The News Gazette reports
A new program at the University of Illinois is aiming to equip the next generation of lawyers with tools to fight racial injustice.
The College of Law’s new Racial Justice Practicum wrapped up its two-week classroom portion Friday, and now the inaugural group of 17 students will be placed with various public-interest legal organizations this summer.
“Obviously, racial justice and inequity related to race are hugely important issues that people in law and more generally in America should be spending time learning about and thinking about and working on,” Dean Vikram Amar said. “This is one of many initiatives that we’ve adopted at the College of Law, not just in the last year, but over the last several years.”
He said the placements with different organizations are a key part of the program “because law is all about applied knowledge. It’s like engineering in that way.”
“We’re devoting our resources to teaching our students the theoretical and conceptual frameworks on the one hand, but also providing really great real-world opportunities and experiences for them to apply what they’ve been learning,” Amar said.
Abraham Ortiz Tapia, one of the students, said he hopes the program will “allow me to identify areas where reform is necessary and how I can be part of a generation of advocates that challenges injustice and creates positive change.”
Associate Dean Margareth Etienne, who led the classroom component, said she hopes the alumni of the practicum can lean on each other in the future.
“We had a great inaugural cohort,” she said. “Part of the idea is to create a community of students interested in racial justice. Every year we can build on that, and over time we’ll have quite a group of people not only trained in doing this kind of work, but that can count on each other and build a network.”
The students are given a $6,000 stipend for the summer, which is being provided by law firms, alumni and law school friends.
“Each of these placements is being sponsored by either a law firm or an alum,” Etienne said. “We’ve been able to obtain some financial support. … They’re not getting paid what a law student would normally get paid.”
Etienne said she hopes the program has a long-term impact, “not just by training individual students to be agents of social change, but also to help support the legal organizations that are at the forefront of these efforts.”
