Law Student Division Members Make Public Service a Priority
Michelle Castillo is championing the rights of women. Heather Dawson spent most of the fall eating, sleeping and breathing a fund-raising concert she helped organize. Brian Murphy started a student-run pro bono program at his law school. These three Law Student Division members are shining examples of students committed to doing the kind of work the division encourages.
Castillo is a third-year student at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California, where she is student bar association president and serves as lieutenant governor for women in law under Ninth Circuit Governor Pezhman Ardalan. Castillo says the job involves promoting women's rights law, which is what she wants to practice when she graduates. When Castillo realized her law school was the only school in the circuit that didn't have a women's law association or similar group, she started one.
Castillo also has been involved in her community. She was co-president of La Raza, an organization of Hispanic law students, and a member of the Latino Unity Coalition, which brings together the leaders of Latino groups in San Diego County-business people, politicians, community activists and educators, as well as students. Castillo gives motivational talks in the community, mostly to girls, who are more likely than boys to drop out of school.
She has worked on public service events like a clothing drive for a battered women's shelter, a beach cleanup, and a mock trial of the three little pigs at an elementary school. She also created a mentoring program for the La Raza Lawyers Association to match law students with lawyers and judges.
After earning her undergraduate degree from UCLA, Castillo took a year off, intending to go to film school. It didn't quite work out that way, but she hasn't completely forgotten the movie business either. Castillo is working on a screenplay about a district attorney who becomes disillusioned over the politics in her office.
It's such an obvious idea that it's almost unfathomable nobody thought of it before Brian Murphy did. On the one hand, we have law students who are being trained in (and who need to practice) legal research and writing skills, and who are itching to do community service work. On the other hand, we have overworked lawyers who need help with legal research and writing for their pro bono cases.
Thus was born the Student Research Center at the University of Denver College of Law in Colorado. The center matches law student volunteers with lawyers in the community who need research assistance with their pro bono cases. The students hit the law library and write memos-and, in some cases, briefs-for the lawyers. The participating lawyers get quality legal research that helps them with real cases. The students get real experience, real writing samples, and references from real lawyers.
Murphy, a third-year law student at the University of Denver, started the center last year with another law student, Kelly Calocci, when he realized that "80 percent of the need for free legal services goes unmet-and that's unacceptable."
There are now about 125 student volunteers. They don't get academic credit for the research, but Murphy says there have been talks with the administration about changing that. But they do get experience in a wide range of subjects, from family law to landlord-tenant law to banking and loans.
At South Texas College of Law affiliated with Texas A&M University in Houston, "We've always had a lot of members, but for such a large student body there was really nothing going on." So says Heather Dawson, a second-year student at the school and its ABA school representative.
Now the school's ABA chapter seems to co-sponsor just about every kind of public service project there is in the Houston area. Dawson says she has tried to foster better working relationships with student organizations and increase public service.
It seems to be working. In October, the school held a fund-raising concert featuring seven local bands. The concert, co-sponsored with the Sports and Entertainment Law Society, succeeded beyond Dawson's wildest dreams, although it did consume her life for a few weeks. The law school received a $500 grant from the Law Student Division's Outreach Assistance Initiative program to get the concert off the ground.
Dawson, who is also the Law Student Division's liaison to the Defense Function and Services Committee of the ABA's Criminal Justice Section, says the school donated $1,000 to purchase musical instruments for local elementary school students through Houston Mayor Lee Brown's "Kids' Music Fund" charity. The school also presented the Houston Special Olympics with a $1,000 check at a Work-A-Day event last fall.
South Texas' ABA chapter also co-sponsors a public service project with another student group to benefit a different charity each month. In September, several student groups sponsored a raffle to benefit a local community foster care home. In October it was a Special Olympics project with the Houston Bar Association and a beach cleanup co-sponsored with the Environmental Law Society. In November the Christian Legal Society and Women's Legal Forum, among others, co-sponsored a clothing drive for a women's shelter.
Dawson grew up outside Washington, D.C., and plans to return to Virginia after law school to pursue a career in appellate litigation. She credits Kelli Johnson, her predecessor as ABA school representative at South Texas and now Thirteenth Circuit governor, for getting her involved at school. "Public service has always been important to me," Dawson says. "I have been given certain benefits and privileges, and I feel the need to give back."
She says getting a major project like a concert off the ground for the first time is tough. But, she says, "If we do it next year, it could be even bigger!"
Which, presumably, means even less sleep for a group of hard-working law students.
