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Practical tips on this methodology
Summer 2004
Tips for teachers are scattered across this web site, both in the Teacher’s Overview and in the Teacher’s Comments featured in Permanent Exhibits. In this section I hope to provide discussion and materials on issues that I believe are likely to recur for teachers who decide to assign community-based field projects in their courses. My intention is to put practical aids at the disposal of those who may be facing similar issues.
At this writing, this site approaches its initial launch date. I will begin with an important threshold matter, the issue of confidentiality. However, there are other areas that would be appropriate for future examination in this space as well. For instance, additional questions of legal ethics -- such as the prohibition on solicitation of clients and that on the unauthorized practice of law -- often surface in the context of community-based placements for law students. Teachers who plan to assign field projects also need to consider a number of mundane issues. They should know how to find money that can support community-based field projects, and they should help their students learn about fund raising for projects as well. These and other issues, however, will have to await another day.
On confidentiality
a. The lawyer-client relationship
b. Research involving human subjects
c. Mandatory reporting of child abuse
Issues of confidentiality are all but certain to arise in the course of field placements like those I assign. So this is one question I do not wait for, but I embed it in my syllabus from the start.
My students often find themselves asking people to help them understand some social phenomenon, some aspect of law or the legal system, or something about their own life experience. Receiving answers to these requests inevitably raises moral, legal, and political questions about the terms of these information exchanges, about the proper uses and misuses of the information elicited, about possible obligations to guard confidences and possible duties to divulge them. My research about my teaching raises confidentiality questions as well, since I am at least in one sense studying my own students. Questions about confidentiality can thus arise in many different settings, and may have to be considered from several different points of view and in light of several different kinds of legal or other standards. A few of these are explored below, but of course these specific topics do not cover all the settings or dilemmas that can arise in the field.
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