Jaime Lee is a professor of law and director of the Community Development Clinic for The University of Baltimore. She also has spent three and a half years working as associate dean for experiential education, overseeing all of law clinics and externship program. A first-generation lawyer, Jaime enjoys making an impact in her classrooms and community, through scholarship and clinical work. Over coffee, she shared about the root of her interest in community development law, the value of embedding full-time tenured faculty into a clinical model, which is a common quality of the top-ranked clinical legal education programs in the country like UBalt’s, and why she encourages lifelong learning.
Q: As associate dean for experiential education, you’ve been able to oversee UBalt's 12 law clinics and champion the connections they invite between UBalt students and the community. Can you share some of the ways these clinics help the community and better prepare students for their future practice?
A: All clinics provide direct services to clients, and they’re free. We choose clients who need help and can't afford it. We offer services ranging from immigration law to veterans law to criminal law, and much more. My own clinic, the Community Development Clinic, is transactional, so we represent nonprofits and small businesses.
These are direct services to clients, and the students are the first-chair attorneys. Although they haven't graduated from law school and taken the bar yet, they can serve under a court certification as a full-fledged practicing attorney, as if they've been licensed through the bar exam, because they're taking a clinic class with us. The students are the ones out there representing the clients in court, meeting with the clients, doing the research and writing, counseling, and doing all of the work of a first chair attorney, but with our guidance and support as faculty. You can only learn how to grapple with being a lawyer when you're actually experiencing it: when you're sitting in front of a client and they are looking you in the eye and relying on you to help them and improve their lives.
By having students do this for the first time in a classroom setting that's supportive and investigatory, they get a shortcut to expertise, as if they have had years of professional experience. We help students weigh their decisions and learn to exercise judgment and professional discretion. This is very different from just being thrown into practice after graduation, when you have the pressures of so many cases, and you don't have the time and guidance of a professional mentor to sit with you and say, ‘Let’s think through some of the choices you are facing today as a lawyer. How would you like to approach this problem? Why is that your choice?’ In other words, nobody's job in the real world is to help you be the best lawyer that you can be. But that is our job as clinic professors, and that is what you get out of clinical legal education. You get personalized one-on-one instruction, tailored to your educational goals, your clients’ legal needs. We're trying to teach the students how to approach any issue that comes up and be lifelong learners and continue to grow throughout their careers. We can see the growth from Day 1, where they're students and week 14, where they have grown into the role of being a lawyer. It is magical to see that transformation.
Q: What sets UBalt’s clinical model apart from other law schools?
A: At UBalt, we're fully committed to clinical work and what sets us apart—and sets all the top-ranked programs apart—is that our clinic professors are almost all tenured or tenure track. That means that we have all the same resources, opportunities and scholarship that every other faculty member has. In a lot of places, it's part-time faculty who do the clinical work. At some schools, they're not trained as teachers necessarily; they're not permanent. It’s unfortunate that many other schools do not place the value on clinical teaching that it deserves.
Here, we are full-time experts in both our field and in clinical teaching pedagogy as well as in our academic research. We also shape the curriculum and to guide school policy toward the best interests of our students as voting members of the faculty, which we are well-suited to do since we have the benefit of spending so much one-on-one time with the students and knowing what they need from us as a law school.
Q: Looking at your scholarship and your areas of focus, can you share what inspired you from the start to revolve your career around community development, or to at least make that one of your areas of focus?
A: I think it stems first from my dad; his career was construction management. I was always interested in buildings and creation, and then I started getting interested in cities and how they develop. By the time I graduated college, I knew I wanted to do something in urban environments and equity. I did nonprofit work for a while, and then I thought about urban planning. Urban planning is a great career, but as a lawyer, I thought I could have more impact.
