Many of the fundamental skills needed to represent older clients are best learned when law students work with actual clients. To describe a client’s options, the students first learn the options and then explain them in their own words. The legal concepts tend to sink in better. While doing this, the student addresses the client’s intellectual and emotional responses. Being focused on the client’s needs and engaged on many levels allows students to experience one of the most rewarding parts of being a lawyer. Clinical teachers get to help students find this moment, when they, too, can enjoy the satisfaction of solving problems for real people.
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During the autumn of 2009 and the spring of 2010, I worked on sabbatical projects from points on the globe that were some three thousand miles away from my desk in the Elder Law and Consumer Protection Clinic at the Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University (Elder Law Clinic). In practical terms, however, I was never very far away, as I found myself speaking about the clinic to academics around the world.2 In 2011, Penn State’s Elder Law Clinic will celebrate its tenth anniversary of operations; about twenty other law schools in the United States have clinics dedicated to providing legal services to older adults, and there is growing international interest in clinical education connected to elder clients. Possibly, Elder Law clinics are helping to pave pathways for the study of the discipline of Elder Law. For example, one study describes the first documented course offered on Elder Law at a United States law school as an Elder Law clinic.
The University of Hawaii Elder Law Clinic students were excited and proud, yet humbled. Seeing a picture of one of their clients on the front page of the Sunday edition of Hawaii’s largest newspaper made them realize that what they were doing in class was “real.” The headline accompanying the picture read: “Financial Abuse ‘Huge’ Issue for Isles’ Elderly.” The article summarized the tribulations of eighty-two-year-old “Mr. H,” with whom three of the students had spent several hours just days before. Earlier in the week, three other students did their best to assist ninety-four-year-old “Mrs. T,” who was the subject of a guardianship proceeding designed to protect her from potential abuse. Mrs. T clearly had diminished capacity, but she was nonetheless more than willing to sign “papers” for her son, who was suspected of neglecting her. The following week, all of the Elder Law Clinic students met with healthcare providers at a community health center that serves a clientele consisting largely of immigrant Pacific Islanders. Many of these patients’ cultural values clash with the traditional “Western” approach, which champions the use of both advance healthcare directives and selecting surrogate decisionmakers once determining a patient is mentally incapacitated.
I have the privilege of teaching Elder Law at two different law schools. At the University of Kansas School of Law, I teach a two-hour introductory course that surveys the area of Elder Law. It meets once a week for two hours during the fall semester. I also teach a one-hour class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. This course meets once a week for two hours for the second half of the spring semester and focuses on selected Elder Law issues an estate planning attorney will encounter.
My overall objective in teaching these courses is to expose students to the various facets of Elder Law in a way that makes the topics as interesting and realistic as possible. I want the students to understand that the subjects that comprise Elder Law impact people in a very personal way, and every one of us will encounter some of these as we pass through life.
In 1987, I had the good fortune and terror of being invited to co-teach a seminar on Aging and the Law at Georgetown University Law Center. “Why not?” was my immediate response, and the result has been a twenty-three year extra-curricular vocation as an adjunct professor of law.
I learned certain realities of teaching right away, such as do not try to cram the universe into a weekly two-hour class. But other realities took longer to appreciate in full, such as the superior teaching value of personal experience over abstract mental exercises. One challenge that evolved slowly over the years was creating a structure for the course that was both conceptually sound and practical for teaching purposes.
“And so the broken circle go[es], over and over again.” Like a broken record playing the same song clip over and over again, the predominant parties in the Internet radio industry have been hearing the same sound bite repeat since Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)5 in 1998. Despite arguing for more than a decade, no viable solution to the problem of setting statutory royalty rates for Internet radio under the DMCA exists. The result thus far is a slew of statutory rates, temporary settlement agreements, congressional acts, and court decisions with which none of the parties agree. It is time for the Internet radio industry and those who license the music that industry brings to the public to convene and perform a complete overhaul of the DMCA’s webcasting provisions. As it stands, with respect to Internet radio the DMCA is inefficient, and serves only to waste time and money by sending the webcasting industry into an infinite loop of fruitless negotiations, hearings, lawsuits, emergency acts of Congress, and overall public uncertainty about the long-term viability of America’s favorite new music medium.
Municipalities in Florida and throughout the United States are battling dog and cat overpopulation issues that impact local government policy and budgets. Dogs and cats are reproducing at an exponential rate that outstrips the number of people who can provide homes for them. According to some experts’ projections, just one unaltered dog and her progeny can produce an estimated 67,000 puppies in a six-year period. A single fertile cat and her offspring can spawn approximately 420,000 kittens in seven years.
On June 12, 2006, Norris Gaynor was brutally killed by two young men with baseball bats while he slept on a park bench in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Mr. Gaynor was homeless. Two other homeless men were critically injured in this unprovoked predawn attack, which the lawyers concluded was fueled by a desire to “mess with some homeless people.”
In Citrus County v. Halls River Development, Inc., the Fifth District Court of Appeal ruled that the mere enactment of a statute, ordinance, or other governmental rule or regulation may satisfy the “as applied” requirement of the Bert J. Harris, Jr., Private Property Rights Protection Act if the impact of the statute, ordinance, or other governmental rule or regulation is “readily ascertainable” upon enactment. This ruling effectively negated the plaintiff landowner’s cause of action under the Harris Act by requiring a presuit claim to be asserted within one year from the time the Comprehensive Plan amendment was adopted in 1997, instead of allowing the landowner to assert a presuit claim within one year from the time the applicable Comprehensive Plan amendment was applied to the landowner’s property in 2002.
The court’s ruling contradicts the plain language and intent of the Harris Act, which is to create a separate and distinct cause of action to provide relief (in the form of payment of compensation) when a new law, rule, regulation, or ordinance of the state or a political entity in the state, as applied, inordinately burdens real property.
Florida’s beaches are critical to the State’s economy and pro-vide significant protection for upland property, but erosion from natural forces, coastal development, and construction and maintenance of navigation inlets threatens the beaches’ ability to provide these vital services. Of the 825 miles of sandy beach in the State, over 485 miles (about fifty-nine percent) is eroding, with 387 miles of beach (about forty-seven percent) experiencing “critical erosion.” To protect and manage critically eroding beaches, the Legislature enacted the Beach and Shore Preservation Act (BSPA), specifically directing the State to provide for beach restoration and nourishment projects.