Law Students Get Dose Of Real World

By Ginger Moored

In a new Georgetown University program, law students will tackle problems of low-income residents in the D.C. area. This presents challenges not often found in classrooms.

The 20 students in the Community Justice Project will take on a variety of cases; some might work on getting HIV patients medicine while others might help homeless people find housing.

But professor Jane Aiken, who's running the program, says all students will learn to deal with tough cases.

"People who do work for justice often come up against really hard things and if you haven’t had a sense of how to survive those times in which you appear to lose you get burned out," says Aiken.

Stacy Braverman can attest to that. She’s a lawyer at the non-profit Bread for the City and says the challenges she encounters are hard to forget.

"To have to break the news to somebody that they will imminently have to lose their home is a terrible thing to have to do," she says.

"Almost every day I think to myself, you know, they did not teach us about this in law school."

And that's why Aiken wants her students to take on real-life problems as well as textbook case studies.