Law-related education: a responsibility of the legal profession.

"The bar increases public esteem by the precepts it lives by, not by the money it makes. In fact if money making is the lawyer's sole purpose, he worships a god that is too small. If he does not approach the law as an avenue to perform a fine public service, he should turn to some other other business...."

-- Taken from Petition of Florida State Bar Association, et al., to Integrate the Bar, Supreme Court of Florida, June 7, 1949

A lawyer's responsibilities have always extended far beyond adequate representation of one's clients. As officers of the court, closely aligned with the judicial branch, lawyers have a significant duty and responsibility to the system.(1) Lawyers are not only advocates for their clients but also guardians of our constitutionally protected rights. For full and equal access to justice to be achieved, we must begin with access to knowledge and information, including law-related education.(2)

Through comprehensive law-related education programs, the legal profession can help fulfill its obligation to the public and rebuild public trust and confidence in the legal system. It can start with a single classroom visit and extend to circuit-wide judicial partnerships and teacher training initiatives. Whatever the plan, law-related education offers a wide range of opportunities for lawyers to meet their responsibilities.

Noteworthy Volunteers

Successful implementation of law-related education programs requires the active involvement of attorneys and judges from throughout the state. Florida's most noteworthy law-related education volunteers are from the Supreme Court of Florida. The courthouse doors have literally been opened to encourage student access to the courts and judicial outreach to the classroom.

The widely recognized access initiative ushered in a new era of public education, outreach, and accessibility. The justices interact with thousands of Florida students who visit the court on field trips and participate in mock oral arguments relating to school uniforms, locker searches, and any number of issues.(3) The students become "justices for a day" deciding challenging constitutional issues.

Florida Supreme Court justices also participate in an annual "justice teach-in" which includes visits to classrooms throughout the state during Constitution Week to heighten student awareness of the courts and the constitution. Many of the justices participate in visits and events throughout the year as well. The involvement of Florida's Supreme Court justices provides a model for judicial outreach statewide.

The Florida Law Related Education Association, Inc., has developed a variety of activities to assist judges and attorneys who visit K-12 classrooms. A Justice is Served! manual provides hands-on activities to utilize with students of all ages. Beyond these activities, students are able to "connect" with judges, learn more about the need for an independent judiciary, and recognize that the courts can be interesting and engaging. Judges become our children's newest heroes and dispel some of the inaccuracies portrayed by the media. Training is provided through a variety of avenues including the Appellate Judges Conference and The Florida Bar Speakers Bureau. Chief Justice Major B. Harding has encouraged judges to use the activities with adult audiences as well. The manual is updated and published annually with new activities and methods. Lawyers and judges can download the manual from The Florida Bar website.

Supreme Court Justice R. Fred Lewis uses the activities when he visits schools with FLREA Executive Director Annette Boyd Pitts approximately twice a month. One student remarked, "Justice Lewis is cool--I can tell he really likes children!" Another fourth grader wrote, "I never knew our rights were so `connected'--sort of like a food chain. I now know I wouldn't want to lose any of my rights." Finally, an elementary school student wrote after a visit: "This is how I think of you--I have a light and it won't turn on and then you come in and it turns on!" Now that's success.

Hundreds of Florida's attorneys and judges are involved in law-related education in their local communities today. Their help is essential to portraying an accurate and realistic picture of our legal system and the constitutional requisites which serve as its foundation.

11th Circuit: Model Initiative

If there is a uniqueness about being a judge or a lawyer, let it be that our position in society gives us the credential to teach. There are a multitude of law-related program styles and formats(4) depending on available resources, time, personal interest, and community needs. The bench and bar are natural partners to a receptive education system and, together, can and should play a pivotal role in providing children at the youngest age with a compass to navigate the moral and legal issues in a complex and volatile society.

It was in this spirit that the 11th Judicial Circuit began, during the past year, a new approach to jumpstart a popular and proven contemporary method of teaching law-related education in the public school system of Miami-Dade County. With the participation of numerous community partners, our court began a first of its kind Justice Teaching Institute on a local level so that the number of teachers prepared to instruct their students in law-related education and concomitant disciplines of critical thinking, decisionmaking, and dispute resolution would grow in pyramid fashion and, in so doing, make a statement in educating a generation.

With a focus clearly on children, it was understood that we can help achieve success for the children in our community by empowering them with educated access to the legal system. The success of this goal, one that is shared by many, requires that we establish partnerships with the public school system to address two pivotal issues. The first concerns the ability of an institution outside of education to make changes in the education system, and second, how to reach so many students, the majority of whom do not have a traditional tie, at least in law and government, to Anglo-American roots.

While courts are renowned for providing tours, pamphlets, and handy guides, all of which are essential to the visitor and user of court services, we sought to establish a format through which to encourage young people to develop the basic discipline of civic education, along with educated access to influence their daily lives throughout the future.

