A New Center for Legal Services
190 Chelsea Street storefront before renovations began in June 2011
Indeed. "They were surprised the clinic was willing to offer that opportunity to students," she says. Her brief, which addressed complex regulatory issues of groundwater contamination, helped her land a coveted internship in the U.S. Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division last summer and, upon graduating, a spot in the Honors Attorney Program with the U.S. Department of the Interior. "Every student should have a chance to work in a clinic," she says.
Removal of the roof and much of the siding during renovations revealed the building’s previous renovations and the old plaster-and-lathe wall covering.
The VLS clinics—a win-win for students, clients, and employers—have long been a cornerstone of the school's public-service orientation and experiential learning approach. Now that philosophy is being cemented, so to speak, with the acquisition and renovation of the former Freck's Department Store on the northwest corner of campus into the Center for Legal Services. The $3.5-million renovation, which integrates historical accuracy with green standards, will house the VLS clinics. The 14,700 square feet of space will enable the clinics to serve clients more effectively and provide an optimal learning environment for students.
A Commitment to Clinical Education
Simultaneously, two of the country's top clinical educators just joined VLS. Margaret Martin Barry, past president of the Clinical Legal Education Association, as the acting associate dean for Clinical and Experiential Programs, and Christine Cimini, former head of clinical programs at Denver University Sturm School of Law, who will become the director of Semester in Practice and Externship Programs in 2012. "We look at it all as a demonstration of our commitment to clinical education," says Dean Geoffrey B. Shields. The school has raised $1.45 million to date for the center, and donors have included every trustee, about 20 law firms in the state, and all the classes that contributed to the 2009 Class Gift of $34,000 for a conference room.
.jpg "190 Chelsea Street storefront")
Trumbull-Nelson Construction Company is tasked with removing unsound structural elements and renovating to the highest standards of energy efficiency while retaining the building’s historical character.
VLS, with the advent of the South Royalton Legal Clinic in 1979, was an early and enthusiastic proponent of clinical education: the clinics are so popular—and essential—that they cannot accommodate all the students or clients who seek them out. Experiential legal teaching has gained currency over the last few decades: The need to reorient legal education to a more practice -based approach is cited as critical in such authoritative studies as Legal Education and Professional Development: An Educational Continuum ("MacCrate Report"), the Best Practices for Legal Education, and Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law ("Carnegie Report"). We are embracing those views by carefully considering how to develop our clinical and externship offerings to provide excellent practice experiences for more of our students. At the same time, we are considering how to integrate experiential learning methods and a broad range of skills across our curriculum.
VLS's clinical program—routinely ranked in the top sixth of all law schools nationwide by U.S.News & World Report—stands out from others in several ways. Few law schools have an environmental law clinic, and even fewer have a land use clinic. The VLS poverty law clinic allows students in-depth work in immigration, child welfare, domestic relations, public benefits, and prison projects. The environmental clinic, one of the largest in the country in terms of students enrolled, offers rare and ready access to top environmental experts on the faculty. Also unusual among clinical programs is the full-time, 13-credit option that gives students a complete immersion into the material so they get a 360-degree view of cases and multiple hearing experiences. That option allows ENRLC students to dig deep into significant cases that may span years—and write court briefs, a task that Cragan said was "initially intimidating" but was made easier because of the clinic's camaraderie and its "nurturing mentors."
Historic, Green Restoration
More students apply each semester than the programs can accommodate, with office space being a significant limitation. The ENRLC's three full-time faculty, two LLM fellows/staff attorneys, and 11 students work on the second floor of Debevoise Hall, cheek to jowl in one large room and a few shared staff offices. The two professors and eight students in the Land Use Clinic (LUC) work in similarly cramped conditions. The South Royalton Legal Clinic (SRLC) offices in the circa-1850 Pierce House are notoriously makeshift; the building has been, as one alumnus put it, "renovated bit by bit to the hilt." The cramped working conditions make confidential client interviews difficult, and the roof of an add-on shed that houses one attorney has leaked water onto a professor's wall diploma.
After pricing out the high cost of repairing Pierce House, the VLS board of trustees turned to the Freck's building at 190 Chelsea Street when it went on the market in 2009, purchasing it for $850,000. Built in 1894, the building sits on an intersection catty-corner from the village green, surrounded on two sides by the campus. A succession of stores on the site had sold everything from mud boots to pork chops to jewelry to shovels; so important has it been to the town that the VLS officials carefully worked to plot out its future with local planning officials and citizens.
