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As part of my early training as a public defender, the new attorneys in my office met with a panel of ex-offenders, now working for a client advocacy and social services organization. This was our lesson in sensitivity training and building relationships with our clients, a one-shot seminar in learning about difference. The panel was comprised of black men, and I remember one man telling us that criminal defendants prefer female Jewish attorneys. Putting aside the question of whether I, personally, fit the image of what is a Jew to the black male criminal defendant or, specifically, to this particular panel or this individual panelist, and wondering what gives one away as a Jew, this was not the dialogue I had in mind. I was silenced by my own discomfort at being known, discomfited by the empowered notions of choice and preference within this context. Thousands of clients later, I am left with a bundle of questions about justice, advocacy, identity politics and privilege, that can be traced, in a way, to that early encounter.
My inquiry generated an unflinching reflection and critique of my own law practice, as a public defender in New York City. In conjunction with this examination, I revisited my own law student experience and asked how law school prepared me for what awaited me in practice. My keen interest in the challenge and lessons of the workplace and the law clinic/law classroom led to the inevitable - something of a critique of both. My post-- clinical reflections, if you will, are generated by an attempt on some level to unpack the radical-lawyer-as-oxymoron question. My inquiry has two strands, which spin from different directions, but have points of correspondence.
I ask the following two questions: What problems do critical lawyering theory2 and the values associated with poverty law advocacy present within the public defender context? How does the predominant construction of public defender identity affect advocacy? Both strands probe the attorney/client relationship itself as well as the related question of what is possible in a particular litigation or a particular practice area? Because we exist in these relationships and roles as a reflection of our larger world view, these two strands of inquiry converge at some points....