The equity part has been interesting, I think, for me personally. In a city like Baltimore, we have such a wide disparity based on class, race, education. We're all living side by side, but there's so much difference in the opportunity that people have. Being able to try to even out some of those inequalities is really important to me. My parents were children of poor immigrants. They experienced those hardships, my parents and my grandparents, so that I did not have to. My parents were able to go to college school and get to where they wanted to be, and they always appreciated the breaks and the opportunities that made that happen for them—the teachers who believed in them and encouraged them, the people who gave them their first jobs. I grew up feeling driven to be able to give back. I was able to have the opportunities I have because of people like my grandparents and my parents and the people who opened doors for them, and so I should keep that door more open for other people as well.
Q: Please share some of the impact that clinics like the Community Development Clinic have made in Baltimore.
A: The clinics in the law school have been around for at least 40 years. UBalt was a strong early adopter of clinical legal education, so we have this long history of impact in the city. UBalt clinics are known for not just providing the basic legal services but doing it in a way that really listens to the clients and facilitates using the law to get them to where they want to be.
One example of the Community Development Clinic’s work is that there's n terrific water justice coalition that I've been working with for about 10 years of other legal services providers, pro bono groups in the city like Maryland Volunteer Legal Services, Food and Water Watch, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, among others. Probably everybody who lives in or near Baltimore understands how astronomically water rates have risen over last 10-20 years. What we were seeing is unaffordable water, as well as a lot of disputes with the water department about the accuracy of people’s bills. People were losing their homes over this. It was a very bad situation, and there is longstanding lack of trust both on the city's part and on the residents’ part about these issues. We were able to change the law in some important ways to help protect people against some of the worst effects of these problems, including creating a water affordability program. For one, if you're under a certain income level, you don't pay more than 3 percent of your income towards water. It's capped, and that's the UN standard for affordability.
We also created an Office of the Water Advocacy, who is specifically dedicated to representing the interests of the people of Baltimore in water policy. People should talk to the advocate about any issues they have. The advocate and his terrific team help to resolve disputes and also helps the department figure out how they can better serve people every day. The advocate’s office is a unique model for government reform that stems from my academic research.
Q: What makes you the proudest of the work that you've been able to do?
A: I am proud of the fact that I was able to use my scholarship and my research and apply it to Baltimore and real people's problems. Real-world impact is something all of UBalt’s schools are known for and should get recognized for.
I've done a lot of my research on public participation. There's a lot of procedures where you invite public input and then it gets ignored, and so I was looking for ways to prevent that. When the water work came up, I thought we had an opportunity to invent a better system. It's been nerve wracking, because I could see from my research where it might fail, and we tried our best to protect against that. We lost some battles, but it's still been wildly more successful than I thought it might be, so I'm proud of that, and I'm proud of the fact that we are doing it in Baltimore, where it’s needed, and we're breaking ground here. I've never seen something structured like this, and we have other water advocates around the country who are interested in the model.
Q: In a message to students you wrote, “the process of becoming a lawyer is a transformative, lifelong process.” How have some of the lessons you've learned over the course of your own career helped you grow as a lawyer and even as a professor?
A: One of the things that helped me grow as a lawyer and a professor is that if you have a true belief in your own growth and your own abilities, and you're willing to put in the work to make that happen, you can be truly fulfilled in your lifetime both as a professional and as a person. Something I always teach the students, which is also part of clinical pedagogy and something that I practice in my own life, is this concept of metacognition. If you think deliberately and intentionally about your experiences as you go through them, and process and reflect on them and take lessons out of them, then you actually grow your intelligence.
Popular understanding of intelligence is that it's capped. We have an IQ number and that's all we can do. Metacognition studies show that you can actually increase what you can do cognitively and intellectually, if you go through this process of thinking deliberately and working to improve and expand. That has been important to me as a person and to my growth, and that's one of the things that clinical teachers are trying to help our students benefit from as well.
Another lesson that I would want to share, especially with students, is to not stay longer at a job that you're not happy at longer than you have to. We all have to do that sometimes, but don't stay longer than you have to if you're not fulfilled. Be open to new opportunities for growth and fulfillment and never limit yourself.
