By: Sarah Coniglio

3L at Fordham University School of Law 

This summer I interned at the Global Justice Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to international gender justice advocacy. During my internship, I was asked to research the lack of abortion services in areas experiencing conflict. In doing so, I realized that while the lack of abortion services in humanitarian settings is an issue that predates COVID-19, the pandemic has created a higher demand for safe abortion care.

Recent data indicates that the novel coronavirus outbreak has led to an increase in gender-based violence and a decrease in the availability of sexual health and reproductive services. According to the United Nations Populations Fund, 47 million women may not have access to modern contraceptives and 7 million unintended pregnancies are expected to occur if lockdowns carry on for 6 months. Now more than ever, there is a pressing need for increased access to safe abortion, particularly in developing countries.

There are approximately 56 million induced abortions each year, roughly half of which (25 million) are unsafe. Abortions are considered unsafe when “when a pregnancy is terminated either by persons lacking the necessary skills or in an environment that does not conform to minimal medical standards, or both.” According to the World Health Organization, between 4.7% and 13.2% of maternal deaths are a result of unsafe abortions, making unsafe abortions one of the leading causes of maternal deaths worldwide.

In addition to contributing to high rates of maternal mortality, a lack of safe abortion care carries a high financial cost. Approximately 5 million women are hospitalized due to abortion complications annually, which costs upwards of $460 million. In Africa, “to provide care for the illness and disability associated with unsafe abortion, a government spends, on average, at least $114 per case,” even though government spending on healthcare totals $48 per capita per annum in the region.

There are legal, operational, and social barriers to safe abortion access. Abortion is criminalized in most countries. In addition, US foreign aid restrictions materially decrease access to safe abortion in humanitarian settings. The United States, the single largest foreign aid donor globally, is barred from providing foreign aid to provide abortions by the Helms Amendment. Further, the Trump Administration’s re-institution of the global gag rule prohibits the United States from providing foreign aid to organizations that provide abortions, even if the costs associated with abortion care are paid for by another source. The majority of unsafe abortions occur in developing countries, the same countries for whom the United States cannot provide assistance to increase safe abortion access. Both the Helms Amendment and the global gag rule should be repealed in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality associated with unsafe abortions.

Restricting access to abortion does not decrease abortion, but rather it makes them more unsafe; “unsafe abortion and related mortality are both highest in countries with narrow grounds for abortion.” Thus, it can be deduced that women turn to unsafe abortion methods when safe abortion methods are illegal and/or inaccessible. Rates of maternal mortality (generally) are the highest in conflict and post-conflict countries, where rates of sexual violence tend to also be high. There is a dearth of data on safe abortion access in conflict areas specifically; however, high rates of maternal mortality in these countries indicate that there is inadequate access to safe abortions.

With sexual violence and unintended pregnancies on the rise, increasing safe abortion access is—quite literally, a matter of life or death.

For further information, please see:

UNFPA – Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic UNFPA Global Response Plan – Jun 2020

Susan A. Cohen – Facts and Consequences: Legality, Incidence and Safety of Abortion Worldwide – Nov. 20, 2009

David A. Grimes – Unsafe Abortion, the Preventable Pandemic

 

By: Tiffany M. Love

2L JDi Student at Syracuse University College of Law 

On March 16, 2020, I was sent home on indefinite telework status and my fifth-grade daughter entered the unchartered waters of virtual/homeschooling. As a military family on our third assignment overseas we were accustomed to rolling with the punches and adjusting to new normals. After all, “resilience” is one of the favorite buzzwords in the military community.

But this was different. And it was not always easy to keep a brave face in light of a threatening and invisible pandemic. We leaned on each other and found a way to juggle homeschooling and teleworking, alternatively retreating to our individual home offices or seeking out each other’s company. We celebrated birthdays (just us three), the end of elementary school, and Hamilton. And we were stronger for it.

