Clinical Trials

Students working in UC Davis’ family-law clinic help victims of domestic violence while getting some on-the-job training themselves.

By Hudson Sangree

Krystal Callaway was a 22-year-old law student when she took on a case that many seasoned lawyers would have had a hard time handling. Her client was a woman whose estranged husband had stabbed her in the head and neck with a kitchen knife while the couple’s two young children watched. The man had lain in wait at his wife’s house and attacked her when she brought the children home from daycare.

It was among the worst forms of domestic violence, says Callaway. “It wasn’t the type of case where he gets angry or drunk and pulls a gun on her,” she says. “It was very brutal and premeditated. The amount of force he used, I can’t even imagine using in self defense, much less in so cold and calculated a way.”

The Yolo County District Attorney’s Office prosecuted the case, and the man was eventually convicted of attempted first-degree murder and sent to state prison. But as the woman waited for her husband’s trial, she still needed a divorce, a restraining order and custody of her children. Those matters fell to the UC Davis School of Law’s Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic, where Cal-laway was a student.

“When we come across those situations, the clinic is a great resource,” says Frank McGuire, a deputy district attorney who deals frequently with domestic violence cases. “[The clients] get quality representation, and it helps balance the playing field. A lot of people would have less access to the system if they didn’t have someone who could articulate complex legal issues to the court.”

Located in Woodland near the county courthouse, the clinic trains law students to practice as attorneys while helping victims of domestic violence with family-law matters. Without the clinic, many low-income residents of Yolo County would have nowhere else to turn for legal assistance. Instead they would have to represent themselves in the courtroom, without the aid of a lawyer. In legal terms they would appear pro se.

Most feuding spouses in the United States represent themselves in court, but many victims of domestic violence are too frightened to confront their abusers in the courtroom, says UC Davis law professor Martha West, who founded the clinic in 1999. “Pro se is fine for a lot of people, but it’s not fine for people who are afraid of their spouses,” she says. “Family-law representation is not available from legal services in Yolo County for low-income people. If not for us, many domestic violence victims would have to represent themselves in court, which means they wouldn’t be going to court.”

Callaway worked on her client’s case throughout her entire third year of law school. She represented her in a trial to get custody and restraining orders and argued a lengthy hearing to win child and spousal support. The case was complicated by the fact that the man, who was facing criminal charges, couldn’t testify in the family-law proceedings because he might incriminate himself. And Callaway’s client was still recovering from the serious injuries she had suffered during the attack.

While the legal tasks were daunting, Cal-laway, now 24 and working in a Sacramento law firm, says the most difficult challenge for her was maintaining the emotional detachment that lawyers need to effectively represent their clients. Nowhere was that more difficult than during the criminal trial, when Callaway’s client testified against her husband, and all Callaway could do was watch from the sidelines while the prosecutors did their jobs. Meanwhile, the man who nearly killed her client was sitting just a few feet away. “It was so hard to sit there and listen to her recount in front of strangers everything that happened to her, and he’s right there,” Callaway says.

Such a case would pose tough legal and emotional challenges for any advocate, let alone an inexperienced law student. But the students’ efforts compare “quite well” with those of veteran family-law attorneys in Yolo County, says Superior Court Judge Timothy Fall, himself a 1987 graduate of the UC Davis School of Law, who recently handled the county’s family-law caseload. “With a couple of students you couldn’t tell the difference [between them and practicing lawyers],” he says. Callaway, in particular, “had remarkable poise,” he says. “She came across as someone with a vast amount of experience.”

The students aren’t alone in their efforts, of course. Supervising Attorney Leslie Knight, who received her bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in 1984 and graduated from the law school in 1993, advises the students and sits beside them in the courtroom, ready to step in if needed. “She’s literally right at their elbow,” says Superior Court Judge Donna Petre, who designed the award-wining domestic violence procedures used by the Yolo County courts. “Professor Knight is very capable, and I haven’t had one bad experience with the student advocates who’ve come into court.”

During law school, Knight had interned with Legal Services of Northern California in Sacramento and went into court with an attorney supervising her. “It was practicing law with a safety net,” Knight says. “I knew the attorney would rescue me if I got into trouble.”

After graduating she worked with another King Hall grad, Judith Hersh Clark, J.D. ’82, in Sacramento for three years, then opened her own family-law practice in Davis in 1996. She soon became known as one of the best family lawyers in Yolo County. When West went looking for an attorney to run the clinic, other faculty members recommended Knight.

Since it opened in 1999, the clinic has quickly become an integral part of the legal community in Yolo County. The clinic’s dozen students now handle about 70 cases per year, most drawn from the cities of Woodland and West Sacramento and hamlets such as Zamora and Knights Landing. To qualify for representation, clients must have an income that falls below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, and they must have suffered some form of domestic violence, from psychological abuse to attempted murder. Many clients speak only Spanish; others are recent immigrants from Russia, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia.

During the first three years of the clinic’s operation, students conducted 25 trials and more than 200 hearings. Knight says she tries to operate the clinic like a small law firm in order to give students the most realistic practice experience possible. But she provides a safety net, like she had in her own internship, so the students can concentrate on their work without worrying too much about making errors.

