In the Wake of Travyon Martin, Calling for a Racial Justice Clinic

Now that protests have ended, social media posts have subsided, and the hoodies have gone back in the closets, someone will have to do the work of clawing our way back to justice. As future lawyers, we have a responsibility to be part of that response. And to weigh in on how law schools might help to prepare future lawyers to respond.

In this space, Professor Weisberg succinctly summarized a lawyer’s take on the State v. Zimmerman. But that explanation is unsatisfying, even for those of us who understand exactly how or why the jury ruled in Zimmerman’s favor. The problem is not that the law is unclear, it’s that justice can be so apparently absent from it. I remember feeling shell-shocked in the days following the verdict not because I was unsure of “how this could’ve happened,” but because I felt so powerless to do anything about it.

I imagine some are tired of talking about Trayvon Martin, or analyzing the countless other cases where race colors the quality of the outcome. I’m certainly tired of talking because I want to do something about it. And I do hope that SLS and other law schools will explore ways to prepare me and my fellow JDs to understand how to use the law as a tool for racial justice—and to right the law when it is wrong. Like many of my classmates, I didn’t come to law school solely because I want a better understanding of the law. I came because I want to change the way the law works for our most vulnerable citizens and neighbors.

For the most part, I know exactly where to go to take advantage of Stanford’s resources and receive excellent training in the process: our clinics. If I wanted to be a prosecutor or public defender, my path would be clear. If I were passionate about environmental justice, transactional work, appellate litigation, or even intellectual property, my options would be obvious. But for me, a civil rights and racial justice junkie, it’s significantly less clear where I should turn. There’s one clinical program that’s glaringly absent: a civil rights clinic focused on racial justice. This is one of our nation’s oldest and most intractable problems, yet Stanford Law has no “Racial Justice Clinic.” If there were ever a summer in the last fifty years that attests to this need, this would be it

Popular culture and media tend to move quickly from one crisis to the next, but we lawyers are in it for the long haul. We’re unwilling to forget. We refuse to give up. But we law students could certainly benefit from a clinic at SLS, directly focused on this important issue, before we enter this fight.

Leslie-Bernard Joseph is a rising 2L at Stanford Law School and Co-President of Stanford’s Black Law Students Association and the StreetLaw pro brono project. He is also a recipient of a 2013 Soros Fellowship. Prior to coming to law school, he was the founding dean of students at Coney Island Prep, a 5-12 public charter school in Brooklyn, and before that he spent three years teaching elementary school in the Bronx through Teach for America