, we have significant unmet needs.”
Quigley describes just how overwhelming the problems are in New Orleans. “Every one of our institutions melted down after the hurricane, and most have not been reconstructed,” he says. Included are the health and hospital system, transportation, education, utilities, public services, and the civil and criminal courts, he explains.
For instance, as of June, not a single criminal jury trial had taken place since before Katrina. The resulting backlog of cases caused some individuals to languish in jail without so much as meeting a lawyer. Some had been detained for longer than the maximum sentence served had they been convicted of the charges that landed them there in the first place.
“I think there are about five times as many legal problems as we had in August (2005) and about half as many people providing legal services and pro bono services,” Quigley says.
Williams, a New Orleans native, is one law student who understands what has befallen the region. The morning after Katrina hit, he was sound asleep in his bed, thinking the worst was over. He woke up to a neighbor’s knock and warning that the city’s levees had broken. “The water was coming down my street in waves,” he says, recalling how he hightailed it out of town with just the clothes on his back.
Within a week, and hundreds of miles from home, Williams had aligned himself with a nonprofit organization, From the Lake to the River, that was created by Tulane law professors, students, and alumni. The group set up the legal hotline, documented problems with FEMA, and drafted a policy report for the mayor’s commission focusing on the right of evacuees to return to their homes and neighborhoods.
A month later, during Equal Justice Works’ annual public interest law conference and job fair, Williams gave a presentation on how law schools could get involved in the relief and rebuilding process. His presentation quickly turned into a planning session with students brainstorming late into the evening about what to do. “That’s when we decided to start the national organization,” Williams says of the Student Hurricane Network.
Pulver was one of those in attendance. For the prior month, while conducting intake on the hotline, he hadn’t had much opportunity to work on the Katrina legal issues that were compounding daily. “We were all about getting people to that financial baseline so they could survive wherever they were,” he recalls. It especially troubled him when he got calls from elderly women, who had stayed behind in flood-ravaged areas, asking him how to get to the grocery store. “I could give them names to call,” he says, “but I couldn’t get them to the grocery store, especially when there was no grocery store open.”
The desire to take more direct legal action is what drove Pulver to participate in a winter break trip to the Gulf Coast organized by the hurricane network. Altogether, it drew more than 350 students from 50 different law schools. Pulver worked with the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court, doing data entry to help bring the court up to date with probation reports and other backlogged paperwork.
When spring break rolled around, the hurricane network recruited even more students: 750 students from 67 schools participated. This time Pulver headed to Atlanta, where a large number of evacuees had fled, to volunteer with IMPACT, a national law student group dedicated to voting rights. The students explained to the displaced residents how they could participate in the upcoming elections for New Orleans mayor and city council. “It was a lot of pounding the pavement, distributing paperwork, and talking to anyone we saw,” Pulver says.
When student volunteers first arrive in New Orleans, they’re often taken on a tour of the ravaged neighborhoods by Bernadette D’Souza, one of the skeleton staff of approximately eight returning lawyers from New Orleans Legal Assistance.
“The students need to see the impact Katrina had on our clients,” D’Souza says as she navigates her car down a mucky street in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where homes once stood but now only foundations are hinted at. “Look at that,” she says, pointing to a house that looks like an accordion, draped as it is over a chain link fence and a car, its final resting place after the floodwaters receded.
“It was unspeakable. I didn’t expect it to be so bad, especially seven months after the hurricane,” says Jonathan Sclarsic, a Cornell law student who spent spring break in New Orleans working at a legal aid intake desk.
“They’ve done a phenomenal amount of work,” D’Souza says of the student volunteers. She describes, for instance, how Sclarsic and other students helped vast numbers of low-income home dwellers file paperwork to obtain FEMA benefits after being initially denied.
“The students are being exposed to issues on the cutting edge of creating new laws for the country in the event of further natural disasters,” D’Souza says. For instance, one day she heard from a client who had relocated to Alabama and subsequently been served a contempt order for not fulfilling the visitation rights of her children’s father, who had fled to another area of Louisiana, hundreds of miles away. Her client was in no position to be traveling back and forth.