As a civilian paralegal for the military, we had to re-think how we delivered legal services to the military community. We found ways to offer remote appointments and regularly reached the capacity of our email servers. We also found ways to be more efficient in delivering routine legal services by scheduling all services, creating new fillable forms, and conducting as much work as possible prior to any face-to-face meetings (complete with masks, of course). We conducted trainings and small group meetings via videoconference. We made sure our waiting room complied with social distancing regulations. I learned to be more efficient in my email communications with clients, many of whom are not legally savvy. We learned to innovate, and I think as a whole we are better for it. While some clients miss the convenience of “walk-in services,” many have appreciated how we have managed to continue to provide more efficient services when other offices were nearly completely shut down.

My daughter has been my best role model for resilience. She turned 11 just over two months ago. Her three best friends managed to throw a virtual surprise party on Google Hangouts, complete with party games and a special visit from her teacher. As an only child, friendships are incredibly important. And she has managed to remain in touch – not only with her friends here, but in Japan and the United States. While some days are undoubtedly difficult, she is often full of smiles and hope. And it gives me hope.

Even though we are in strange times and may often feel isolated, we can still find ways to connect. As a JDi student, I already feel confident in the ability of classes to be delivered remotely and to still remain a member of the SUCOL community. I am watching with interest the arguments for diploma privilege for new law school graduates. As a current paralegal and future attorney, I feel confident that with open minds and creative thinking, we can overcome many barriers and still provide quality legal services to those in need. I am hopeful that this current situation may be the impetus for innovation and growth in the legal field.

By: Nadia Abed & Melissa Berouty

3Ls at Syracuse University College of Law

Molly Coleman is a graduate of Harvard Law School. She is a co-founder of People’s Parity Project (“PPP”) and the first Executive Director. In law school, she worked for a number of legal organizations committed to advancing justice for the most marginalized, including Gender Justice, Legal Voice, the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee, the Hennepin County Public Defender’s Office, and the Fair Labor Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office; she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Prior to law school, Molly spent three years with City Year New York, working to close the opportunity gap for students in Harlem and the Bronx and to empower young people to become civically engaged leaders. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and a native of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Can you tell us about the PPP and how it got started?

COLEMAN: PPP is a National Nonprofit that organizes law students and new attorneys to unrig the law. We are focused on the role that lawyers and members of the legal profession have played in creating a civil legal system that serves corporate America and is stacked against consumers and workers. After a series of events during my 1L year, PPP got started. That year, we learned about Alex Kozinski’s serial sexual harassment of his law clerks. We immediately saw the link between Kozinski’s sexual harassment and Kozinski as the number one feeder of law clerks to Anthony Kennedy, who was the swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time, I believe that Kennedy hired a ratio of law clerks that was 6 men to 1 woman. We quickly realized that maybe this is a problem for the entire country that women are being harassed out of the profession and stripped of the opportunity to influence our legal system at the highest level. A few months later, we found out that law firms were forcing workers including associates to sign forced arbitration clauses. As young law students, it became clear to us that sexual harassment, race-based discrimination, gender discrimination, and gender identity discrimination were rampant across the legal profession and were actively impacting the maintenance of the status quo in the legal system. People would then think of us as an organization that is focussed on sexual harassment, which is true we do care about sexual harassment. However, what we care about more are the ways in which our legal system enables sexual harassment and how this impacts workers and everyday people. We need to clean up our own house before we can worry about other people’s houses. We need to fix what has gone wrong with the profession and the ways in which the profession has worked to advance corporate power before we can start organizing outside of it. 

Was PPP started by you and a group of peers seeing this issue in the legal system and believing there was a need for a change?

