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St. Thomas Law Review

First Page

561

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In recent years, the Therapeutic Jurisprudence and preventive law model has begun to penetrate legal education. As this article attempts to show, this model has much to offer clinical legal education and child advocacy clinics, in particular. This article describes how Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Therapeutic Jurisprudence/preventive law model are used in the Children & Youth Law Clinic, and demonstrates their value in the context of representing one foster care client of the Clinic. Specific examples of our activity are rewound to analyze the strategies or techniques the Clinic used or, in retrospect, should have used, to address or prevent some of the legal problems that occurred at different junctures in the case. In particular, the article considers how we sought to identify our client's "psycholegal soft spots," how we identified or developed strategies to address those psycholegal soft spots, how we used preventive law techniques such as "legal checkups," and how we evaluated the therapeutic or antitherapeutic effects of the available strategies. This article also examines how the attorney-client relationship with George evolved from that first meeting. Viewing the Clinic's relationship with George-from the different and sometimes conflicting perspectives of the client, student, and teacher-lawyer-as he made the uncertain, difficult and painful transition from foster care to adulthood, this article considers how the use of Therapeutic Jurisprudence and preventive law enriched the students' educational experience in the Clinic, and how, in the end, this experience had a transformative effect on the client. This article evaluates how teaching and practicing Therapeutic Jurisprudence in a law school child advocacy clinic can accomplish the goal articulated by Therapeutic Jurisprudence scholarship, to "broaden the counseling mission, and... convert the practice of law into a helping and healing profession in ways that make it a much more humanitarian tool." By in-depth appraisal of the work done by the Clinic in one case for a single client, with a focus on the role of the child's Therapeutic Jurisprudence/ preventive lawyer in doing legal checkups with the child to avoid psycholegal soft spots, this article is a descriptive case-study, similar to a medical school grand round, of the practice of Therapeutic Jurisprudence and preventive law in a child advocacy clinic, with its many frustrations and satisfactions for the teacher, clinic student, and client. Lastly, this article gives general recommendations on how law school child advocacy clinics can teach students to apply the principles of Therapeutic Jurisprudence and preventive law in their practice and how the practice of Therapeutic Jurisprudence in the experiential setting of a clinic gives them opportunities to reflect upon and critique their role as lawyers for children. It also suggests ways of broadening the reach of Therapeutic Jurisprudence into both clinical legal education and child advocacy.

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