Alumni and Friends Making an Impact

Third-year law students in the University of Dayton’s Leadership Honors Program are working collaboratively and gaining invaluable professional expertise while making a social impact on critical issues.

The program is designed for highly motivated students who want to be part of the next generation of lawyer-leaders. As LHP students, they have an opportunity to learn from top professionals while creating their own law school leadership legacy.

“Third-year students develop and implement their projects, seek feedback, self-evaluate, and pass the baton to the next group,” said Ericka Curran, Leadership Honors Program director. Supported by donors to the School of Law Dean’s Fund for Excellence during One Day, One Dayton, the LHP provides full-tuition scholarships and attracts students with public interest backgrounds. “Students in this program excel academically and have tremendous leadership skills,” said Curran. 

This year those talents were put to work by the students in small groups on a range of projects including veteran discharge upgrades, civil protection orders, immigration asylum, public defender perceptions and free speech issues.

Administrative Law Clinic
TJ Scanlon, alongside team members Cooper Lee and Curtis Stratton, partnered with School of Law alum Steve Strain ’15, veterans legal counsel at Montgomery County Veterans Service Commission, for a veteran discharge upgrade information session. 

“The veterans who were not honorably discharged aren’t always able to obtain all the benefits they’d normally be able to get. There is a designated process for them to reapply and appeal to the (discharge review) board to get an upgrade to some of the benefits like health insurance, but that process is complex and a lot of the required paperwork can be pretty confusing,” said Scanlon.

Scanlon’s team built on the previous team’s research to craft an accessible guide for navigating the reapplication process. “Some of them came in for a quick question while a few others stayed for over an hour, and we were able to walk them through the entire process and also provide them with the necessary paperwork,” said Scanlon.

Plus, the team prepared informational material for next year’s students. Scanlon hopes that next year’s clinic students can serve even more clients in the School’s clinic practice areas: civil, criminal, immigration and administrative law.

Civil Law Clinic
Another LHP group, comprising Morgan Ensign and Katelyn Wauligman, worked on resources for domestic violence survivors. Inspired by Ensign’s personal experience with domestic violence when she was an undergraduate — something she wrote about in her law school application that drove her to attend law school and use her degree to make a difference for people — they wanted to make accurate information about legal options such as the civil protection order process easily accessible and usable. 

“On Professor Curran’s recommendation, we reached out to the Greater Dayton Volunteer Lawyers Project as a resource to kickstart our project. The purpose was to inspire attorneys to get involved with the causes so law students could acquire limited licenses and shadow the attorneys. This allows law students to represent victims,” said Ensign. The project began there, and so did their exhaustive research on protection orders. 

Wauligman and Ensign hope that their work will eventually be used to develop a domestic violence clinic at the School. “It would be a great way to serve the community in addition to giving law students concrete experience,” said Wauligman.

The duo wrote an informational pamphlet to hand out at the Greater Dayton Volunteer Lawyers Project for victims looking to self-represent. They also created a presentation, which they used at a learning event through the Dayton Bar Association and presented in front of 30 attorneys and judges.

“I feel good about the fact that, in participating in this project, I get to make good on the promise that I made to myself and the University when I applied three years ago,” said Ensign.

And having a scholarship that covers law school tuition is especially beneficial for students who are passionate about pursuing public interest work.  “If students have a lot of loans taken out to attend law school, it is hard for them to afford to work at a legal aid organization and do other service-focused work. Scholarships support and encourage law students to pursue excellence while serving the community,” said Curran, whose vision is to establish more clinics at the law school.