The renovations involve gutting the interior of the main building, demolishing the rickety 1910 back addition and rebuilding it, removing and realigning inner walls, replacing plumbing and wiring, and installing handicapped-access features, including an elevator. Sustainable green design features include enhanced insulation, computer controls to dial down heating and cooling systems in off-times, a white reflective roof, water-efficient landscaping, low-flow toilets, low-volatile organic compound paints, sealants, carpets and wood, and drywall made from recycled gypsum. At least 75 percent of the construction waste is being recycled.
Because the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the exterior is being kept carefully intact—even the tin with brick patterns that covers the wooden structure will be replicated.
More Clients and Students Served
The foundation for the new wing in the east side of the Center for Legal Services building took shape in the summer of 2011.
With four professors currently supervising about 20 students, the 33-year-old South Royalton Legal Clinic now handles about 1,500 clients a year from 8 of Vermont's 14 counties, providing an estimated $1.5 million in free legal services annually. Its student clinicians participate in 250 hearings, trials, status conferences, and other proceedings a year-a hefty caseload. "We drive 25,000 miles a year serving our caseload—a little more than once around the world," says May. Even so, the SLRC often turns clients away, May says: "The demand far exceeds the supply of students and attorneys available to provide legal assistance."
“The demand far exceeds the supply of students and attorneys available to provide legal assistance.” —James May, SRLC Director
For many students, the clinic is a welcome dose of the real world. "By the time they get here, most students are coming out of four years of high school, four years of college, and at least a full year of law school, so they appear to be a little tired of that academic experience," says May. "We provide them with a jolt of reality that is sobering when they realize they're going to be responsible for their cases, but immediately they get very excited and motivated because of that significant responsibility. Their skills improve in all areas. Even the mechanics of talking on the phone with potential clients, court clerks, opposition counsel, witnesses—at the beginning many are hesitant about their ability to say the right thing or achieve the right results, but by the end they have become very self-assured and are acting like professionals."
Seventy-five percent of Vermonters with legal problems face them without a lawyer, estimates the Vermont Supreme Court, and for many of them, the clinic can be a lifesaver, figuratively or literally. "Without its help, I think I'd be dead. I would have committed suicide," says Jane. (Her name has been changed.) She was 43 and launching into a PhD program in business management when she collapsed and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Denied long-term disability, she was struggling to make ends meet on $440 monthly in temporary disability when her mother died, her low-cost living arrangements deteriorated, and her car was stolen: "Everything in my life was falling down around me, and there wasn't anything left. There was nowhere to go and nothing I could do." Then the son of a neighbor, a VLS student, told her about the clinic. Student clinicians, supervised by May, launched an intensive reexamination of her medical records, located her treating doctors, and compiled an inch-and-a-half file that resulted in her disability decision being reversed by the state Social Security Administration. "I was fighting the good fight, but I was fighting it alone—until the clinic," she says. "I was impressed by everything about them." In another case, the parents of an 18-year-old girl sought help because she was being stalked by an older man, who watched her through binoculars during softball practice and sent her unsolicited gifts and emails. After an emergency Order Against Stalking didn't stop him, the clinic secured a court order prohibiting the man from any contact with her.
As part of its energy-efficient renovations, 190 Chelsea will receive a new roof and windows.
For many students, the clinic provides their first face-to-face encounter with poverty, and the impact can be profound. Adam Necrason JD/MSEL1996 went to a client's home to interview him for a disability petition, and found himself sitting "knee-to-knee in a camper covered with ramshackle boards, in the dark, creosote dripping under our feet, while the client is offering you hospitality the best he can. It was a year-round lifestyle that many of us would struggle to survive in during a weekend of camping." He enlisted the VLS Habitat for Humanity chapter and everyone else he could corral into building the man a new house, which incorporated such green construction strategies as passive solar, a composting toilet, and high-efficiency gas appliances. It took a year of passing the hat and the hammers, and when the ribbon was cut, "we were not celebrating winning—we were acknowledging progress," says Adam. The project pioneered green building for Habitat for Humanity nationally, and changed Adam's career direction. Today his practice in Montpelier focuses on lobbying the legislature not just for environmental causes but for consumer protection, health care, and worker rights. "I saw the need to get on the front end of these problems, to get policy in place that brings justice to many fronts," he says.
“I saw the need to get on the front end of these problems, to get policy in place that brings justice to many fronts.” —Adam Necrason, JD/MSEL1996
In bringing the law to life, the clinics also affirm students' commitment to their ideals. Lise Daniels JD 2010—married, with four children and commuting two hours a day—struggled through two years of law courses, and only knew she was in the right place when she interviewed her first client at SRLC. "It brought the reality of law into the law school," she says. "I got to do the real thing-and got to realize I'm good at the real thing." She won a $2,000 Schweitzer Fellowship and dipped into her house's line of credit to set up and run a free legal resources center near her home in New Hampshire.