COLEMAN: PPP started outside of class. As I think a lot of organizing happens on law school campuses, you go to a lunch talk and you start talking about a particular issue. You then see who else is riled up and have follow up conversations. We started meeting and it became clear very quickly that there was a lot of energy for this type of organizing work. It also became clear that this focus on actively organizing and working to make a change is something that is not prevalent enough on law school campuses. As we started to do more at Harvard, we heard more from students at other law schools who wanted to do this work on their campuses. We started hearing from organizations who wanted to partner with us and wanted to know if there were similar organizing opportunities on a law school campus near them. We looked at our model and decided we wanted to expand. We now have 10 campus chapters and have continued to grow from there. 

What advice would you give to a law student who is interested in elevating a student organization to a national organization like PPP?

COLEMAN: I would definitely say to think long and hard about whether this is the right step or not. I will be honest, it is a lot of work and dealing with the organizational side of things means that you have less time and energy to put into the organizing. PPP did a landscape analysis and determined that there weren’t any other organizations that were doing this work in the way we believed it needed to be done. We then knew we would be able to make a unique contribution. With that being said, if you make the decision that this is an organization that doesn’t exist, doesn’t have a close counterpart on the national level, and you want to keep growing it, I would say find some amazing champions and allies to serve as validators and a sounding board. Also, I think when you’re doing organizing work there is a lot of forward momentum. This is especially true if you have a big mission like PPP. You could do a lot of work nonstop without ever thinking strategically. It’s really important when you are taking that step from being a campus organization to a national organization to do some critical analysis, and see where you can be supportive to other organizations – think about where you want to invest your energy. It is so important to make space for that reflection. 

How do you feel like you were able to juggle all of this and be a law student?

COLEMAN: I think this enabled me to be a law student. The work 1L can feel soul-crushing, particularly if you came into law school to do justice work. It is easy to very quickly feel like you are not in the right place or your priorities are wrong. So for me, PPP served as an outlet and something that gave me faith that things could be better. It motivated me to want to learn the law as it is now, so I can start thinking about how I can change it. Emotionally, this is what allowed me to balance this. One thing that PPP has asked of organizers is to really reflect on whether they are able to make a significant time commitment. It means that you are going to be in meetings over lunch instead of in the library and that you are going to be juggling more emails than people who are not organizing on campus. For me, my co-founders, and other organizers, this made sense. We believed that this is the fight of our lives and this was absolutely worth putting time and energy into. For other people, they may want to focus on their classes, law review, or whatever else, and this is their theory of change. They hope that this will enable them to get the job that they want down the road and hopefully they will be able to do the justice work at that point. 

How has the managing and operating of PPP changed during the pandemic?

COLEMAN: A major consideration has been how to pivot to everything that is happening in the world right now and what does it mean to be in an organization of justice-oriented lawyers and law students who are now in a world that is completely different than it was six months ago. When we talk about legal culture and the way in which legal culture promulgates the status quo, you also have to think about the ways in which people will get very complacent. People may think “yes, the world is on fire, but I cannot change my organization’s priorities and goals.” For us at PPP, it was like nope, we need to totally rethink what we are doing. So this summer instead of focusing on whatever we would have done otherwise, we’re going to put all of our time and energy into bringing people together in response to the pandemic, to support the uprisings, and to think about systemic lawyering in this new world. I think this level of flexibility has been extremely important to our ethos. It is something I am very grateful for right now, as we have had to make a lot of changes quickly.

Can you go into a little more depth about the changes and pivots PPP had to make this summer?

COLEMAN: By mid-march, we had launched our Rapid Response network. At the beginning of the pandemic, when it was clear that there were going to be massive needs within the legal community given the number of people who could no longer pay rent, questions surrounding what are the conditions under which workplaces are reopening, and how is worker safety being protected. The amount of issues and need were so clear right away. We started hearing from organizations that they needed additional support. We also heard from law students, who were saying we want to help and do something. We developed the Rapid Response Network that focuses on matching law students with organizations that we knew and trusted. Around the same time, the Systemic Justice Project started doing a series of conversations about learning in times of crisis and began putting on this really fantastic programming that brought together attorneys from around the country to talk to law students and to talk to other attorneys about what it looks like to respond to what we’re seeing. We started talking about joining forces to build the Systems Summer Institute and thinking about how we can ensure that law students, who were losing jobs left and right, have the opportunity to do good work and develop their lawyering skills. We brought in Justice Catalyst, who is an incredible partner in all of this. We decided that on June 1st would bring in 250 people and have something prepared for them for the summer. It really was that the Systems Summer Institute grew out of these existing responses to the crisis rather than a pivot to focus on COVID-19 response. 

