By LINDA P. CAMPBELL
lcampbell@star-telegram.com
Just two days into his summer internship, Richard Gonzales was handed case files and plunged into legal research. Before long, he was writing a memo on the Americans With Disabilities Act. He helped draft interrogatories, plus requests for admissions and document production, which all are legal papers asking the other side in a lawsuit for material important to the case. He learned to deal with clients and draft summary judgment motions.
All with just two years of law school behind him.
Most important, though, he had his eyes opened to the many ways that poor Texans need legal help they can’t begin to afford. Gonzales, now a third-year student at the Texas Wesleyan law school in Fort Worth, was among more than two dozen aspiring lawyers who interned with legal aid offices across the state through the Texas Access to Justice Commission.
The Texas Supreme Court created the commission in 2001 to give low-income Texans more assistance with civil legal issues, such as handling landlord-tenant disputes or getting medical benefits they’re entitled to.
One of the programs the commission developed was a partnership with the state’s nine law schools to provide paid internships so that law students can work in regions that don’t have law schools nearby but are home to small legal aid offices scrambling to meet more needs than they can handle.
The goal is to expose students to the legal issues in lower-income communities and to encourage them to consider careers in public interest law or to at least understand why they should make room in their future practice for pro bono work.
Gonzales was glad to spend the summer at the South Texas Civil Rights Project in the Rio Grande Valley town of San Juan. He’s from nearby Edinburg.
He worked on the case of deaf parents who were seeking a sign language interpreter for when they took their sick daughter to the doctor. That gave him a new perspective on language barriers, he said.
He assisted members of a family kicked from their home for reasons they considered unjust. Watching the opposition, he said, taught him lessons in what a lawyer
shouldn’t do.
"A lot of law students want an internship they’ve seen in the movies," he said. "I would give up all the glamour and hype to get into the meat of what a lawyer is. I got to really see what being a lawyer is about as opposed to what people think it is."
The civil rights office also handled an appeal in a defamation case and a suit for an Iraqi veteran who was barred from riding his Segway scooter at area shopping malls.
Gonzales said he learned that domestic violence is a significant problem in the valley, often involving women who are in the country illegally and don’t have the money for an attorney to apply for the visa that will allow them to leave their abusive situation. Another problem, he said, arises among noncitizens who have visas and want to get on the fast track to citizenship but can’t find good, affordable immigration lawyers.
Such an internship isn’t for everybody, he said, but "it can change how you view your future profession."
He’s entertained going into criminal law or being an FBI special agent. Now, his ideal is to have his own practice, one that accommodates a substantial amount of donated services.
"Overall, the low-income community is very underrepresented," he said. "Attorneys want to get paid, I understand that. But at same time, you need to set aside your time to help these people. They can’t just go on without anybody to help them."
A clarification: In my Oct. 8 column, I wrote that the hymn
Faith of Our Fathers sounds like "an identifiably Protestant song to me." Although the hymn is contained in various Protestant hymnals, two readers helpfully pointed out that it was written by Catholics in 19th-century England. According to several Web sites, the words were written by Frederick William Faber after he switched from being an Anglican clergyman to being a Catholic priest, and the tune is credited to organist/composer Henri Hemy.
Linda P. Campbell is a Star-Telegram editorial writer. 817-390-7867
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