Name: Joseph B. Tulman
Title: Professor of Law
School: U.D.C. David A.Clarke School of Law
Mailing Address:
4200 Connecticut Ave., N.W. 38/207
Washington, DC 20008
Phone: 202 274-7317
Email: jtulman@udc.edu
Home Page: www.law.udc.edu
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Summary Description:
Professor Tulman has incorporated the training of practicing attorneys into his clinical course (Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic). The target population has been attorneys who were accepting court appointments to represent (1) indigent children in delinquency cases or (2) indigent parents or children in neglect cases. The goal of the effort has been to change the level of professionalism and effectiveness of indigent representation of children and parents. In addition, utilizing what Gary Bellow labeled a “case aggregation strategy,” Tulman has attempted to change the nature of the practice and of the outcomes. Specifically, by training neglect and delinquency attorneys to utilize special education advocacy, Tulman has attempted to lower attorneys’ caseloads (by training them to provide special education advocacy and obtaining statutory attorneys’ fees) and to shift the focus from constraining children (delinquency) and blaming poor parents (neglect) to educating children with special needs and to providing services to parents.
The involvement of practicing attorneys and the systemic change strategies are both apparent to the law students in the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic. These approaches inform the clinical supervision and the dialogue with law students regarding problem solving for clients and professional responsibility. Both of these major competencies are the focus (along with oral and written communication, practice management, legal analysis) of extensive, written mid-term and final evaluations for each student in the clinic, and, of course, these competencies are the focus of continuous dialogue in tutorial sessions and in class. Professor Tulman also leads the students in one or two classes each semester in which the clinical students must formally present analyses of ethical issues that arise in the context of using special education advocacy for clients who also are facing delinquency or neglect charges.
As a consequence of the training (of law students and lawyers) and organizing activity (organizing lawyers and graduating law students) in the clinic, D.C. is the only jurisdiction in the country in which poor and minority parents have available to them a significant cadre of attorneys. As a direct consequence of the training and organizing, D.C. -- a jurisdiction of 500,000 people -- had in a recent year over forty percent of the nation’s special education due process hearings. During the past decade, coincident with the special education organizing campaign and other activities (e.g., a symposium on unnecessary detention that Tulman put together and a class action brought by the DC Public Defender Service), DC’s juvenile incarceration rate has dropped precipitously (from about 450 beds to 188 in the last decade), and the juvenile arrest rate has dropped by over sixty percent.
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Program History:
This effort to train practicing lawyers along with law students has taken several forms.
(1) Over a five-year period in the early to mid-1990s, Tulman and his colleagues in the clinic conducted separate training sessions for practicing attorneys, training over 100 D.C. attorneys in sessions of twelve to eighteen hours.
(2) Seven select attorneys joined the clinic for an entire semester, attending classes for four hours per week and participating alongside the law students in weekly tutorial sessions supervised by Tulman and his colleagues. (Five of the seven attorneys altered the nature of their practice after the “semester in residence,” and their collective influence changed how people addressed child neglect in DC. Further, three of the seven have now become magistrate judges in the newly-organized DC Family Court.)
(3) Through the present time, select attorneys attend the clinic’s classes (four hours per week throughout the semester) as auditing students.
(4) Tulman continues to conduct periodic training sessions for attorneys. On November 24th, 2003, for example, he conducted a five-hour training for the eight new attorneys (guardians ad litem) at D.C.’s Children’s Law Center. In December 2003 or January 2004, Tulman will conduct a day-long training for lawyers at a large law firm who want to learn special education law and advocacy and represent poor parents on a pro bono basis.
(5) Tulman and his colleagues have produced a comprehensive manual on the use of special education advocacy for children in the delinquency system. Through the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the ABA Juvenile Justice Center, defense attorneys and advocates in every state have received -- and are using -- this publication. Tulman is currently editing a parallel manual regarding the use of special education advocacy for children (and their families) who are in the neglect system. Tulman has published other articles regarding the use of special education advocacy. Tulman also put together a symposium -- published in the D.C. Law Review -- on the unnecessary detention of children in the District of Columbia.
(6) Tulman also conducts training sessions for judges (National Judicial College in Reno, NV; three training sessions over a decade for D.C. Superior Court judges; training for judges in Rochester, New York); for national audiences of attorneys (ABA Juvenile Justice Center; NAPAS; others); and for mixed audiences (National Association of Sentencing Advocates; COPAA; National Institute on Integration).
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Confidential Items:
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Expanded Program Description (Optional):
Another objective of the clinic (one semester, seven credit, 350 “billable hours” per student) is for each student to become sufficiently skilled that he or she could graduate and be able to practice special education law either in a solo practice or in a small practice (and, with the availability of statutory attorneys’ fees, represent poor people). As a consequence, a number of our students are going into special ed practice, representing poor children and their parents.
As noted above, the nature of delinquency defense and, to a lesser extent, the nature of neglect representation, have changed in D.C. Judges, attorneys, probation officers, and others are understanding that educational -- and particularly special education -- needs are a primary and proper focus.
Tulman has raised, through the 1990s, close to a million dollars in foundation funding for the clinic.
Professor Tulman received in 1995 his law school’s distinguished service award. The Criminal Law Section of the American Bar Association awarded Professor Tulman its 1996 Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award (national juvie lawyer of the year). The D.C. Bar Foundation named Professor Tulman the winner of the 2001 Jerrold Scoutt Prize for sustained, fulltime service to underrepresented people in the District of Columbia (DC public interest/poverty lawyer of the year). Under mayoral appointment, Tulman served, from September 2001 until March 2003, as chair of the D.C. Juvenile Justice Advisory Group. Tulman is also co-chairing, with the head of DC’s special education office, a working group on special education systemic reform.
Professor Tulman, since 1988, has been counsel for plaintiffs in Evans v. Williams, a class action on behalf of persons with mental retardation. The suit, filed in 1976, led to the closing in 1991 of Forest Haven, a large institution. As part of a 2001 settlement in the Evans case, Tulman negotiated the establishment of an independent nonprofit organization (The Quality Trust for Individuals with Disabilities), funded by D.C. with an initial payment of $11 million and annual payments of $2 million for ten years.
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Supporting Materials:
Draft of chapter five of neglect/special education manual: The Rights of Parents in the Neglect System To Enforce Special Education Rights
Disability and
Delinquency (forthcoming in Whittier Journal of Child and Family Advocacy,
2003)
Resume of Prof. Tulman