WHAT I LEARNED THIS SUMMER

Candace Ragin
Neighborhood Legal Services
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

During my first brief service call while working with Neighborhood Legal Services, I answered a phone call from a woman who had four young children, enfeebled from living in a fetid apartment infested with mold and wasted by surging water, a woman of meager means with an apathetic landlord historic for aggravating rather than addressing the conditions.  I wanted to help this family; who wouldn’t?  Notwithstanding all my empathy, all my somber desire to help, all my formal legal education, I had no clue of how to assist this woman despite the fact I had just spent days of intense training on topics I thought ran the gamut of landlord-tenant scenarios.  It turned out that I could do very little to affect this family’s pains, even after hours of research and conferment with numerous supervisors and colleagues.  In response to a plea from a woman, a mother who seemingly had no other place to go, I provided some information on landlord-tenant, a few phone references, a modest word of encouragement, and then I replaced the phone receiver in its cradle.  I had answered her call, but then again, I had not; she thanked me, but for what?  I wanted to make the landlord pay for his negligence, at best, or threaten the landlord into action, at least; I could do neither in this situation in which the landlord had manipulated and beguiled my client on every possible occasion.  I preconceived law as a comprehensive and objective system with distinct yet certain resolution to every inquiry.  If law were so encyclopedic, what was the reason I couldn’t help my first client?

            My impotence quickly shattered my preconception, my misconception of the vastness of legal remedies.  The following weeks, filled with the calls from others in need, forced me to overcome my obsession with the abortive efforts of my first case.  The following weeks, filled with exposure to different points of law and conflicting interpretations, forced me to abandon my disjunctive panorama of the law.  The law is just a series of directives and consequences, merely a set of patterned means to diverse ends.  The human factor animates and personifies the law, and in keeping with the motley of human nature, law checkers and conforms depending on the environment, bestowing accomplishment at once and then failure.  Neighborhood Legal Services impressed on me the importance of the human face of law, and coevally dispelled my sentiment that unadulterated victory is what truly matters; sometimes the law allows only for a qualified win.  Progress, however humble, is what matters.  Law redresses wrongs and attunes behavior so that society continually forges toward maturity.  Maybe I couldn’t help my first client in the manner I wanted, but at least my putting her on notice of her rights would prevent a future instance of her being abused by another disreputable landlord.