Miami-Dade County

The ethnic composition of the more than 300,000 students in our public school system underscores why the traditional method of teaching about the legal system, which historically contemplated core values derived from an ethnocentric population, must be transformed into a dynamic and organic sustained method. With 52.8 percent of the students in grades pre-kindergarten through 12 identified as Hispanic, and approximately 70 percent of all students registered in bilingual classes, we sought to develop a program that would result in a deeper impact than the rote "three branches of government" and the chart that describes "How a Bill Becomes a Law." It should also be noted that the ethnic classification of full-time instructional staff for these students reveals that approximately 33 percent are Hispanic.(5)

Our thinking mirrored the concept of the statewide Justice Teaching Institute begun in 1996 by the Florida Supreme Court. Each year, 25 middle and high school teachers from around the state are selected to convene in Tallahassee for five days to participate in workshops, panels, mock trials, appellate arguments, and computerized research and access to the Internet, to help formulate curricula that would, in turn, shape the way in which to teach our future leaders about the American legal system. In its first two years, a total of 10 teachers from Miami-Dade County were selected to participate. As a condition of completion of the institute, these teachers committed to developing curricula and/or teaching law-related education at their home schools or in the community in the year following completion.

These 10 teachers became the energy behind a local initiative. How to take their experience, duplicate it in quality, and expand it to reach at least one teacher in every middle and high school in Miami-Dade County was our challenge. With an average teacher/student ratio of 1:19.6,(6) it became a numbers game. Only later did we learn that a Justice Teaching Institute had never been presented on a local level in Florida or the nation.

Programming

Utilizing resources of the Florida Law Related Education Association, Inc., we created an agenda for the first local institute that included a full day of programming for which each teacher received certification credit upon completion.

The first local JTI was held on November 6, 1998, for 40 middle and high school teachers. The event was held in two of the main courthouses in downtown Miami. The grandeur and history of the Dade County courthouse was, for many, a movie setting for trial practice and guest lecturers. The modern setting for computer workshops and interactive sessions was Courthouse Center. The public school system distributed applications, along with letters from the superintendent of public schools and the chief judge, to all principals and chairs of social studies departments of every middle and high school. Applications were reviewed by school administration and those accepted for the program received a congratulatory letter and study materials in preparation for the day. Specifically, teachers received the "case of the month" from the Florida Supreme Court with a homework assignment to review the facts and issues of the case prior to attending the JTI. Because the date for this first JTI was a teacher planning day during which the teachers were required to submit students' grades, we were concerned that they would not wish to give up this day to attend. There was no problem filling the 40 positions with 40 qualified and motivated teachers.

These teachers represented seven of the 51 middle schools and 15 of the 32 high schools in Miami-Dade County. While there was a deliberate focus on achieving county-wide representation, we also concentrated on selecting teachers from law magnets and schools with high-risk students. There were, for example, four applicants selected from one high-risk middle school.

The morning consisted of three concurrent workshops of 45 minutes each. Teachers rotated through 1) a technology workshop for which 15 computers were set up in a computer lab so that all 40 teachers were on line learning to surf the Net for lesson plans, civic education, and the Supreme Court's "case of the month"; and 2) "Using the Court as a Community Resource" in which teachers provided fact patterns to court administrators to understand where and how an individual enters the system, and what path each case can take as it progresses. An important area of discussion was motor-voter and jury education. Teachers were also encouraged to sign up for a class field trip to a court-related facility or program. The third workshop was juvenile mediation in which teachers learned by presenting real life scenarios and then observing and participating in a mock mediation session.

Following lunch in a historic courtroom, a panel of judges provided an interactive, fast-paced walkthrough of the case of the month in a one-hour "trial procedure' session. Teams of teachers then presented their version of the case before the judges serving as a mock appellate panel. The case continued to generate interest with the distribution of the actual Supreme Court written opinion to the teachers three months later.

Evaluations from the teachers suggest that the 30-minute panel discussion by lawyers from the Dade County Bar Association and The Florida Bar was among the most relevant sessions of the institute. Six lawyers discussed and distributed resource materials, legal rights for new adults, the street law project, and a list of liaisons from the Bars who had volunteered for their schools. The final session was a teacher "peer" panel discussing how those teachers had used information learned at the statewide institute in their classrooms for creative lesson planning. An exemplary lesson plan by a JTI graduate was distributed.

Partners

The agenda was a tribute to the partnerships we had formed in the community. First, to offer a valuable peer lesson and to fulfill their commitment to teach law-related education, graduates of the statewide institute, our teacher partners, facilitated sessions wherever possible. Second, attorney partners offered resource materials, legal information and a lawyer liaison who had previously volunteered to partner with a specific school. Third, the institute offered judge partners. Following the judges' session in the afternoon, teachers and judges discussed the need to have judges assigned to schools on a year-round, ongoing basis to expand the meaning of the 3 Rs--as a resource, role model, and real party in interest. To date, 27 of the 111 judges in the 11th Judicial Circuit have volunteered to partner with middle or high schools.

The JTI was also an opportunity for court administrators to collaborate from within. Juvenile mediation, social services, domestic violence intake, and community education linked their administrative and creative arms to present the court as a community resource.

The Next Step

Going from educating 10 teachers in two years to 40 teachers in one day, we quickly built on our success. Along with our partners, we scheduled a second JTI in April 1999 for elementary school teachers. The number of applicants outnumbered those teachers selected by three to one. The second institute hosted 45 teachers, representing 36 out of 201 elementary schools in the county. Many of the teachers selected were in the gifted or academic excellence programs. Others were from schools with potentially high-risk students. Geographically, schools from throughout the county were represented.