At the ENRLC, clients are often citizens fighting for years against toxic contamination or environmental decay. When the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) quietly and quickly approved the lease of a liquefied natural gas terminal on sacred tribal lands of the Passamaquoddy Tribe's Pleasant Point Reservation in 2004, "it was a fast and furious chain of events that unfolded in front of us," recalls tribal member Vera Francis. An email she sent to ENRLC then-director Patrick Parenteau was answered within hours; soon he and two others were meeting with 50 tribal members. "They were very forthright, transparent, clearly compassionate, and, more important, in alignment with our issues and values," she recalls. "They were truthful about the legal challenges, about how long it was going to take." The clinic filed a challenge to the lease approval in federal district court, based on the failure of BIA to comply with four regulatory processes. In 2010, BIA terminated the lease.
The ENRLC typically takes on significant, complex cases on the cutting edge of environmental policy and regulation; resolution occurs over years rather than a semester. "The great thing for students is that after so many years of theory it's real life, and in real life, cases are messy," says Sheryl Dickey, ENRLC staff attorney. Working on behalf of local community groups and public interest environmental groups, students have helped to protect the endangered gray wolf, bring about better protections for surface and groundwater from industrial pollution, and address the sources of greenhouse gas pollution at the heart of the climate crisis.
"Students are blown away by how much more work it is than they ever thought it would be, as they start to have an understanding of what it takes to write a brief, develop scientific evidence, meet court deadlines, and review piles of documents," says Teresa Clemmer, ENRLC Acting Director. "For some, it's a welcome challenge, for others, it's a scary moment, but overall, they develop a lot of confidence and pride in what they've done, and that serves them well after law school." In fact, they often meet future employers while working alongside them, such as the Sierra Club or Environmental Integrity Project, or even against them. "Even though the EPA or Justice Department can be on the opposite side of the table, they recognize good work when they see it," says Clemmer.
The Land Use Clinic focuses on providing training materials for local land-use policymakers and at clarifying gray areas of regulations. The LUC works closely with local policymakers throughout the Northeast. Students are currently drafting easement templates for culverts that allow fish to migrate and helping towns modify zoning ordinances to allow for "agripreneurial" enterprises such as bed-and-breakfast inns and composting farms. "Vermont is certainly a progressive state in land use, and students learn here the art of what's possible," says LUC staff attorney Katherine Garvey. During the month following Tropical Storm Irene, the Land Use Clinic and South Royalton Legal Clinic helped more than 50 families with FEMA registration, insurance claims, disaster unemployment applications, Small Business Association Loans, and legal appeals.
Employers are more than impressed: "We want to hire people with a high level of maturity and self-confidence, and that is the type of thing clinics help to build," says Anne Cramer, chair of Burlington's Primmer, Piper, Eggleston & Cramer. "VLS's emphasis on trying to get as many students as possible into that setting is important in making a legal education, frankly, much more worthwhile." That viewpoint enables fund-raising despite the economic downturn, says Sarah Buxton, development officer for the Center for Legal Services: "I find the clinics are nearly unanimously applauded by the legal community." As Jim May puts it: "We're really teaching students what is needed to fly on their own."
Photos for this article by Laura DeCapua and Mark Washburn
PLANNING FOR CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY
The transformation of the 117-year-old Freck's building into the Center for Legal Services marries a prominent downtown landmark to Vermont Law School's highest ideals of social justice and environmental stewardship. It restores an underused, deteriorating building into a vital local hub-one that provides not oats and hoes but help and expertise for basic legal needs and protections.
By virtue of its prominent location on the corner of the campus, the building has long been viewed by Vermont Law School planners as a logical way to continue the school's environmentally conscious, restoration-focused growth. The Master Plan of 1995 pinpointed it as a desirable acquisition if it ever came up for sale, and it also got the nod of approval from Sasaki Associates, the landscape design firm that produced an award-winning "framework plan" in 2010 for consideration by the Board of Trustees.
Because the building is located at the intersection of the two main streets in South Royalton, placing the legal clinics inside the building was also a logical choice, says Lorraine Atwood, vice president for finance and administration: "The Center for Legal Services will be serving not just students but the public, which integrates the campus with the community."
With 16 of its 19 buildings historic in character and "repurposed" for the school, VLS has learned how to preserve historical and aesthetic integrity while meeting strict green building standards. "We've gotten good at the rigorous process of protecting the exterior and certain interior components, while at the same time making a building modern and functioning," says Dean Geoffrey Shields. In its long-term planning process—and in meetings with local officials and boards—VLS has sought to expand carefully and thoughtfully, without overwhelming the small, struggling town of South Royalton. "This is an opportunity to spruce up a key location in town while expanding the public-service function of our clinics, which will draw more people into town," says Shields.
SHARE