University of California, Berkeley, School of Law plans to launch an in-house family defense clinic, the first of its kind on the West Coast.
The clinic will enable students to represent indigent parents threatened by state intervention with the removal of their children. This fills an urgent gap in free legal services in East Bay.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean at Berkeley Law, said the clinic will provide much needed legal assistance and advocacy and can be a model for other law schools.
In the clinic, students will work closely with clients during acutely traumatic moments in their lives, when they face the possible permanent removal of their children. These opportunities will allow students to participate in trials and hone trial practice skills.
“It is exciting to plan for a new clinic that will help fill a community need, meet student interest and provide opportunities to develop advocacy skills in different ways from existing clinical offerings,” said Laura Riley, clinical program director.
Berkeley Law students Justine DeSilva ’24, Greta Sloan ’24 and Ariane Walter ’24 noticed a lack of support available for impacted parents in the area and a lack of pro bono or career development opportunities for students and recent graduates eager to provide this support.
In their second semester they created the Family Defense Project (FDP), one of 40-plus Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects at the school, which assists parents facing investigations, creates know-your-rights training sessions, and conducts research to publicize bias in the family defense system.
As a student-led group, FDP has worked on impactful projects that include investigating and publicizing racial bias in the drug testing of mothers and newborns in Bay Area and Los Angeles hospitals — and finding that such testing leads to racially disproportionate, unnecessary, and deeply traumatizing removals of newborns from their mothers by child protective services.
In addition to their research, FDP students have staffed the East Bay Family Defenders’ intake line and have continued to work with the organization throughout its merger with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children to determine whether they could support parents at the investigation stage, refer them to specific social services, or help them contact their panel attorney if their case was already filed.
They also worked with impacted parents to create a systems-navigation workshop for those involved in the family regulation system, which FDP leaders Addie Gilson ’25 and Eli McClintock-Shapiro ’26 presented at last spring’s American Bar Association Access to Justice Conference.
Since the project’s creation nearly three years ago, FDP leaders have bolstered the expansion and evolution of family defense in the Bay Area through diligent policy work and community organizing.
In doing so, they energized fellow Berkeley Law students, impacted parents in the Bay Area and community partners across California to support the development of a new family defense clinic.
Original press release by Andrew Cohen on Berkeley Law’s website.
