Law students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, will become the first in the nation to represent poor minorities in Baltimore, the rebuilding city of New Orleans and a Third World country.
The school began an unprecedented new program, called the Leadership, Ethics and Democracy Initiative, to provide students more real-world experience and help them cope with ethical conflicts. In addition to working in New Orleans and an economically depressed country, students will participate in forums and classes stressing leadership and ethics.
For Michael Millemann, a law school professor and director of LEAD, the program provides students the same passion for law that he discovered when he joined the civil rights movement in the South in 1967.
“It put me on a course I?ve stuck with ever since,” Millemann said. “It was a formative experience for me. I told the students when they went down: ?This could be the same opportunity for you.? ”
Millemann said he spent last week in New Orleans with five students from Maryland who are helping residents with legal problems.
“A lot of salt-of-the-earth people who did what they?re supposed to do first got wiped out by the storm, then got ripped off by the contractors,” Millemann said.
He pointed to one case where a couple that earns $60,000 a year pays a mortgage on a house that Katrina destroyed, and insurance companies paid only 30 percent of the costs.
Diane Hoffman, associate dean at the law school, said she hoped the new curriculum would “start a movement” at other law schools throughout the country, many of which may only offer an ethics class.
The program will be phased in over three years with a $1.6 million grant from the Fetzer Institute, a nonprofit in Kalamazoo, Mich.
“It?s one thing to have what the professional requirements are,” Millemann said. “It?s another thing to act professionally.”
