If anyone still doubts the educational and social value of clinical legal education, please read this article about my brilliant colleague Uzoamaka Emeka Nzelibe and her work in our Bluhm Legal Clinic representing young asylum seekers. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Five floors up from the cacophony that is Chicago’s West Loop, inside a stone-still hearing room at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Chicago Immigration Court, where the ratcheted-up nerves and quickened breaths make for the sort of place you do not want to be, Uzoamaka Emeka Nzelibe ’96 is there to get the job done. An immigration lawyer, she is fighting to right a litany of wrongs, fighting for youth who’ve fled hellholes all across the globe, trekked thousands of miles and hurdled untold obstacles, running for their lives.
The words Nzelibe chooses couldn’t be starker — nor the consequences more dire. She locks eyes with the immigration judge. Her words at once pierce and amplify the chill in the room.
“What we’re deciding today is whether or not this kid is going to die,” begins the no-nonsense Nzelibe, a 43-year-old Nigerian-born clinical associate professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. As staff attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, she represents unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, cases deemed the toughest legal challenges by agencies that turn their clients over to her.
Regarding the program's educational mission:
Today Nzelibe and Amy Martin, the clinic’s immigration law fellow, work closely with second- and third-year law students, each of whom spends the semester taking on the nuts and bolts of building an immigration case, from client interviews to chasing down evidentiary documents to defending teens in court. A hallmark of the center’s immigration practice is its holistic attention paid to clients’ needs, whether a winter coat, a psychiatric evaluation or the birthday celebrations they’ve never had.
And in the words of one of our students:
“She’s an absolute game changer,” in an immigration quest “where the rules are always changing and the goal posts always moving,” says Lindsey Blum ’18 JD, now a first-year associate at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, who spent a year in Nzelibe’s immigration law clinic. “I’d walk into her office all the time, saying, ‘The world’s ending. I don’t know what we’re going to do. This case is impossible.’ And she’d say every time, ‘Let’s reframe it, because we’re going to make it work.’
“It got to the point that none of the cases kept me awake at night, because Professor Nzelibe would always say, ‘We’re going to solve this. No time to wring your hands.’ ”
Uzo, who is herself a child immigrant from Nigeria, sums it up:
“When I read the Declaration of Independence, when I read the Constitution, I know my clients are the embodiment of those ideals. I see that in them. We need not fear that America is going to change because of immigrants. What I’m concerned with is that in our desperation to keep immigrants out, we actually change who we are. We lose the values, we become our worst nightmare. Our country can absorb these people, and the forefathers’ experiment, started centuries ago, it’s still working; we need not fear that it’s not going to work.”