UNC law students connect, reconnect

Jessica Harden reconnected with a little known piece of her family history last week while traveling with a team of UNC School of Law students through Eastern North Carolina on a mission to offer legal services to community residents for free.

She was one of 23 students who spent a week in the region drawing up wills and other legal documents as part of a pro bono project coordinated by the law school, the Center for Civil Rights and the nonprofit Legal Aid of North Carolina.

The students worked with low-income and minority clients on wills as well as on health care power of attorney documents that allow a person to designate someone else to make health care decisions if he or she becomes incapacitated.

Harden, a 24-year-old first-year law student, was working at a senior center in Washington County on one day of the trip, helping to draw up a will for a woman to make sure her precious jewelry and furniture will pass to her children when she dies.

As she was working with the woman, Harden realized they had something in common: The woman had worked for her grandfather, a person she herself has never met.

Harden said the woman told her stories about “back in the day,” when she had worked at her grandfather’s restaurant. It made the student feel good to know that she was helping someone who had played a role in getting her to the place where she is today.

“You can call it a coincidence or you can call it whatever, but it’s just such an honor to be able to give back to this person, who was an integral part — even if it was just six months doing something at the restaurant, or however long she was there — that put me where I am,” Harden said.

This was the second year that law students like Harden have come to the region to work in Pamlico, Washington, Jones, Beaufort and Martin counties to help the legally underserved, said Sylvia Novinsky, the law school’s assistant dean for public service programs. The program was also expanded this year into the western part of the state.

Novinsky said that on their trip, the students toured the offices of local attorneys such as the New Bern-based Sumrell, Sugg, Carmichael, Hicks & Hart as well as the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District District of North Carolina, and they watched trial court at Cherry Point air station.

Novinksy said the trip was designed to help the Legal Aid attorneys reach parts of their service area they don’t normally go into, as well as to write wills to help low-income and minority populations protect their land.

Mark Dorosin, senior managing attorney for the Center for Civil Rights, said there is a form of property ownership that is particularly vulnerable to land loss that has often affects low-income and minority populations. If a property owner dies without a will, the property passes to the landowner’s heirs in equal portion, according to the law.

The resulting situation is a “very unstable form of land ownership,” he said, because any one of the owners can force a partition sale of the property to get the value of his or her percentage, which can sometimes result in the entire property going up for auction.

“And so in North Carolina in particular, but throughout the South, this has particularly been an issue in African American families,” Dorosin said. “Because of the history of segregation and discrimination in the country, they are excluded from the legal system, and have not had access to lawyers and to wills, and so the property has passed into this sort of heirs property model.”

Having the students go out into underserved areas is a proactive way of combating that land loss problem, Dorosin said. The students were trained in two sessions during the school year about the legal requirements of a will and strategies for working with clients.

They were supervised by attorneys from Legal Aid as they worked with clients gaining what some students saw as valuable experience in the field.

David Boaz, 23, said he believes it’s important for students to reach out to more rural parts of the state to dispel images of lawyers only working in high-rise offices. Like Harden, the first-year law student had worked in a senior center in Washington County. He worked with a couple who had each been widowed recently, and then were remarried to each other.

“I guess these two couples were friends, and then both the spouses died, and then these two got married after that happened,” he said. “They both wanted to be married next to their spouses but their spouses were also buried next to each other.”

He said the situation was interesting, but the clients were equally interested in him, too.

“I think they love to talk to us, I think they love seeing our energy and hearing our stories,” he said.

Lauren Cranford, a 25-year-old first year law student, said she also felt it was important to help others preserve their land, especially since the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a land-grant university.

Cranford added that she worked with a client on a health care power of attorney document to grant one of the woman’s nine children the ability to make decisions concerning her health. She said it was touching to see the trust the mother was putting in her son, and she came to recognize the real ways in which the law touches people’s lives.

“I hope they look at it as something they can hopefully take with them as a piece of paper, and also that they had a peace of mind that they didn’t have before,” she said.

Laura Oleniacz can be reached at 252-635-5675 or at loleniacz@freedomenc.com.