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Abstract

He was a very big guy. He was already balding, and looked as if his body, which had been so good for football, would run to fat before he was 35. He talked as if he had a pretty high opinion of himself. He wore his shirts open one more button than the norm and always seemed to wear gold chains around his neck. This was February of his second year of law school. I'll call him Peter. She presented herself to me through her resume. The first time I read it, I had the impression she was as two-dimensional as the kind of paper dolls with tabs on their feet I would cut out as a child. I had trouble imagining the real person represented by that resume. When she came into my office she wore her hair tightly pulled back, her glasses were large and dark, and she spoke softly. Some students walk into the office as open as my trusting four-year-old. Some students, like this one, are so closed I find it hard to even find a surface which reflects back to me, much less an opening into the student's world. This was the fall of her third year. I'll call her Sarah. He was slender and wore his hair in long curls. He would have looked at home in the Haight in the '70's. He wanted to save the world, and particularly the natural world. Part of his family had a strong background in working with organized labor. He came to Vermont Law School because of the strength of our environmental program and because Vermont is such a wonderful place to live. I met him on his first day of school. He let me know he was a committed pacifist and a birthright Quaker. He wasn't at all sure he wanted to be a lawyer. He wanted to enroll in the Semester in Practice as soon as possible in order to find out. I'll call him Jeremy. None of these students is real. Each is a composite created from experience. They reflect some characteristics and experiences from among the more than 600 students who have "won" the lottery at Vermont Law School (VLS), and were therefore eligible to enroll in the semester-long external clinic VLS calls the Semester in Practice (SiP). I have drawn on several of my students' individual experiences to illustrate experiences common to many students in the SiP. I want each student to seem so real to you, the reader, that you can imagine yourself working with these particular students. To protect the confidentiality of each individual student, I have mixed together assorted students' personalities and stories. But each of the questions, statements, and conclusions I quote was actually said by someone, and the various scenarios and vignettes are drawn from actual experience. In this case study, I will describe just a few parts of these student experiences in the hope that this description will prove helpful to others - whether law professor, field supervisor or law student - in structuring effective and valuable practicum-based learning experiences.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

1

Issue

1

First Page

173

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