Reflections of a 3L, Installment Two: Fieldwork and Clinics are Indisputably Indispensable

Casebook reading got you down?  Tired of briefing pretend issues for pretend clients?  Wish you’d never heard of Socrates or his dubious method?

Have I got news for you!  Now for the low, low (HA!) price of your already-paid tuition, you can learn about the law through real life experience.

I don’t mean to denigrate the value of our classroom legal education.  It is, of course, of vital importance to our growing legal knowledge and our ability to think about the law.  However, I am of the opinion that no legal education is complete without a foray into the wide world of the real-life practice of law.  For me, Marquette’s well-developed clinic and fieldwork selections were a large part of why I chose to come here.  I remember talking to Professor Hammer on the phone while making my where-to-go decision, just to check that all the clinic experiences listed on the website were real.  He assured me that, not only are they real, but that students who participate in them do real legal work for real clients.

In spite of my pre-law school enthusiasm about fieldwork, after my first two semesters, I became fearful if I left the confines of Sensenbrenner Hall, some sort of apocalypse would ensue.  At the end of my 1L year, I asked a 2L friend about the advisability of taking a clinic in my second year.  I was worried that taking on another responsibility would take away from my classroom performance and keep me from getting as much as I could from my classroom learning.  She told me that without her clinic experiences, her classroom experiences would have been less meaningful.  She couldn’t have been more right.

My clinic experiences have taken my theoretical learning and given it life.

They helped me to think in a pragmatic way about what kind of issues I want to deal with on a daily basis.  Our practice is not just the bodies of law we deal with.  Our work involves some of the most personal areas of our clients’ lives.  Knowing this and actually talking to the people we may serve — be it a crime victim, a divorce petitioner, a parent involved in a custody battle, or a senior whose Medicaid is being cut off (to name some examples from my own fieldwork experiences) — are two completely different things.  Thus, my clinic experiences revitalized my classroom learning and helped me to direct my studies to areas where my interest continued to grow.

My experiences also helped me meet practitioners.  Some days at the courthouse I feel like I know 99 percent of the people in the hallways.  This leads me to realize that there is a reason why Marquette grads are sometimes called the “Marquette mafia” — we are connected.  (Not in a gun-in-a-violin-case, speak-easy kind of way, but in a “hey-good-to-see-you-remember-that-crazy-case-we-worked-on” kind of way.)  Or at least we have the opportunity to get connected.  Not only does meeting people in the field help you stick your feelers out for practice areas where you might work (always important), it helped me to put a face on the Milwaukee legal community and thus was my first step to finding my place in it.

So, February’s second piece of unsolicited life-in-law-school advice from yours truly: find a clinic or fieldwork position that interests you and apply.  You’re cheating yourself if you don’t.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Michael M. O'Hear

    I couldn’t agree with you more about the value of a clinic-type experience in Law School. So much of legal practice (especially in the field of criminal law) is about the encounter between society’s haves and have-nots — in a deeply economically segregated society, the courthouse is one of the few places where people from all walks of life gather together (sometimes voluntarily, and sometimes not). I particularly valued my clinical experience in law school for the way it brought me into direct contact with some of the most marginalized members of the community. These connections helped me to move beyond the shallow stereotypes of poverty I acquired through my middle-class upbringing and develop a more nuanced sense of the messy realities of being poor in America.

  2. Tom Kamenick

    I agree 100%, great post! Even opportunities that don’t involve contact with litigants (such as judicial internships) are extremely useful experiences.

  3. Peter Heyne

    Jessica, thank you for this post. I am currently serving as a judicial intern in felony drug court, and loving it. It is uncanny how on at least two occasions, the exact search & seizure note case that I had just read for my Constitution & Criminal Investigation class with Prof. Blinka arises in court the very next day! I then incorporate the case in a bench memo that I need to draft for an upcoming suppression hearing. Talk about academia imitating life! My thanks to Prof. Hammer, the law school, and the supervising judge for this unique opportunity.

  4. Mary Swan

    Jessica, thank you for amazing post. I particularly valued my clinical experience in law school for the way it brought me into direct contact with some of the most marginalized members of the community.

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