Since 1979, the South Royalton Legal Clinic (the Clinic) has worked on well over 2000 formally-opened cases, and several thousand walk-in and phone consultations, providing high-quality legal services to those in need. The Clinic provides over $1 million annually in pro bono counsel to low-income or unemployed individuals who cannot afford legal representation and who seek assistance managing issues such as domestic abuse, immigrant assistance, housing, disability benefits, bankruptcy, divorce, and custody arrangements.
Each year up to 40 full-time-equivalent law students practice under the four staff attorneys and another 20 students participate in Clinic activities through work-study positions. The Clinic averages over 100 open cases at a time. These cases involve multiple judicial or administrative hearings, status reviews, depositions, negotiations, and meetings. Students develop court cases from start to finish working directly with clients on interviewing, counseling and negotiation, research, analysis, discovery, writing briefs and motions, preparing the case, and presenting at trial. Some have been involved in Vermont Supreme Court and U.S. District Court cases that have set precedents or clarified important points of law.
At the Clinic, students gain experience in providing legal representation to real clients. For students this is often transformational: their values and careers can be deeply shaped with a new and strong appreciation for, and often deep commitment to, public service. The clients benefit from high-quality services in defense of their legal rights in life-changing situations – aid they could neither afford nor otherwise access.
Vermont Law School Helps Refugee From Burma
(Adapted with permission from article by Sam M. Schneider, Valley News, April 16, 2005)
In her early 20’s, Nau Otant (a pseudonym) has seen more cruelty than most people witness in a lifetime. Nau Otant, who was born into a family of political activists in Burma and spent much of her childhood watching her country’s military try to hunt down and kill her family and friends. She saw three of her six siblings die from diseases that are easily treated in the United States.
Her family, which is part of the Tavoyan ethnic group, became targets of the military junta that rules Burma after her father became active in the democracy movement. The former Burma, renamed Myanmar by its military leaders, is a country of nearly 43 million people in southeast Asia. Nau Otant’s parents fled to the jungle in the early 1960’s when the military took power and lived there until 1998, when they relocated to a refugee camp on the border of Thailand. “We lived in small camps. We built bamboo huts. We would have to worry about when the military (would come) to hunt us down.” Nau Otant, who learned to speak English in Thailand, said that the military would often arrive and shoot at members of her ethnic group. She described one battle in which her aunt died, along with 12 other adults and seven children. “That happens all the time and people get killed instantly. Today you see your friend and tomorrow you don’t.”
Nau Otant first came to Vermont when a local aid worker at the Kalk Kani refugee camp met her and her family and offered to send her on an exchange program for a year at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont. After a year in Barre, she returned to the refugee camp in Thailand, but faced the constant risk of being arrested by Thai authorities because her presence in Thailand was illegal. She said that her Vermont host parents came to visit her and helped her enroll in a GED program in the United States, which eventually led to a semester at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, before Nau Otant enrolled at Middlebury College.
Vermont Immigrant Assistance Program, (VIA), part of Vermont Law School’s South Royalton Legal Clinic, represented Nau Otant when she filed to obtain political asylum in the United States. Arthur Edersheim, a staff attorney at the South Royalton Legal Clinic, handled her application for asylum. The Clinic takes cases on a pro bono basis and VLS students represent low-income clients under the supervision of the Clinic’s four full-time attorneys. Asylum cases are often lengthy and complicated. One has to prove a “well-founded fear of persecution should you return to your home country,” with persecution based on at least one of five factors, including political opinion. If one is granted asylum, one may reside and work in the United States permanently and eventually become a U.S. Citizen.
On March 13, 2008, Nau Otant’s application for asylum was granted.
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