The Community Justice and Legal Assistance Clinic offers legal assistance in cooperation with several partnership sites that provide professional services to children, youths and families. The work of this clinic is anchored in the community; student lawyers operate less as practitioners in a law office and more as legal resources in the neighborhood organizations where the poor know, and trust, the service providers.
The Community Justice and Legal Assistance Clinic has three components, which are meant to provide students with multiple levels of legal experience:
A unique and cutting-edge clinical program, CJLA is not a free-standing law office, an externship program or a referral-based system. Rather, CJLA students are “embedded” at community sites, where they participate as members of problem-solving teams.
These teams are made up of social workers, case managers, therapists and other service providers; CJLA student attorneys serve as the legal “ears” for the teams and as a primary legal resource for staff and clients. Students are mentored by highly experienced, full-time law faculty and by partnering professional service providers. Out of the partnership settings, potential legal cases are referred to the clinic.
Clients represented by CJLA student attorneys often get the benefit of wraparound services that community partnerships enhance, develop and foster.
The populations primarily served by the CJLA are young adults and families, many of whom reside on Providence's southside. Students also serve residents at various correctional facilities and those reentering their neighborhoods post-incarceration. Most of the cases and nonlitigation work done by students derive from relationships with community partners, who currently include Casey Family Services, the John Hope Settlement House, the Providence Center, Meeting Street School and the Adult Correctional Institution.
One focus of student practice has been the preservation and support of families with limited resources or facing serious access barriers to the justice system; another has been the transitional process from institutional setting into home communities.
