Volume 35
Issue
1
Date
2020

Lawyering Over the Line: Teaching Crisis Lawyering With Law Students Serving Asylum Seekers In Mexico

by Kayleen Hartman

For several years now, a humanitarian crisis has been building on the U.S. southern border, where northern-bound migrants—primarily family units and children—confront increasingly dire circumstances to seek safety in the United States. Restrictive and erratic asylum policy has resulted in ever-rising legal hurdles that families and individuals must surmount, even before they arrive in the United States. In response to this, American lawyers and law students have been “crossing the Line,” and going over the southern border and into Mexico to provide legal services. Though the exceptional setting presents difficult issues of substantive law, professional responsibility, and pedagogical method, it has received little to no academic attention as a practical educational experience. Lawyering Over the Line provides an overview of the current opportunity to conduct this work through U.S. law schools, and analyzes the value of this work to clients, law students, and law schools. This work shares much of the traditional pedagogical value found in service-learning work as developed in previous scholarship, along with many of the challenges and learning opportunities of experiential learning work performed in family detention centers. The stressors of the border experience described in this article highlight in new ways important aspects of more traditional service-learning work. Undertaking this work in Mexico is unique, however, because of the acute nature of the challenges encountered in work across international borders. The disorienting, liminal space students share with clients in transit, when thoughtfully combined with this form of service-learning has, the potential to be radically transformative for law students in their development as lifelong practitioners in public interest and other fields.

Continue Reading Lawyering Over the Line: Teaching Crisis Lawyering With Law Students Serving Asylum Seekers In Mexico

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