Duration: Full year clinic

Credits: 8 credits (4 per semester/letter grade)

Childhood should be the happiest time in life, but for thousands of poor children in our community, life is filled with struggle and heartbreak.  Children in foster care are prohibited from seeing their siblings. Children with emotional problems are provoked and taunted by school officials and then arrested for acting out.  Children who are truant from school are brought to Juvenile Court in shackles, handcuffs, and leg irons.  Children prosecuted as delinquents who are appointed a lawyer because their parents cannot afford one are nevertheless required to pay a “counsel fee,” even if their cases are dismissed.  These are problems representative of the issues the Child Advocacy Clinic seeks to confront and reform. 

Students in the Child Advocacy Clinic will learn how to use the power of the law to shape public policy to protect and advance the rights of children, especially children who are disadvantaged by race, socioeconomic class, or disability.  Students will study and practice the many strategies and skills that lawyers use in order to make or change public policy. 

Child Advocacy students will be assigned to represent one or more clients on projects that will redress systemic problems and relieve social harms.  Clients may include social service agencies, grassroots organizations, and the individual clients of other Suffolk clinics such as the Juvenile Defender Clinic and the Education Advocacy Clinic.  Students will have primary responsibility for all aspects of their projects, including interviewing clients; researching the relevant facts, law, and policy context; developing strategies to accomplish the clients’ goals; and implementing these strategies.  In order to achieve their clients goals, students may write and lobby for legislation; advocate within administrative agencies for regulatory or policy changes; conduct quantitative and qualitative research; write policy reports; engage in media advocacy; form and maintain coalitions of supporters; and/or develop and file civil lawsuits.  The weekly clinic seminar will include discussions of these and other methodologies as well as the substantive policy issues on which students are focusing. 

A central feature of the clinic will be a focus on understanding the role that individuals play in advocacy campaigns.  Even when the clinic’s client is an organization, we will look for ways to actively engage individual children and their families to design project goals, make key decisions, and play a leading role in reforming systems and improving their own lives.  Students can thus expect that as part of their project work, they will interact with the very people whose lives are most deeply affected by the policies the students are seeking to influence. 

Among other requirements, each week students will attend the clinic seminar, meet with the professor for project supervision, and submit a reflective journal.  In order to accommodate meetings with clients and necessary field research, students should keep at least two days a week free of other commitments before 4 p.m. 

Although Evidence is the only prerequisite course, completion of Children and the Law, Juvenile Law & the Rights of Adolescents, and/or Law and Public Policy are recommended.

Questions: Contact Professor Erik Pitchal at epitchal@suffolk.edu