The agenda for this second JTI expanded upon the initial institute in several areas. This time our facilitators included Supreme Court Justice R. Fred Lewis, an enthusiastic educator who was comfortable in front of a class. In addition, both observing and participating were Dr. Robert Ingrain and Betsy Kaplan, members of the Miami-Dade County School Board. School Superintendent Roger Cuevas was also in attendance. It was clear that to institutionalize our local efforts, the public school partnership needed to expand to include systematic and sustained recognition and approval from the highest administrative and political levels. To make it possible for teachers to attend, the school system agreed to subsidize the payment of substitute teachers in the amount of $4,000.

An additional partnership was formed to complete the elementary school agenda. The technology workshop in the morning featured "Justice by the People," donated by The American Board of Trial Advocates for each participant. This interactive CD-ROM and video work through various lessons including the value of group decisionmaking, the trial of Gold E. Locks, and jury selection and deliberation. The other concurrent workshops were "ELF," or Elementary Legal Frameworks, a program created by Florida teachers to explore the need for rules and authority, rights and responsibilities, law-related career awareness and conflict resolution, and "Invaders," a workshop in which Justice Lewis, Steve Shenkman, president, and Annette Boyd Pitts, executive director of The Florida Law Related Education Association, Inc., instructed the teachers in how to teach decisionmaking through an interactive exercise while students are learning about their constitutional rights.

The second institute also explored an ethical component by offering a thoughtful discussion on "Ethics and Education" by Professor Anthony Alfieri, director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law.

An expanded emphasis on mediation reflected the courts' reaction and concern over school violence and our perceived role in forging a solution. In the afternoon, teachers participated in the "Courts and Conflict" session which involved eight judges, the director of mediation for the courts, teachers, and JTI graduates. The group used a fact pattern to role-play first as a judge, and then as a mediator, to settle the dispute through the contrasting strategies of courtroom advocacy or mediation, the former having a judge-driven process, the latter a party-driven process. Teachers were encouraged to sign up for mediation training by court staff in their schools.

The afternoon sessions continued with "Using the Courts and Local Bar as a Community Resource," a discussion with Mark S. Shapiro, president of the Young Lawyers Section of the Dade County Bar, court administrators, and JTI graduates.

The costs for both institutes were only in court staff time and material duplication. There was no budget item for these programs and no direct costs incurred by the court.

The benefit of localizing the Justice Teaching Institute model is to work with teachers to build a foundation of understanding that addresses the immensity of needs unique to the locality. The outcome is to empower our youth with the values of responsibility, civility, communication, and respect as members of this community. The underpinning of such a foundation is educated access to decisionmaking, dispute resolution, and, ultimately, the legal system. One would hope that the commitment to such programs would not ebb and flow as our attention focuses on high profile trials and a particular tragedy relating to teens in the news that day.

Programs such as these should be ongoing and systemic and provide a stimulating learning environment for public school teachers. Our observation is that larger training sessions and a system wide framework for such training is essential for an efficient, cost effective service delivery system.

The number of students in Miami-Dade County public schools continues to grow, with the ethnic population reflecting more liberal immigration policies and increased immigration, particularly from Latin American countries. At the same time, judicial caseloads reflect the complexity and seriousness of such a diverse society. Educating this generation becomes a daunting application of our finest legacy.

Conclusion

Law-related education is an important responsibility of the legal profession. A judicial system requires public trust and confidence to survive.(7) Attorneys and judges can work together to visit classrooms, train teachers, and design practical law-related education programs to impact elementary and secondary students. With volunteers like those on the Supreme Court of Florida and in the 11th Circuit, a strong foundation has been laid to demonstrate the importance of legal and judicial outreach and involvement.

(1) Bar Related Issues: Background Papers. Department of Public Information and Bar Services with assistance from the General Counsel and UPL Department. July 1998, pp. 138-139.

(2) Access to the Legal System. July 1998. Bar Related Issues: Background Papers. Public Information and Bar Services Department with assistance from the UPL Department.

(3) The Supreme Court of Florida provides an educational tour program operated by docents through the Supreme Court Historical Society and on-site staff and law clerks. Over 7,000 students have participated in the program this year.

(4) See Leslie A. Hayahsi, Building Your Law-related Education Dreams, 33 JUDGES' J. 28 (Winter 1994), for a discussion of program types from traditional to contemporary to prefabricated to avant garde.

(5) "Statistical Highlights 1998-99," Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Miami, Florida, February 1999 (pamphlet).

(6) Id.

(7) The Florida Bar Re Amendments to Rules Regulating The Florida Bar, July 1, 1993.

Gerald Kogan is former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. He now serves as president of the Alliance for Ethical Government in Miami.

Joseph P. Farina is chief judge of the 11th Judicial Circuit. He hosts local teacher training programs and serves as faculty to the Florida Supreme Court Justice Teaching Institute.

Attorney Marjorie A. Baron serves as special assistant to Chief Judge Farina.