Jennifer Haffner, a second-year law student, got a dose of real-life practice in December when she was assigned a case and had just three weeks to prepare for the first trial of her legal career. Haffner’s job was to seek child custody for a 20-year-old woman who said she was taken against her will to live with her husband’s family in New Mexico and then fled with her child back to California.

For days Haffner raced frantically between her law school classes in Davis and the clinic in Woodland, working “between classes, before classes and after classes,” she says. She spent dozens of hours interviewing her client and family members, drafting direct and cross-examination questions for trial, and making last-minute runs to file paperwork with the court.

“You see TV shows in which the lawyers are always running around, and you think, ‘Why don’t they just plan ahead?’” she says. “But then here I was in this situation, and I’m thinking: ‘Oh, my god, I have no time to prepare, and I’ve never gone to trial before.’ I was trying to keep my nerves at bay and just do the task at hand. But as soon as I started thinking about the trial, my stomach would knot up. I just kept telling myself everybody has a first trial and everybody gets through it.”

Just a few days before the trial was set to start, Haffner was preparing her opening and closing arguments when she got word that the trial had been postponed. It was put off until January, when Haffner’s client and her husband ended up settling the case out of court. He went into the military and gave her sole custody of their son, while she agreed to drop the restraining order against him.
So what motivates students to do domestic violence work? Some are interested in family law as a career, some want to give back to the community and others, intending to become prosecutors or litigators, just want the courtroom experience, says Knight. Some students have more personal reasons. Callaway, for example, had a relative who was a victim of domestic violence.

For many students, the clinic appeals to their passion for women’s rights. Haffner—who served a stint before law school in the Peace Corps in Guatemala and worked as a volunteer for a San Francisco group that helped women escape prostitution—says her work at the clinic has been a natural progression. “I have always been active in women’s causes and feminism,” she says. “I was drawn to the clinic for the practical experience I would gain, and I really wanted to get out of the classroom. But I chose this particular clinic because of the need for legal services for low-income people and specifically women victims of domestic violence.

“I liked the idea of being able to combine my legal studies with a cause I feel very strongly about,” she says.

Students like Haffner began demanding practical training in the 1970s, when law schools were still bastions of the Socratic case-law method, a teaching style memorably illustrated in the movie The Paper Chase. Clinics were initially opposed by academics who didn’t want to sully their ivory towers with what they thought was the grimy work of practicing lawyers.

Now, however, clinics are an accepted part of the legal landscape, giving students both academic credit and valuable experience. The UC Davis School of Law has four such programs. In the Civil Rights Clinic, students litigate in federal court on behalf of inmates who claim to have been denied medical care or freedom of religion. In the Prison Law Clinic, they help inmates in state prisons file grievances with prison authorities. And in the Immigration Law Clinic, one of the first of its kind in the nation, students represent both legal and illegal immigrants in deportation and asylum cases.

The Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic is the latest addition to the roster. In 1998 it received one of the first federal grants from the U.S. Department of Justice under the Violence Against Women Act. That year it was the only California program to get one of the coveted awards.
Recently, however, the clinic has fallen on hard times. With competition tougher than ever for the justice department grants, the clinic lost its federal funding after three years. The justice department received $94 million in requests last year but had only $35 million to hand out.

Right now, West and Knight are trying to piece together enough funding from the law school, the university and private donors to see the clinic through another year. Eventually they hope to have the federal funding restored. In the meantime, they’ve sent out requests for donations to King Hall graduates who practice family law.

Those who deal with the clinic day to day say it is an important part of the legal fabric in Yolo County and ought to be supported. “It’s an outstanding program,” says Judge Petre. “It would be a shame to see it not continue.” Agrees Judge Fall: “They certainly have served their clients. On top of that, they have served the courts.”

The clinic works especially closely with the Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Center of Yolo County, with which it shares a building on Woodland’s Main Street. The center is a private group that handles domestic violence emergencies and operates a 25-bed shelter. But like the D.A.’s office, it can’t help with matters such as custody and divorce and refers those cases to the clinic.

Debbie Jacobson, an advocate with the sexual assault center, says the law school clinic provides more than legal services. “They go above and beyond what I see most practicing attorneys do,” she says. The students advocate for their clients with government offices, including child protective services and low-income housing agencies, she says. They also help them with the simple chores of life. “Maybe they’ve never had a bank account before,” she says. “It’s not just the legal issues they help them with. It’s their other life issues as well. It’s really important to the success of the client in this particular type of case.”

The clinic also “teaches young lawyers to be sensitive to the dynamics of domestic violence,” says Jacobson, and in doing so, it teaches them a valuable lesson about their own behavior as attorneys.

“Many clients have been in relationships with someone constantly controlling them and telling them what to do. So you don’t want an attorney who steps in and takes over,” she says. “Lawyers tend to be controlling individuals. They feel they know the law best and want to help. But without knowing it, they are bullying the victims. Clients haven’t learned yet to be assertive.

“In the clinic, the students act more as partners with the clients,” she says. “They learn to be sensitive. It’s a good lesson for a new attorney.”

Hudson Sangree is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law in Boston and staff writer for the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals. Illustration by Jan Conroy, UC Davis Editorial/Design.