Youth Outreach from AZ to NM at the HNBA Meeting

Over Labor Day weekend, ASU 2Ls James Cool and Sarah Barrios, and ASU Law Professor Charles Calleros led youth outreach programs at the HNBA annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

On Thursday, Sept. 3, Prof. Calleros presented a workshop on success in law school to law students, as part of an all-day program for law students preceding their job fair. Other workshops that day addressed judicial clerkships, the bar exam, interviewing techniques, and the variety of job opportunities for those with a law degree.

On Saturday, Professor Calleros met Cool and Barrios at Atrisco Heritage High School, a beautiful new school – in fact one still under construction – in a low-income, rural area on the outskirts of Albuquerque. There, they joined other educators and community leaders in presenting workshops to dozens of high school students and college prelaw students.

Professor Calleros led the high school students in an introductory legal method workshop in the morning, and conducted a sample law school civil rights class for the college students in the afternoon. Cool and Barrios conducted a Street Law class for the high school students, exploring the applicability of the Fourth Amendment in the secondary school setting. At lunch, high school and college students sat with law students and attorneys to talk about law school and legal careers.

Other sessions at the high school included workshops on the LSAT and law school admissions for the college students; panel discussions on jobs in the legal profession for all students; programming for parents on preparing their children for higher education; a re-enactment for everyone of the oral argument in Texas v. Hernandez; and a showing of a video about newly appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor from discoverlaw.org, a web site of the Law School Admissions Council, which provided a $5,000 grant for the outreach program. The students were inspired to stretch their minds and to soak up the guidance, instruction, and inspiration.

Similar outreach to prelaw students takes place in Phoenix through the HNBA mentoring program.