Texas RioGrande Legal Aid

Rebecca Koford is spending her summer at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid in Eagle Pass, Texas, and loves her job!
Below she shares some experiences:

One of my clients cries every time I talk to her, and I'm trying not to smile while remembering this, but it's difficult. Horribly inappropriate, I know. But I love that I have clients, and I love it even more that I can actually help them detangle their legal knots.

It feels good to be useful to clients and use some of the things I've learned in the past two years of law school. It feels better to know that a client is sleeping better at night because they're no longer living in complete terror of losing their home, job, or children. It doesn't feel so good to see someone find out that no one in her family wants to help her out because they think she's a lost cause. But at least she has someone on her side.

I've gotten to do a lot in the short time that I've been in Eagle Pass. In the past four weeks, I have interviewed clients in (mangled, but improving) Spanish; written memos, replies, responses, and requests for disclosure; sued somebody; countersued somebody; sat in on hearings in a judge's chambers; and today I visited federal court and jail (twice).

I'm even working on a hot button issue: the border wall. The west side of Eagle Pass hugs the Rio Grande, and the federal government has temporarily condemned land along the river to survey where it wants to put the wall. This is upsetting some of our clients who use the river and the adjacent land for education, research, and even their livelihood. They will not be able to do any of this if the wall is built where the government is proposing. So one of the things we're trying do (and that I spent a large chunk of the last week working on) is to get an injunction so that if the wall is built, it is put in a more sensible location and doesn't completely prevent access to the river.

So thank you to everyone who donated to EJF. Without you, I wouldn't have my dream job this summer.

ABA- Rule of Law Initiative

Throughout the summer EJF recipients will be posting about their chosen summer public interest employment.

We're kicking off the blog with a post from EJF board member Riley Graebner:

I’ve been interning at the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative for all of four days and here’s some lessons learned:
Be prepared to do substantive work on the first day.
If you say you know a mildly obscure language, you better know it. My first day I supplemented my Romanian vocabulary with terms like “law clerk” “prosecutor’s office” while researching almost exclusively in that elusive fifth romance language. And if you speak a foreign language, bring your dictionary.
Folks here are super nice. They’re cutting me some slack during journal write-on. That’s showing a law student some love.
Reading the nutshell on Public International Law was totally useless. Think the nutshell is going to have a chapter of court personnel training reform in Romania post-2002? Ah, no.
People here are very serious about their water coolers.

Rule of Law Initiative (ROLI) is the largest program in the Washington, DC office of the American Bar Association. ROLI provides legal technical assistance to countries around the world in seven main areas: anti-corruption, criminal law reform and human trafficking, gender issues, human rights and conflict mitigation, judicial reform, legal education reform, and legal professional reform. Project implementation is done through collaboration of ABA staff and host country nationals. The office of Research and Program Development, where I’m interning, provides research support for ROLI’s various programs around the world as well as implements reform assessments.

I’ve just put a toe in the water, but I’m currently working on a field manual commissioned by the United Nations’ Office on Drug and Crime for judges on how to improve judicial integrity and transparency. The small piece I’ve been researching and writing over the past few days looks at court personnel reform and, specifically, some of the best practices exhibited by Romania. Getting to use my Romanian and delve into a specific topic has been—dare I say it—fun.