Where has the summer gone? The law school semester has begun! We at CFCC are looking forward to another great year; we take utmost pride in teaching the next generation of lawyers about family law and our major tenets, therapeutic jurisprudence and the ecology of human development. We also ensure that our students personally engage with the things they learn in the classroom through their enrollment in the CFCC Student Fellows Program.
Our Student Fellows engage in an in-depth examination of the policies and theories surrounding court reform and cutting edge issues in family law, including unified family courts. They also become involved with one of our projects, which can include research, writing, or field work. Last year, six Student Fellows supported the judges at CFCC’s Truancy Court Program (TCP) sessions by taking notes, distributed rewards for goal achievement, and discussed strategy with the TCP team. One Student Fellow led a “Kids and Cameras Program” class to teach children about photography, and three Student Fellows created and implemented workshops for TCP parents covering legal issues ranging from truancy to school discipline to schooling options for children with chronic health conditions.
We look forward to a wide variety of research and practice projects this year, including a research project on the impact of cultural factors on children of immigrants, experiential projects with the Truancy Court Program, and more. Additionally, because our instructional philosophy for the Student Fellows Program centers on reflection, application, and discussion, we plan to use this blog as a new element of the course. We are going to allow each Student Fellow an opportunity to write about the topics they are learning, both in the classroom and through their experiential component. We believe that this web integration can be a valuable part of our Student Fellows’ learning experience, and we encourage our readers to join in this process by responding to our student posts.
I wish the students and faculty supervisors at CFCC a terrific year. It seems to me that CFCC represents a marked and important departure from the narrow assumptions underlying my legal education from a third of a century ago. We were taught, for example, that pitting family members against each other in a legal contest was a sensible response to a family crisis like separation and divorce. And we were taught this not because such an assumption served the interests of clients, families, or the public, but because it’s what the legal profession knew how to do. We knew how to cast family crises as legal battles, so that’s what we did. It was never suggested that maybe family clients (and their families and especially their children) would be served best by problem-solving and an education in how the family members’ best interests were actually mutual rather than in conflict. In my view, what CFCC offers may be nothing less than a chance for a new generation of attorneys to ascend to a higher calling of actually serving the interests of those we’re supposed to serve over the law’s own narrow paradigms. Almost all of us practice in jurisdictions embracing the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, including its tenet that the law’s status as a self-regulated profession carries with it a special responsibility to serve the public’s interest over its own. (“The legal profession's relative autonomy carries with it a responsibility to assure that its regulations are conceived in the public interest and not in furtherance of parochial or self-interested concerns of the bar.” –Preamble to Rules of Professional Conduct.) Yet not enough of us routinely consider or discuss what it is our family clients and their families actually need. I wish CFCC a wonderful year in helping a new generation of attorneys to understand what we should be about.Charlie AsherCharlie@UpToParents.orgFreedom 22 FoundationSouth Bend, Indiana
Thank you for your kind words, Mr. Asher. We at CFCC certainly agree about the importance of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) in legal education. So much work has been done in this area of the law in the last few decades. We at CFCC believe that the theory and best practices established by incorporating TJ into family law are invaluable tools for young attorneys striving to fulfill their ethical obligations and to serve their clients’ interests. We are proud to be among the leaders incorporating therapeutic jurisprudence concepts into legal education, and we hope that this important body of scholarship continues to be introduced at law schools across the country.Thanks,Barbara Babb