After a year and a half of being primarily on-line, the University of Maryland Carey School of Law Clinical Law Program is thrilled to be back in person! Almost all of our seventeen clinics are meeting in the Law School, and while no one would claim that we are “back to normal” (whatever that was), having our students, staff, and faculty back in the building, learning and working together, is wonderful. The energy and passion that our students bring to their work is palpable. It is such a privilege to share the space with them.
As regular readers of this newsletter know, our Legal/Medical Partnership, Fair Housing, Public Health, and Mediation clinics have been collaborating on an Eviction Defense Project, providing legal information, advice, and representation to people in Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, Maryland, at risk of losing their housing. We are thrilled to announce that the Goldsecker Foundation has awarded the Eviction Defense Project a grant to hire a staff attorney who can coordinate this essential work and increase our capacity to represent individual clients.
You may also remember that Maryland Carey Law recently received a $5 million gift to create the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice. A portion of that gift was dedicated to hiring a new faculty member to create an Appellate Immigration Clinic. We are currently interviewing candidates for that position and expect to have a new clinic up and running in Fall 2022.
And as for the rest of us—we continue to meet our clients wherever they are: online, in their homes, in prisons, in nursing homes, in immigration detention, in the community. We work to make our community, our city, our state and our country more just places and to ensure that our clients are heard and their legal rights vindicated. We know that pandemic or no pandemic (and honestly, particularly in a pandemic) our work is unceasing and crucial. And that we are unbelievably lucky to do that work and to teach our students to do that work.