How can a law student run organization pivot their focus, particularly to issues that have been magnified by COVID-19?

COLEMAN: Early on in the pandemic, someone told me that there are always going to be people who try to capitalize on a crisis. Through most of American history, it’s been the “bad guys” who have most successfully capitalized. We’re in a moment where there’s huge potential for the “good guys” to do that. There is so much energy because everybody is seeing how stark the inequities are. People are seeing how broken and rigged our system is. I hate to use the word broken because our system was created to be this way. However, today, people are seeing how dire the consequences of that rigging are. I think there is this huge energy around effecting change right now. We also have this incredible opportunity because so many people, who are in law school, are now motivated by the ways in which lawyers stood up to the Trump Administration, stood up for justice, stood up for the rights of immigrants, and stood up for the rights of religious minorities in the USA. We have this generation of law students who used this as their driving force for coming to law school. I think you then come into law school, which is designed to make people complacent in the face of inequity and some of this energy drops off. This crisis has renewed the energy. People are getting back to their roots and thinking I came to law school because I wanted to make the world better and maybe for a little bit I got swayed because making money is really awesome especially when you have a significant amount of debt, but no! There’s no time to waste, the world is burning, we need to get to work on it. I think now is the time to be building coalitions and having conversations. From there, you can determine where there is work that can be done together, consider whether we develop a set of organizational priorities across progressive groups on campus for the year, or do we set our own priorities but commit to supporting each other over the course of the year because we see that we really are all in this together. I think that building coalitions and bringing the table together is key. So often in progressive spaces, we don’t even all sit down at the same table so we are not having those conversations with people who are natural allies. You then are not talking about how to build a strategy together. You’re not talking about where do you lead, where do we lead, and where do we step back. Right now, there is the chance to have those conversations and to really bring people together to create a shared vision of what comprehensive and deep change will look like.

How can law students get involved with PPP on their own campuses or just in general?

COLEMAN: We are always accepting new chapters, so if people are interested in working to unrig the law we want to work with you. You can email me (molly@peoplesparity.org), sign up for our email list, or check out our website (peoplesparity.org). Additionally, we have a network of students who aren’t organizing in a formal PPP chapter, but who are organizing campaigns and circulating petitions on their campus standing up against universities having corporate immunity. There are numerous ways to get involved in this fight. It’s a massive effort and it’s only getting bigger, so consider starting a PPP chapter, we would love to talk to you about that, and if you don’t want to start a chapter let’s talk about how you as an individual can get involved. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

By: Aryssa Pasinos

2L at Syracuse University College of Law 

They say that the first year of law school is the hardest for many reasons. For some, myself included, it is the first time they are away from family and from home. The move from Southern California to Central New York definitely made my first year of law school a bit more stressful. Adjusting to the climate, making new friends, and getting cold-called are a few other things that I had to learn to juggle. I always thought that the first semester of 1L year was going to be more difficult than the second semester. I had high hopes for myself going into my second semester of 1L year. Classes were going well, I enjoyed the topics a bit more, and I thought I was finally learning “how to law school.” I even attended my first Barrister’s Ball and it was a blast! However, little did I know that just about one week after that night, a pandemic was going to change my life.

