Motion DENIED - Louisiana retaliates against Tulane Law school environmental law clinic

Progressive, The, March, 1999 by Frank Wu

"As legal services funding has been cut back, clinics have stepped in," said Justine Dunlap, a former legal aid lawyer who now teaches at Southern New England law school. "Clinics are now the sources of lawyers for poor people."

The prohibitions against helping people form nonprofit groups and forbidding cooperation with national groups were especially troubling to many of the clinical instructors who attended the conference.

"One of the important aspects of collective action is the ability to insulate yourself," said Kathleen Ann Sullivan of Yale University. "The disclosure rules about clients compel them to mark themselves and reveal their identities."

The former dean of Tulane Law School, John Robert Kramer, said the governor's comments against the law students echoed the rhetoric used against civil rights lawyers a generation ago. "They're saying, we were happy until these outsiders came down here. Sound familiar?" He noted that out-of-state attorneys were imprisoned when they appeared in the South on behalf of civil-rights causes.

Students who were in the clinic are dismayed. "When you go to law school, you pretty much learn everything from books," says Jennifer Lewis, a Tulane graduate whose clinic experience led to a job with the Environmental Protection Agency in Atlanta, Georgia. "You learn the law, but not how to be a lawyer."

A former fundraiser for Tulane, Nancy Abudu went on to the law school and enrolled in the clinic just in time to work on the Shintech case. It didn't surprise her that the school came under pressure. When she spoke to alumni, the two most frequent demands that she heard were that the school field a better football team and back away from controversial causes such as Shintech. Abudu says she worked with members of an African-American community in New Orleans that claims neighborhood homes were built without their knowledge on top of a garbage dump. Those clients, who received assistance from the clinic prior to the rule change, "probably wouldn't be allowed now," she says.

Abudu also worries about the effect the rule change will have on students. "It's very upsetting," she says. "We're trying to develop legal skills so we don't go out there to practice without any. It seems that this is being done as revenge for doing a good job exposing corruption in the state."

Frank Wu is associate professor at Howard University Law School. His book "Beyond Black and White" is forthcoming from Basic Books.