The most significant lesson he learned in law school, Beck says, was "You really want to get cases over early. Nobody wins in a lawsuit. If there's a conflict, we try to negotiate or mediate it early. It's always better if you can talk things through upfront and communicate with the other side, and if you hear both sides of the issue hopefully you can get to a compromise quickly that saves a lot of time and money and stress on everybody."
Amy Dimitriadis, one of the stars of MSLAW's trial advocacy teams, said the competitive experience taught her to "stand up in court and get your voice heard." In most law schools, she said, students are just reading and briefing cases and writing memos. But in actual practice, it's the courtroom where you really practice law. "And it gave me a feel for what it's actually going to be like out there eventually when I get to it." She goes on to say that "for me right now practicing law is about helping people when they need it the most without necessarily holding a badge or a scalpel...it's helping them when perhaps they are at their most desperate, when they need justice, when they need someone to help them when no one else can." She said that law school made her even more determined to achieve her career goal of becoming a practicing lawyer.
Neil Judd, another advocacy team winner, recalled that he was "trembling tremendously" when he gave his opening statement in his first competition. But he told himself that the judges are "going to like me or aren't going to like me but at the end of the day, this is me. And I wish I knew that earlier in life." Judd added that law school prepared him for those moments because it taught him, "Not everything is handed to you on a silver platter. You actually have to work for it, fight for it. And at the end of the day, you need to only be happy to yourself." Today, he adds, "you can put anyone else at the other table next to me and I'm not afraid of them, no matter what school they say they're from, or whatever their background is. We practiced and prepared so much no one else could have done it more than us."
Shane Rodriguez said he was inspired to attend law school from his childhood days watching Perry Mason on television. "But more than that, it was a way out of the inner city for me. It was a way for me to climb out of living in poverty and to help others climb out once I became an attorney." Rodriquez, who is assistant chief of police at a public university, said he juggled both time-consuming efforts by "making sacrifices, by giving up a number of different things" so that one day he would pass the bar exam. Law school, he says, has helped him in his work as "one of the things it's really taught me is to have an open mind and to go into cases and people's particular situations with an open mind." He explained that in law enforcement "it's very easy to rush to judgment when you're dealing with criminal defendants all the time...and to look at the circumstances behind a particular situation instead of just coming in with a very narrow focused view."
The Massachusetts School of Law was founded in 1988 to provide a quality, affordable education to students from minority, immigrant, and low-income households who otherwise would be unable to enter the legal profession. A Wall Street Journal article referred to MSLAW as "The Little Law School That Could" and renowned jurisprudence scholar Brian Tamanaha at Princeton University has called upon the nation's law schools to shift their teaching approach from the 'academic' or research model to one designed to train "good lawyers," citing MSLAW's example. MSLAW's dean and cofounder, Lawrence Velvel, has been cited by The National Jurist magazine as "one of the most influential people in legal education over the past 15 years" and The National Law Journal has honored Velvel for his contributions to law school reform. (Sherwood Ross is a media consultant to MSLAW. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)#
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