The Wall Street Journal on Immigration

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed
11 January 2006

Clinical, Cynical

By Heather MacDonald

Democratic senators have repeatedly questioned whether Samuel Alito is in the legal “mainstream” during the opening days of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. To see what the “mainstream” means for the legal elites in the Democratic party, look no further than the law school “clinic.” These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and advocacy for 30 years. Though law schools claim that the clinics teach students the basics of law practice while providing crucial representation to poor people, in fact they routinely neither inculcate lawyering skills nor serve the poor. They do, however, offer the legal professoriate a way to engage in political activism — almost never of a conservative cast. A survey of the clinical universe makes clear how politically one-sided law schools — and the legal ideology they inculcate — are.

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LETTERS

Clinics Link Law Students to the Real World

COMMENTARY

‘Keep America, America’
By ANDREW S. GROVE

January 26, 2006; Page A10

Recently the House of Representatives passed an immigration bill — the Sensenbrenner-King bill — by a vote of 233 to 189. It is now on its way to the Senate.

This bill scares me.

It’s not likely to affect me directly. I’m no longer in day-to-day business, nor do I have regular contact with immigrants. But it scares me because it has the potential of turning neighbor against neighbor — and of changing our country into a place of fear and mistrust.

Let me illustrate. The bill contains a provision punishing anyone who “assists, [or] encourages . . . a person who . . . lacks lawful authority to remain in the United States” to remain here. Punishment: three to 20 years in prison, the same punishment meted out to professional smugglers who profit from transporting illegal aliens across the border.

This could change the nature of our society in a way that I have seen firsthand. As a Jewish child hiding from the Nazis in Hungary, I saw how the persecution of non-Jewish Hungarians who hid their Jewish friends or neighbors cast a wide blanket of fear over everyone. This fear led to mistrust, and mistrust led to hostility, until neighbors turned upon neighbors in order to protect themselves. Is this what we want?

Consider the potential effect of this bill. Victims of the hurricane that devastated New Orleans more often than not did not have proof of their immigration status. Relief workers who helped them — for example, by providing schooling to their children — could have been charged under this bill with assisting undocumented aliens. Volunteers who save the lives of individuals who are left to die by smugglers — by providing water or food, or by taking them to a hospital — could face arrest and prosecution. An immigration worker who encourages a refugee from political persecution to seek asylum in the United States could be charged with a felony; so could a manager who forgets to check the papers of a job applicant.

Prosecution of these well-intentioned people will lead to a growing schism. We will be forced to become a nation of identity-checkers; anyone who looked “foreign” would likely have to endure a lifetime of proving their status even if they were native-born American citizens. People will be deterred from helping anyone suspected of foreign origin. The events of World War II, the civil wars in Africa, the strife in the Middle East, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the decades-long civil disturbances in Ireland and the recent riots in France, all provide wrenching examples of fractured societies.

This bill forces us to answer the question: What kind of country do we want? Our country has promoted tolerance and diversity through most of its history, providing an outstanding and attractive example to others. Coming to this country and enjoying its openness has taught me how wonderful it is.

Church groups, relief organizations and legal scholars have spoken out against this bill. Business groups have not. Perhaps they consider this bill of little concern to them. I disagree. This is a time when we face increasing competition from well-educated and highly motivated workers from many corners of the world. The stability and diversity of our society are two key competitive differentiators we enjoy. We must hang on to them.

Let’s keep America, America.

Mr. Grove, former chairman of the Intel Corporation, is a member of the board of overseers of the International Rescue Committee.
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Forget the fringe; look at the mainstream. I taught in asylum clinics at Seton Hall and Brooklyn law schools for more than 15 years. Hundreds of our students learned real lawyering through research, writing, client contact and court appearances. They saw law practiced apolitically as a learned profession, not as a business. We represented clients, not causes.

In a typical case, two Seton Hall students fought for months to free a Somali refugee from U.S. immigration jail. They won in court, sprung their client, fed and housed him until he could get on his feet, then defeated a frivolous government appeal of the judge’s asylum grant. They were not social engineers; true conservatives, they protected an individual from the power of the state. And they were not starry-eyed nitwits; both were officers in the U.S. military.

Jeffrey Heller, J.D.
University of Chicago, 1980
Cranford, N.J.
(Mr. Heller was adjunct assistant clinical professor, Brooklyn Law School 1992-2004, and adjunct clinical professor, Seton Hall University School of Law, 1995-99.)

Ms. Mac Donald says clinics fail at serving the poor and at teaching practical skills. My experience as a third-year law student in the Rutgers Urban Legal Clinic has shown otherwise. Under the supervision of an attorney, I have worked on adoptions, a divorce, a house sale, a will, a landlord-tenant dispute, and other civil legal issues on behalf of indigent clients. My classmates and I are able to interview clients, go to court, draft pleadings, and fully participate in all stages of litigation.

My classmates in other Rutgers Law clinics assist small businesses in transactional issues and provide representation to parents of students in need of special education services, to name just some of what is done. The Urban Legal Clinic has allowed me to learn about different substantive areas of the law and the procedure used in practice, despite Ms. Mac Donald’s argument that clinics are of little pedagogical value. My clinical experience has been of tremendous value to me, and I hope and believe it has been of value to the clients we represent.

Allison Herron
Rutgers Law School
Class of 2006
Camden, N.J.

As director of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic since May 2000, I am familiar with one of Ms. Mac Donald’s examples: the controversy over a proposed Shintech PVC plant in St. James Parish, La. In response to a 1997 petition that students in Tulane’s environmental law clinic prepared on behalf of clients, including St. James Citizens for Jobs and the Environment, the EPA found that the plant’s air emissions permit was illegal. Ms. MacDonald thinks it would be “specious” to claim that Tulane’s student attorneys represented “the poor” because the NAACP favored the project. But lawyers represent specific clients, not “the poor” or “industry” or any other general sector of society. And the St. James Citizens are entitled to legal representation even when the NAACP disagrees with them.

Law clinics serve three valuable functions: 1) they teach law students to apply their legal training in the real world; 2) they help the legal profession meet its obligation to see that people have an opportunity to vindicate their rights in court even if they cannot pay high-billing rates or if their points of view are unpopular, and 3) they promote the rule of law by making it possible for ordinary people to challenge powerful interests.

Adam Babich
Director
Tulane Environmental Law Clinic

New Orleans

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Heather Mac Donald’s “Clinical, Cynical” (editorial page, Jan. 11) uses fringe examples to claim that law school clinics are politically one-sided and that their litigation mostly concerns “the allocation of taxpayer resources.”