Sclarsic researched the matter and determined that Alabama law would allow the woman to adjudicate the matter there without having to return to Louisiana. And in a further effort to sort out the legal ramifications of Katrina on child custody cases, Natalia Merluzzi, a winter break volunteer from the University of California at Berkeley, returned to school and wrote a paper, “Family Law and Jurisdictional Issues in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: Divorce and Child Custody,” that she forwarded to various legal aid groups in the affected region.
New Orleans wasn’t the only place begging for student volunteers. The Mississippi Gulf Coast also received a wallop from Hurricane Katrina.
“It was tumultuous,” says Allison Korn, who was just beginning her second year at the University of Mississippi School of Law when she learned that some of her classmates could not at first locate their families or had lost homes. After attending the same Equal Justice Works’ conference where the Student Hurricane Network came together, Korn subsequently became its director of Mississippi projects.
One project done in conjunction with the Mississippi Center for Justice recruited law student volunteers to attend housing court hearings involving landlords and low-income tenants. Many tenants appeared in court with no legal representation, no leases, and little knowledge of the law. “After the judgment was made, the students would approach the tenants and ask if they knew about their legal options,” Korn says, explaining that they weren’t able to dispense legal advice but could inform them where to go.
“It was a good learning experience. By helping people learn more about the law and how to benefit from it, you can effect change,” says Joel Roberson, who was a 2L at Chicago-Kent College of Law when he traveled to the Gulfport/Biloxi area during spring break. Roberson volunteered with the Mississippi Center for Justice in a campaign to help residents in danger of foreclosures. For one week, he and other volunteers traveled across the southern area of the state, sleeping on a church floor at night and searching for foreclosure notices during the day in a race to identify the homeowners and alert them of their rights.
“We tried calling, but phones were disconnected or had no answer,” says Roberson, who also couldn’t rely on Mapquest directions because so many street signs were gone, roads washed away, and bridges mangled. He only wishes they could have reached more people. “But if we were saving one family from being evicted from their home, it still felt good to make an impact,” he says.
For many volunteers, the experience taught them lessons about themselves. Heather Ford was entering her final year of law school at Loyola University New Orleans when Katrina struck. She evacuated to Houston to take advantage of the Loyola law classes and clinic that were temporarily grafted onto the University of Houston campus by early October. After inquiring about ways to fulfill her pro bono requirements, she began putting in hours working at an intake table at a downtown disaster relief center.
“I’m a pretty quiet and shy person, and I had always worried about graduating from law school without enough legal contacts,” Ford says. “I walked away from this realizing that I’d talked to hundreds of people and that I did something that I’m passionate about.”
At the same time, listening to people’s dire stories day after day highlighted for her the limitations of the law. “It taught me that the laws are frustrating and don’t necessarily make people whole,” she says. “And just because there’s a wrong doesn’t mean there’s a remedy.”
Meanwhile, the Student Hurricane Network is taking the organization to the next stage: assembling a report documenting its accomplishments and the region’s ongoing needs to use as a lobbying tool when its members gather in Washington, D.C., this fall. The network is also forming a committee to help organizations develop student research projects for the current school year, to be posted at www.studenthurricanenetwork.org.
The need for hands-on legal support also continues unabated, especially as the region gears up for a flood of returnees once FEMA cuts off its temporary housing vouchers, and as the federal government releases funds to rebuild this fall. A list of the legal entities that need volunteers appears on the hurricane network’s web site, along with contact information for the liaisons at participating law schools.
“There’s no shortage of work” for law students, said Williams, the Tulane law student and hurricane network founder, during a nationwide videoconference in March sponsored by the ABA Council on Racial and Ethnic Justice.
“Lawyers wait their whole lives to do what we’re doing,” says Pamela Metzger, the Tulane professor and criminal law clinic director. “I don’t think anyone walks away from this untouched.”
