Challenges in education; Research and legal aid

A legal aid program for the poor is beginning in the Durham North Carolina area with most of the work being handled by law students from three schools working under close supervision of attorneys. There will be students involved from Duke University North Carolina college and the University of North Carolina law schools they'll all be law students we have will have a very limited number of first year law students although they are welcome to participate. Depend and list their school refuses to let them because of the burden of work. But other than that they'll be employed on a limited basis with the bulk of the work being done by second third year law students. You are listening to Kathleen Mary one of the students who is so closely involved with the program. In a moment she talks about the research arm of the legal aid clinic. Challenges in education presented by Duke University. Here with today's speech is Charles Bronson.

A legal aid clinic has been set up to work with the poor in certain problem areas. But along with the clinic there is a very important research arm in existence. Miss Kathleen Mary a student at the Duke Law School comment under the OIO grant that we've got the research arm of the clinic. Well of the program actually because the clinic is somewhat divorced from the research arm will operate out of the law school. And in addition to doing various projects in the state of North Carolina and in this community in particular we'll also have a legal memoranda Committee which will be responsible for doing briefs or memos on the law of test cases which will be sent to us from any registered OIO office in North or South Carolina. Other important work will be performed by other students. Another committee will also handle an examination of legislation in the areas that we deal with. Under our agreement again both North and South

Carolina with the idea that we'll evaluate the legislation as it exists. See what changes could be made to make it more beneficial to the people that is really designed to help. That is the poor of the areas. And then. Draft proposed changes in the legislation and then go about doing everything we can to see to it that the legislation is passed in the area of housing law consumer and public welfare and juvenile proceedings. The research arm will be writing and publishing some manuals the manuals will be basically designed to assist attorneys who are dealing with this particular type of law. However they hopefully will be written in such a way that they can also be distributed to other people who deal with this with this type of situation on a fairly regular basis. In doing this we hope to be able to again circulate them on a national level so that while they wouldn't cover the loss of all the states they would cover the basic tenants of the law its strengths its weaknesses the ways in which it could be dealt with using the North

and South Carolina law as your basic example or jumping off place. There is a lot of enthusiasm about the program as Miss Kathleen Mary indicates. I'm a third year law student and I often wish right right now that I were a first year because I think this is. This program I think could really do a lot first of all for the Durham community for the communities all the communities in North and South Carolina through our research arm into the other Ojo offices. But at the same time I think it offers an awful lot to the law students themselves. For instance working at the clinic we're going we're bound to acquire a familiarity with the day to day process of being an attorney which you don't get in a classroom at the same time I think it's going to offer us an opportunity to acquire expertise in these areas of the law which are important no matter what you go into in the sense that you're going to have consumer problems in any area of the law whether you're a corporate attorney or remain a poverty attorney. The same thing is true of landlord and tenant

problems. The law is the same whether you're talking about a multimillion dollar corporation and his landlord or whether you're talking about the man who was on welfare and his landlord. The research arm of a legal aid clinic. This is Charles Braswell with challenges in education from Duke University. This program was distributed by the national educational radio network.