Land Tenure Center ‘externships’ provide real-world exposure

When Melissa Kiniyalocts returned to the Law School last fall, some of her fellow students asked a typical question: “What did you do last summer?” Her answer was anything but typical.

Kiniyalocts and another first-year Wisconsin law student, Jennifer Binkley, had spent 10 weeks working as legal “externs” at a North Carolina-based nonprofit group called the Land Loss Prevention Project. The assignment came through the Summer Law Extern Program, a nationally unique project begun in 1997 by the Land Tenure Center. It pairs law students with programs in communities that have “extreme unmet legal needs” regarding issues of land ownership. In exchange, the students gain invaluable real-world experience.

Among other assignments, Kiniyalocts and Binkley did legal research in support of a lawsuit challenging Wake County’s decision to site a second landfill in a predominantly black mobile home community in Holly Springs, outside Raleigh. The suit was a success: In September 1999, an administrative law judge ruled that the county had broken the rules in obtaining its permit, handing the community a key victory in its ongoing struggle to stop the landfill.

“I was surprised [by the decision],” says Kiniyalocts, noting that Wake County was represented by lawyers from the state Justice Department, whose resources vastly exceeded those of the Land Loss Prevention Project. She was also delighted: “Some of the language I used in my memos had ended up in the administrative law judge’s opinion. Not many first-year law students have an opportunity like that.”

Not all of the students who have taken part in the Summer Law Extern Program during its first three years have met with such dramatic success. Some have handled heartbreaking cases of people separated from land that had been in their families for generations and for whom there is nothing they can do – except to confirm that nothing can be done. But even these students have come away enlightened and energized, with a keener understanding of how property law – literally the law of the land – affects people’s lives.

“All of my student externs have really gained something,” says professor Thomas Mitchell, who oversees the program for the UW Law School. “They have all come back and said, ‘My summer proved to be a very meaningful experience.'”

The origins of the Summer Law Extern Program trace to a meeting in the mid-1990s between Gene Summers, head of the UW Land Tenure Center’s North American Program, and John Zippert, head of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

Recalls Summers, “I asked him: ‘If there was one thing we could do that you would find most helpful, what would it be?'”

Recalls Zippert, “I said we really need lawyers and law students to help us with the large number of individual cases from people who come to our offices with legal problems.”

Summers, with the help of grant funding from three major foundations – Ford, W.K. Kellogg and Otto Bremer – established a program using Law School students. In its first year, the program dispatched a single extern, Brenda Haskins, to the Federation’s headquarters in Epes, Ala. The following summer, in 1998, two externs were sent. Last summer, the program was expanded to five students, and to the two new sites in Texas and North Carolina. It was also expanded to include a law student from the Howard University School of Law.

Philosophically, the extern program is an ideal match for the larger mission of the Land Tenure Center. Funded in 1962 to serve the U.S. government’s need for research and analysis on land-reform issues in Latin America, the center branched out over the years to include other countries and, ultimately, North America. One key area of concern is the southern U.S. where, says Summers, “the decline in ownership of land among African-Americans is just astronomical.”

Indeed. The number of black-owned farms in the United States plummeted from 925,000 (14 percent of the total) in 1920 to just 18,000 (1 percent) in 1992. And the amount of land belonging to black farmers has dropped from 15 million acres to less than three million acres. White farmers have also seen substantial losses, but the rate of land loss among blacks is much greater.

Several factors account for this trend. One is systematic discrimination against black farmers – by banks, white farmers, even the federal government. Last year, the federal government decided to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the U.S. Department of Agriculture systematically discriminated against black farmers through loan-approval decisions made by predominantly white local committees. Qualifying farmers are entitled to payments of $50,000 plus forgiveness of existing debt. One of the major tasks assigned to student externs, at the Federation and Land Loss Prevention Program, has been helping farmers see whether they qualify and, if so, completing the voluminous paperwork required to file a claim.

Perhaps the biggest culprit in black land loss is the failure of many poor rural farmers to leave wills. Absent a will, the property is divided among the deceased person’s heirs – and later among the heirs of these heirs – in accordance with state intestacy laws.

