Benefits for Law Students
The primary reason to start a Street Law program at your school is to provide law students with a unique and powerful professional development opportunity. By teaching about the law and interacting with the community, law students learn:
Substantive law
In order to teach a topic, a teacher must have a mastery of the materials. In order to respond to high school student questions and prepare detailed lesson plans, law student instructors need to understand the law and be able to explain how legal concepts impact people in their daily lives. Street Law programs provide law students with a rare opportunity to analyze state and local laws and procedures.
Lawyering skills
By being Street Law teachers, law students improve their:
- First-hand knowledge of legal procedures: Successful Street Law classes use interactive teaching strategies, including mock trials, legislative hearings, role-plays, moot courts, and simulated negotiations. By having these procedures come alive in the classroom, law students gain insights and skills not readily provided in a textbook.
- Ability to communicate: Law student instructors enhance their ability to explain legal concepts in terms understandable to the lay public and communicate effectively before large groups. Teaching requires law students to organize their thoughts, think quickly on their feet, and develop invaluable public speaking skills.
- Analytical ability: Teaching provides many opportunities to hone analytical skills. Law student instructors must grapple with deciding what to teach, what teaching methods to employ, how to teach a complicated topic in the span of a few weeks, and how to be flexible to meet student needs yet accomplish class outcomes.
- Time management and organization skills: Law student instructors learn how to budget their time. In teaching and preparing for several classes a week, law students must budget their time, meet deadlines, and handle a multitude of tasks.
- Ability to enter into an attorney-client relationship: The relationship between the law student instructor and his or her students, in many fundamental ways, resembles the relationship between the attorney and client. For example, the relationships are parallel in the need to establish trust, explain complicated laws to a non-lawyer, and set appropriate limits.
- Exposure to other professionals: Law students gain experience working with other professionals like teachers. They gain an understanding of the demands of the teaching profession and educational trends like standards and high stakes testing. Often law students involve lawyers, police officers, domestic violence professionals, and politicians in their classroom presentations.
- Knowledge about community resources: Law students must become familiar with local community resources in order to better serve the needs of their students. Street Law classes do not stop at the classroom. Instead law students are encouraged to help their students make a difference in the community by reporting instances of police misconduct, writing local legislators, researching community issues, and seeking legal help when necessary.
Knowledge about human rights and democratic values
Law students teach not only law but also the human rights and democratic values upon which a legal system should be based. They also ask students to examine whether the laws and legal system should be changed to better reflect these values.
The impact of laws on the community
Street Law injects the human element into a law school education. Law students learn from their students about how laws impact people and the strengths and weaknesses of the legal system. This insight sensitizes the law students to crucial public policy issues and concerns, which can encourage law students to pursue a career path aimed at combating social injustices.
A range of career opportunities
By participating in Street Law programs, law students are exposed to a wide-range of career opportunities, often not adequately represented at law schools.
Benefits for the Law School
A Street Law program at your law school can help:
- Improve a community’s perception of the law school
- Fulfill the pro bono or public service requirements of many law schools in the U.S.
- Develop new links to private foundations, the bar, and bench through the involvement of community resource people
- Encourage students of color to pursue a law-related profession
- Create an innovative clinic for law students that serves hundreds of community members
Benefits for the Community
A Street Law program benefits the community by:
- Providing the public with essential legal information to help them navigate through our law-saturated society
- Putting lawyers in a positive light, thereby creating more trust toward the legal community and respect for the law.
- Creating positive role models for high school students who participate in Street Law classes
- Reducing delinquency among participating students
- Demonstrating support for public education