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Abstract

It is difficult to speak briefly of the extraordinary accomplishments of Edgar S. Cahn and Jean Camper Cahn in the fields of poverty law, human rights, and clinical legal education. These achievements, described eloquently by the University of the District of Columbia School of Law Faculty in their unanimous nomination of the Cahns for the Section's Award, have decisively shaped the meaning of the law for generations of lawyers and clients. The very existence of the legal services program, threatened though it is today, owes a great deal to the work of the Cahns, including their pathbreaking 1964 article, "The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective." Similarly, the flourishing of clinical legal education today is the fruit of efforts in which Edgar and Jean Cahn played a very special role, as the co-founders, in 1972, of the Antioch School of Law. For the fifteen years that the school operated, Antioch offered an education rarely matched to this day in its intensity of clinical commitment. When the school closed down, the Cahns also played a key role in developing the school that carries on Antioch's traditions, the University of the District of Columbia School of Law (DCSL). And Edgar Cahn is now back in live-client clinical teaching, directing the Public Entitlements/Community Development Clinic at DCSL and working to apply his concept of "Time Dollars"-which he describes in the remarks published here-to the critical task of mobilizing poor communities to remake their lives. In recognition of this remarkable work, the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education gave its 1997 Award for Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Legal Education to Edgar S. Cahn and, posthumously, to Jean Camper Cahn, who died of cancer in 1991. The Editors of the Review join in celebrating this award, and are very happy to publish the remarks which Professor Edgar Cahn made on the occasion.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

3

Issue

2

First Page

253

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