Legal Clinic Is National Leader in Juvenile-Justice Matters

More than 30 years ago the Juvenile Law Center started as a free, walk-in legal clinic that served mostly

runaways, truants, and delinquent kids in this city. It has since emerged as a national leader in promoting juvenile-justice and child-welfare issues, taking a leading role in precedent-setting court cases, conducting research, publishing reports, and heading advocacy campaigns.

Still, Marsha Levick, a co-founder of the law center and now its legal director, makes sure most of the charity’s lawyers are always involved in at least a few cases involving local teenagers in trouble with the law or facing problems in the foster-care system.

“We need to stay in the trenches in order to keep close to what we are all about and to have street cred,” Ms. Levick says. “If we are going to complain and talk about reform, we need to have firsthand experience.”

A key element of that firsthand experience — caring about the kids they serve — is unmistakable among the law center’s 16-person staff, and in evidence right in the middle of the group’s crowded common area. There, Debbie A. Hollimon-Williams, a secretary, has created what she calls the Wall of Children: photographs of clients and pieces of their artwork taped onto a narrow column next to her desk.

Ms. Levick can tell practically the entire story of the Juvenile Law Center through the stories of the young people in the photographs. And, she says, it’s for them — people like Denise, now in her 20s, whom the center helped shepherd through abusive and neglectful foster-care arrangements — that she is most pleased about one of the law center’s latest triumphs.

Last month, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation bestowed a $500,000 no-strings-attached award on the organization. The center was one of eight nonprofit groups around the world to win the prize — considered, in its third year, to be akin to the foundation’s older and more famous “genius prize,” but for charities.

On the Job

It’s not quite 10 a.m. on the day after the announcement of the MacArthur prize, and Ms. Levick has finally settled in behind the piles on her cluttered desk. The morning has been light, but hectic: Ms. Levick had visited a law firm on another floor of the center’s office building to collect copies of newspaper articles about the award, and fielded dozens of congratulatory messages, including one from a security guard in the lobby.

Taking a few minutes to reflect on the center’s beginning, Ms. Levick recalls how she and three other freshly minted Temple University Law School graduates started the Juvenile Law Center in 1975 with the goal of responding not only to their young clients’ legal troubles, but also to their general well-being. The organization distinguished itself by helping clients with family, school, and other issues of daily life.

The center also took an unusual tack by figuring out what linked the cases it was handling and then pressing for broader changes in government policies. If the center was handling cases of physical abuse at a youth-detention center, for example, it would not just help the young people who were wronged, but also press for changes in policies and practices at the facility and others like it to prevent other youths from harm.

Ms. Levick says that she and her colleagues were emboldened by the times — “all that ‘70s we-can-make-a-difference stuff” — and the particular landscape of juvenile justice, which was just beginning to take new shape in the United States. A 1967 Supreme Court decision granting youths accused of crimes the same due-process rights as adults had opened up a whole new field of legal advocacy, both in delinquency cases and in cases of child welfare, and the Juvenile Law Center was on the front lines.

“We were dedicated to the notion that we could change the world,” Ms. Levick says.

Growing Up

The group’s goals are more tempered these days — “we and the organization have all matured,” she explains — but her zeal and optimism are still evident.

At a mid-morning meeting, Ms. Levick and Laval Miller-Wilson, the law center’s senior lawyer on staff, discuss plans to execute a bold legal maneuver, called a king’s bench petition, intended to challenge a Pennsylvania county court that has repeatedly, and, the law center says, illegally, allowed and even encouraged parents to waive the rights of their children to be represented by lawyers.

“It’s rarely used and difficult to successfully pull off,” Ms. Levick says of the king’s bench petition. “But this is a case of pervasive injustice, the kind we just can’t close our eyes to.”

Ms. Levick and Mr. Miller-Wilson confer on other matters, including a case in western Pennsylvania where a mentally retarded fifth-grade girl was arrested for allegedly assaulting a county sheriff who was called in by her school to restrain her. The charges were dropped in part because of the girl’s mental capacity, but the girl’s parents wanted to challenge the sheriff’s involvement in a school behavioral matter.

The two lawyers toss out potential issues for a court to raise — like invasion of privacy rights — but Ms. Levick quickly comes to the conclusion that the case lacks some key elements, such as an apparent pattern of wrongdoing, for the Juvenile Law Center to place it on its limited docket.

“Would we like to take every case where kids are not treated fairly? Absolutely,” Ms. Levick says. “And in this case I can see why the family is incredibly angry. But it doesn’t necessarily look like there’s a clear claim or a bigger issue to tackle.”

Ms. Levick’s instincts won’t let her drop the case altogether, though: She suggests that Mr. Miller-Wilson consult with the Education Law Center, another legal advocacy group, located right down the hall, to see if there may be a way to file a complaint, perhaps with the state’s education department, sending a message that the school needs to monitor its disciplinary procedures more carefully.

Ms. Levick continues to brainstorm about legal tactics during her next meeting, with Jessica Feierman, another of the charity’s lawyers. Among the issues they discuss is a case in New Mexico where a judge has decided to try as an adult a 17-year-old who was involved in a gang-shooting incident. The case is likely to inform another matter pending in the state’s supreme court examining the latitude justices have in treating youths as juveniles or adults. And Ms. Levick is already sketching out how these kinds of issues may eventually help build a case for carving out an entirely new juvenile-jurisprudence system based on the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, banning cruel and unusual punishment.

But Ms. Levick knows she is getting ahead of herself. Besides, it’s nearly 1:30 and lunch is calling.

Conference Calls

Dining is a perfunctory affair in a café in the office building’s lobby, and then it’s a race back upstairs to get to a conference call with the MacArthur foundation. The call is a monthly meeting about progress on the law center’s three-year grant of more than $1-million to lead the foundation’s efforts to change the juvenile-justice system in Pennsylvania.

Robert Schwartz, the law center’s executive director and one of its co-founders, is already in his office chatting on the speaker phone with MacArthur officials about plans for a policy-briefing breakfast with state lawmakers.

Ms. Levick has to slip out of the call a bit early to get to another conference call with a group of public defenders in California who have sued the state, charging that California’s so-called three-strikes rule — which puts people with three felonies in prison for life — is unfair for juveniles because they do not have the same rights as adults to jury trials. They talk about the case and about the brief the Juvenile Law Center intends to file on behalf of the plaintiffs.

It’s clear the California lawyers are leaning on Ms. Levick’s expertise, though she appears embarrassed when at the end of the call the other lawyers offer thanks for her help.

She cut her teeth at the law center, but Ms. Levick says she gained valuable experience during her time away from it, too. She served as the center’s executive director from the start, then left in 1982 to go first to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now called Legal Momentum) and then into a private law practice that specialized in the securities industry. She returned to the law center in 1995 as its legal director, well trained, she says, to handle litigation and complex legal cases.

‘Great Honor’

At an end-of-the-day meeting with Mr. Schwartz, the two longtime friends catch each other up on law-center business — Ms. Levick running down key legal matters and Mr. Schwartz summarizing what’s happening on research and public-policy fronts.

It’s Friday afternoon and they still seem a bit giddy about yesterday’s events, though neither of them is exactly sure what to make of the MacArthur prize or how best to spend it.

“While it is a great honor, I have a feeling that mentioning it won’t play in oral arguments,” Mr. Schwartz jokes.

“Yes,” says Ms. Levick, turning more serious, “we need to make it translate into ways to help us all do our jobs better, more effectively, so we can get the kinds of wins we need to make a difference.”