The result is that a given piece of property can have dozens of partial owners, under what is known as a tenancy in common. This is an inherently unstable form of ownership since any one tenant can file a petition to terminate the co-tenancy, which can lead to an order that the property be sold.

What often happens is that an opportunistic lawyer or land speculator will acquire a partial interest from a distant and unwitting relative, then use this to force a sale and acquire the entire property. Mitchell, the extern program coordinator, wrote his 1999 law thesis on this very issue.

“If the losses are not reversed or at least halted,” he warns, “African Americans will enter the 21st century effectively shut out of the agricultural sector as producers and rural black people will own less land than rural black people owned in the years immediately following the Civil War.”

Mitchell, citing the “well-established links between land ownership, community and democratic participation,” calls for new laws governing heir property that would leave landowners less vulnerable to being bought out. Society, he writes, “has a clear moral obligation to reverse the processes that have stripped black landowners of their land.”

Underpinning these situations is a lack of access to lawyers and legal advice, especially among poor rural blacks. Mitchell, in his thesis, calls on Congress to expand assistance to poor land owners by hiring attorneys with experience or training on such issues as estate planning, real estate, property and tax law. “In order to begin building a cadre of lawyers interested in work with poor, rural landowners,” he writes, “these legal services offices should establish internship programs that allow law students to acquire specific expertise in land-related cases.”

This is essentially what the Summer Law Extern Program is already doing. “[W]e aim to cultivate a national population of law students with experience in and commitment to a rural public interest practice,” states a program prospectus prepared by the Land Tenure Center. “Th[is] program is more than just a great summer job; we hope it will change the way students think about the law and, ultimately, about their own career paths and identities.”

Mitchell, who is now processing applications for the coming summer, weighs several criteria for selecting students. One is the student’s level of interest in public interest law. Another factor is whether the student has particular skills relevant to certain assignments. Lastly, Mitchell considers the potential value of the experience to the student’s personal and professional growth. “One of the purposes of law school – of education in general – is to expose people to things they would not normally be exposed to,” he says.

If funding can be secured, the Summer Law Extern Program hopes to expand significantly over the next three years. The goal is to have 16 students serving four populations: African Americans, Latinos near the U.S.-Mexico border, Native Americans and Appalachians. And it also wants to involve students from schools other than UW–Madison. Already, there is plenty of interest.

“In the last year or so, we’ve heard from four or five other schools,” says Mitchell. “They’ve asked if their students can participate.”

For students here, the externship includes a fall seminar taught by Mitchell for law school credit. The students do projects related to their experience. And Mitchell plans to beef up the program’s training component, perhaps by bringing in staffers from the Farmers Legal Action Group in St. Paul, which has a lot of experience training people.

Finally, the program plans to do much more in the way of legal education – what Mitchell calls “preventive medicine.” Rather than only dealing with farmers who have lost their land, students could be helping teach them to protect their interests, from making investments to drafting wills. “Let’s not get to the point where the wolf is at your door, knocking.”

Previous steps in this direction include a “land loss prevention” seminar for farmers and landowners that externs helped organize last summer.

The projected cost of the extern program over the next three years is $730,000, or about $20,000 per extern. This includes administration, training, travel and a $4,000 per-student stipend for living expenses. The program is seeking grant funding from foundations as well as contributions from law firms eager to meet their pro bono obligations. Recently, the Land Tenure Center and Tuskegee University snared a four-year, $3.5 million federal grant recently to preserve minority ownership of rural land, including a legal aid component.

Mitchell, sizing up the program’s first three years, is enthusiastic: “It’s been well received by the communities we serve and organizations we work for.”

Marcus Jimison, executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project, where Kiniyalocts and Binkley were stationed last summer, agrees wholeheartedly. “Melissa and Jennifer were just a godsend,” he says. “They helped out so much. It’s hard to overstate how valuable they were.” He especially credits the students’ work on the landfill litigation: “No one gave us a prayer of winning this case and yet we did. There was no way we could have done it without them.”

Jimison is hoping the Summer Law Extern Program will again send students to help this year: “We’ll take as many as we can get.”