Learning by Trying

LAW SCHOOLS Learning by Trying

"The adversary system," said Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark in a speech to Houston lawyers and law students, "operates on the basis that effective representation of opposing interests is a better lie detector than any machine." Unhappily, he added, U.S. law schools have so neglected trial training that "from where I sit, it appears that the tribe of advocates is a vanishing race." The country's few skilled advocates, said Clark, are now so swamped that court delays could conceivably force the abolition of trial by jury.

Ex-Prosecutor Clark is determined to do what he can to prevent so drastic a change in U.S. justice. Under a 1964 law, indigent federal prisoners may now be represented by paid public defenders, and last year Clark suggested that law students could aid the federal defenders while learning the art of advocacy in the process. Such on-the-job training for students would serve much the same purpose as the back-to-school movement that provides continuing legal education for practicing attorneys (TIME, March 25); it might also enlarge the nation's short supply of trial lawyers by whetting the appetites of fledglings who would otherwise pass up such prac tice in favor of other specialties.

With Ford Foundation money, Chicago's U.S. District Court got the National Defender Project to start an "intern at law" program last fall. Now, two-student teams from six Chicago law schools report daily to the federal courthouse, help determine prisoners' indigency, gather evidence, interview witnesses, prepare motions, huddle with the defender at the trial, and are given an opportunity to question the judge.

Mash & Mutuality. Saving a federal defender's time and effort, DePaul Law Students Jay Shapiro and Larry Gabriel recently tackled the case of a Puerto Rican moonshiner. Without a warrant, federal agents had invaded his apartment, found 500 Ibs. of fermenting mash, and then nabbed him outside in a car crammed with sugar. After plumbing assorted precedents, the students informed the defender that the agents indeed had "probable cause" for the warrantless invasion: the mash smell was detected by their own trained noses. Such experiences have persuaded Gabriel to become a prosecutor, Shapiro a criminal lawyer.

So far, the only trouble has come from a U.S. attorney who claimed that a defender's eager student aide deprived him of courtroom "mutuality." Since he himself had no such eager helper, argued the prosecutor, the jury might have been prejudiced. The judge sustained the objection, but Chicago's Program Director Ray Berg is hardly daunted; he hopes soon to enroll all of the city's third-year law students in civil as well as criminal cases.

Precious Commodity. Though local bar associations often take an initially dim view of such efforts, the idea that law students should emulate medical students' intern training has now been accepted in varying degrees in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Wyoming. In Massachusetts, the state's highest court has authorized law students to appear in lower courts and to defend indigents in cases involving less than 2 1/2 years' imprisonment. At Boston University, law students now get classroom credit for courtroom practice in Roxbury, a predominantly Negro slum where 70% of defendants cannot afford lawyers. Lest a student prove unequal to his job, a veteran teacher-advocate is always on hand to rescue the client. Every law student needs such training, says B.U.'s Assistant Law Dean Robert L. Spangenberg. "The liberty of his future clients is too precious a commodity to be squandered through the mistakes of inexperience."

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