Opinion

Addressing Secondary Trauma in the Legal Profession

Posted on by Kirkman Ridd

By Annie T. Le* on November 8, 2022

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Introduction

“The raging river is the client’s life . . . . The boulder falling is the trauma occurring. The image of secondary trauma is a lawyer standing in the river. They don’t get hit by the boulder, but they feel the ripple effect.” – Jean Koh Peters[1]

California Rule 1.1 of Professional Conduct requires a lawyer’s competency, not just education and skills, but also “mental, emotional, and physical ability.”[2] Stress can negatively affect mental and emotional ability, and a high level of stress is known to be associated with the legal profession.[3] While being invested in the clients’ cases and showing empathy, lawyers sometimes absorb clients’ suffering. Over time, repeated exposure to the first-hand traumatic experiences of others may lead to secondary traumatic stress, also called secondary trauma.[4]

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Turn Asylum on its Head and Presume Eligibility

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By Bill Ong Hing on September 25, 2022

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Introduction

 
Thirty-five years ago, I was fortunate to be part of the litigation team that won big before the U.S. Supreme Court in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Cardoza-Fonseca,[1] the case that established that asylum applicants “need not prove that it is more likely than not” that they will be persecuted in their home countries in order to prevail.[2]

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Inspiring Great Writing in Law Students

Posted on by kenji

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By Antonette Barilla*

Law schools, focused as they are on providing intense, specialized, professional training, might legitimately be accused of stifling the creativity and innovation that define brilliant writing. When it comes to law school writing, there are blueprints for nearly every type of composition—from case briefing and exam writing, to the design of legal memoranda and the outline for an oral argument. And while professors are experts at teaching students the requisite formulas, we, as practitioners and legal writing professionals, are not as adept at facilitating the development of good writing—writing that is unfettered by artificial legal formulas. We forget that anytime one writes, even in a personal capacity, they provide some measure into their competence as a professional. The intended audience of a letter to the editor, a blog post, holiday cards, hotel reviews, business proposals, letters to friends, etc. will develop an opinion about the writer’s skill, cleverness, values, and identity. Each time a law student or attorney commits his or her thoughts to words, they open their professional reputation to some level of evaluation.

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Teach a Law Student to Fish: A Tutor’s Perspective on Legal Writing

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By Kathleen Tarr*

[I]n a writing center, the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. In axiom form it goes like this: Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing.
– Stephen M. North[1]

There are common standards for tutoring practice in a writing center: share the space; let the student set the agenda; understand the assignment; give the student control; prioritize problems; get the student involved in solving the problem; get the student to write; respect and use the time; and, bring the session to a close. There is also an unwritten rule: never contradict the professor or the assignment. This latter standard is actually harder to meet than it might seem.

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Offering and Teaching Mindfulness in Law Schools

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By Tim Iglesias*

Mindfulness is a form of meditation in which a person focuses her attention on her breathing to anchor herself in the present moment.[1] When thoughts,feelings, or anything else attracts her attention away from the breath, she might briefly acknowledge what it was that took her attention and then, without any judgment, return her attention to her breathing.

Over the last decade, mindfulness courses have proliferated in law schools nationwide.[2] Now is an appropriate time to ask two interconnected questions: First, what are we teaching in these courses? And second, how do we attract students to these courses?

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U.S. Copyright Protection for Our World Chess Champions: A Futile Zugzwang

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By Iris Kokish*

I am standing in the “all-purpose room” of Cragmont Elementary School in Berkeley, California, lecturing beside a vertical chess board displaying the following position from Rueben Fine’s The World’s Great Chess Games.[1]

Chess board

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A Message from the Dean

Posted on by kenji

I greatly appreciate the leadership of the University of San Francisco Law Review to devote significant attention to the recent grand jury action in St. Louis County, Missouri and to police-community relations generally. Earlier today, approximately 80 students and faculty and staff, led by Professor Steve Shatz, discussed the death of Michael Brown, the criminal justice process, race, the media and potential federal civil rights law enforcement action. It is heartening to see the USF School of Law community come together from a wide variety of viewpoints, debate, agree, disagree and commit to continuing our pursuit of justice.

The recent events should be a starting point for candid conversations that reflect upon the shared values that unite us and the distance we must overcome to advance those values. Some of this discussion must take place in a historical context and it must create space for the voices of people who represent the changing demographics of cities, town and communities across the country. It should also be expressed not just in the context of the criminal justice system but in access to education, job opportunities and housing, democracy and good government and the responsibilities we all have to each other. Words must lead to actions and not fall victim to short and fading attention spans, news media cycles and election campaign seasons.

Within the School of Law and across this University, we are rich in the resources of people, education, talent and principles to ask the hard questions, respect differences and work together to solve problems. I look forward to reading the commentary, views and ideas that the University of San Francisco Law Review will elicit from among us.

Sincerely,

John Trasviña
Dean, School of Law

Target, Negligence, Chips, and Chickens

Posted on by kenji

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by Jesse D. Gossett*

Shopping on Black Friday. It’s almost as American as baseball and apple pie. But during the 2013 holiday season, over forty million U.S. citizens experienced what is increasingly becoming a uniquely American problem: face-to-face (“FTF”) credit card fraud.[1]

FTF credit card fraud occurs when a consumer’s credit card magnetic stripe (“magstripe”) is swiped through a merchant’s card reader.[2] The fraud occurs when someone intercepts the information somewhere along the way. In the case of Target’s December 2013 data breach, [3] the interception of credit and debit card information[4] happened using a so-called memory parsing malware at the Point of Sale (“POS”).[5] But this is not the only interception method. Nearly ten years ago, fraudsters used wireless technology to access the unencrypted network of Marshall’s, which allowed them to access at least forty-five million credit card numbers.[6] Or, the theft can be as seemingly low tech as so-called skimming where the fraudster places a secondary card reader on an ATM or gas pump, or the waiter you handed your credit card to at lunch swipes it through a device on his smart phone before giving it back to you.[7] What all of these frauds have in common is they take advantage of a serious flaw in the credit card payment processing system in the United States. Namely, our credit card system relies on forty-year-old magstripe technology.[8] Continue reading “Target, Negligence, Chips, and Chickens” →