What began as a trial period of learning remotely, had extended into the rest of the semester being taught online. In the beginning, I thought that learning through Zoom and Blackboard would be beneficial since all I had to do was log in and sit at home during the lectures. It did not take too long before I realized that online learning was not beneficial to me. What I thought was going to be my best class of second semester, became the worst grade I received. Though, with that being said, as aspiring lawyers, we are taught to adapt to any unforeseeable circumstances that might arise. As a result of these unforeseeable circumstances, the paid internship that I had lined up at a medical malpractice firm in downtown Syracuse fell through. This was actually the main reason why I decided not to go back home to California after the semester. I extended my lease on my apartment and it was already too late when my prospective employer told me that due to the current state of things, they have decided not to hire a summer intern. So, what I had hoped to be a great learning experience turned into me being alone for almost 3 months, only leaving my apartment to go grocery shopping every two weeks.

Now, going into my first semester of 2L year, I have learned that most of my classes will again be taught online. Since failure is not an option, changes must be made on my part to make sure that I still receive the best possible education I can have given the circumstance. Possible changes that must be made regarding my law school education include: better time management skills, avoiding distractions, and taking advantage of fellow students and professors. I don’t see life going back to the way it was before the pandemic hit any time soon. Therefore, legal education for many of us will definitely change. I am not saying that this will be easy, but if I know one thing that each law student is capable of doing, it is the ability to adjust to and make the most out of a situation, regardless of how difficult it may be.

I believe that there are some courses that can successfully be taught online but, I don’t believe that any law course can be a part of that list. Law courses are taught so differently than other classes because they prepare us to think on our feet and be prepared to answer whatever hypo the professor can throw at us. Online learning hinders this Socratic way of teaching/learning. Even though most of what the pandemic has done seems to have negatively impacted my life, I do believe that some good things came out of it. It has allowed me to take a step back and truly appreciate the little things in life. It has also brought into light some social justice issues that have always been present but had been either forgotten or put on the back burner. As aspiring lawyers, we must think about how our actions today will carry over when we become practicing attorneys. This is a thought I plan to have in mind as I go into my 2L year.

By: Kanalya Arivalagan 

2L at Syracuse University College of Law 

It was such a strange transition, going from in-person classes to the sudden lockdown on March 16, 2020.

One would think that the frenzy from the rapid sequence of events throughout the world, the nation, and our home would also be reflected in our classes at the law school. However, most of my professors chose to go on as if everything was normal. So, I put myself through the motions as if things were normal such as completing my readings, taking notes, reviewing notes, attending office hours, and meeting with study groups. But things were most definitely not normal.

The abnormality was reflected in my summer internship where I worked as a legal intern at a district attorney’s office in Texas. The impact on the livelihood of the people with awaiting cases, prosecutors, judges, and everyone else in between was immense and obvious. The court hearings were either postponed or held on Zoom. I listened in on juvenile cases where the court had to decide whether to allow the child back with the father who is a drug abuser or let him stay in a facility where being exposed to the virus was a possibility.

Though I had my own space most of the time, I still had to interact with others to complete projects and coordinate timings for the hearings. Soon, when the cases started rising exponentially in Texas and in turn, my anxiety started spiking, I began to wear a mask even in the office as a precaution, especially due to the daily news on the many ways that COVID-19 could damage the lungs.

The cases in the county and my anxiety were both worsening, so much so that I ended my internship a month early after letting them know that I would like to complete my assignments from my home in California. The amount lessened significantly because of my decreased access to confidential files in hard copy. So, I had much more time to explore what I can do to fill in the time.

While I completed the tasks from home, I also learned how to sew holes in my dresses, cook more than just ramen and pasta, kickbox for cardio, meditate for more than just two minutes, and even journal to unravel my emotions and monotonous days.

Quarantining provided me the discomfort of having to deal with just myself, but also the opportunity to truly see the world for what it is, the fragility of life, and the possibility of being whoever I wanted to be if I put just a little bit of effort. Though everything is unprecedented and our lives after COVID-19 will look different from the one we had before March, it will all be okay because we’re all still in this strange transition together.