Interesting cases aren’t hard to come by at The University of Toledo’s Civil Advocacy Clinic, where Robert Salem, the clinical professor of law who guides and supervises the second- and third-year law students who participate, has long honed an eye for the out-of-the-ordinary elements that turn an everyday case into a particularly valuable teaching opportunity.
Megan Anderson was privy to several in her final semesters in the College of Law, including a custody case that presented her first experience in front of a judge and a federal civil rights case that’s still working its way through the court system.
Cristina Alvarado and Amy Overmyer worked with UToledo’s Civil Advocacy Clinic so that Overmyer could adopt their two sons, Gabriel, 5, and Cristian, 3, on June 24. From left are Hailey Swartwood, Megan Anderson, Amy Overmyer, Cristian, Judge Jack Puffenberger, Gabriel, Cristina Alvarado and Rob Salem.
But when she first heard about the scenario facing Cristina Alvarado and Amy Overmyer, Anderson recalled that she was especially intrigued.
Alvarado and Overmyer were calling on the clinic to assist in an adoption — of their own children, specifically, whose birth certificates already carried the names of both of their mothers. The married couple had come to see the apparent redundancy of adoption as an important additional step to protect their family against the unexpected.
“I find the legal issues surrounding assisted reproductive technology fascinating,” said Anderson, whose sister used in vitro fertilization to grow her family and later became a surrogate for another couple. “I wanted the chance to help women like Amy and Cristina walk through this tricky legal landscape.”
Clinics are a long-standing tradition in legal education, offering students a guided opportunity to put into practice the theory they learn in the early semesters of their programs. Students work directly with clients, and with other counsel and court system representatives along the way, while under the careful supervision of a faculty member who acts as the attorney of record in each of the cases the clinic accepts.
At the College of Law, Salem has headed the Civil Advocacy Clinic since 1994. It’s one of three clinics in the college that, in addition to externships and simulation courses, fulfill a six-credit experiential learning requirement for graduation.
The College of Law also hosts Immigrant Justice Clinic and a Tax Advocacy Clinic.
“The primary purpose of our clinics is to teach students and to teach professional skills,” said Salem, who in any given semester might accept cases related to family law, social security disability and basic estate planning, in addition to working with nonprofits and local government agencies. “But our very important secondary purpose is to have a positive impact on the community that we live in. UToledo’s College of Law has always had a social justice mission, and we take that very seriously. We want to instill in our students a sense of civic duty.”
In line with that mission, the Civil Advocacy Clinic caters to clients who for various reasons have limited opportunity to access quality legal resources. It has long engaged in legal issues surrounding the LGBTQ community.
As employees of UToledo, Overmyer, nurse navigator at the Eleanor N. Dana Cancer Center, and Alvarado, director of immersive and simulation-based learning at the Interprofessional Immersive Simulation Center, are otherwise atypical clientele. They connected with the Civil Advocacy Clinic after Alvarado listened to a presentation by Salem on Health Science Campus, which led her to worry that her children’s birth certificates weren’t the protection she and her wife had assumed.
Alvarado is the biological mother of Gabriel, 5, and Cristian, 3, each of whom were carried by Overmyer. Should something happen to Alvarado, they began to wonder, would her wife’s custody of their shared children be questioned?
“I drove home and could not stop thinking about it,” Alvarado said. “I realized at that moment how serious it really was for us to pursue this adoption.”
Salem took on the case, which was in turn taken up by Anderson and Michael Doyle, another third-year legal student enrolled in the Civil Advocacy Clinic. Anderson and Doyle walked Alvarado and Overmyer not only through the process by which Overmyer would legally adopt her sons, but discussed additional steps that could benefit them.
Doyle drafted a parenting plan, which he filed at the Lucas County Family Court Center while Anderson gathered documents and began a packet of adoption paperwork. Doyle and Anderson also suggested estate planning, on which the couple is working this semester.
“It was a great experience,” Overmyer said. “The students answered all of our questions. Anything that we didn’t think of, they thought of. They made it seem like a very easy process.”
The Civil Advocacy Clinic and the Advanced Civil Advocacy Clinic proved a valuable experience for Anderson. She credits the experience with bettering her as a lawyer and advocate, teaching her practicalities outside of classroom instruction — case management, for example, and the on-your-feet thinking that serves lawyers well when taking a deposition in the important discovery phase of a case.
She also credits the experience with the writing sample that helped her to land her post-graduation job as a staff attorney for Judge Ian English at the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas.
Less than six months since they’d connected with the Legal Advocacy Clinic, Alvarado, Overmyer and their boys headed into Family Court Center to finalize the adoption on June 24. The children were mostly excited by the teddy bears they received to mark the occasion that would, of course, change nothing about their day-to-day lives as they knew them. But Alvarado and Overmyer recalled feeling the significance of the day a bit more acutely.
“We were always a family,” Alvarado said. “But having the legal backing to recognize our intent to mutually parent our children, regardless of the biology, was just so precious to both of us. It gave us both this sense of relief, really, that regardless of the political landscape or the legal landscape of our country, there are no questions that these are our children and they belong with us.”
Anderson, who at that point had just graduated from the College of Law, made a point to be there for the happy occasion, too.
“I was so excited to get to attend the final hearing with Rob, Amy, Cristina and their two adorable boys,” she said. “It was a really great full-circle moment.”
