Third-year law student Zach Boggan developed an interest in
Indian law when he took a course on the subject and participated in the Native
American Law Students Association moot court program. “It can be hard to find a
firm practicing Indian law in a meaningful way,” Boggan said. “That’s what
drove me to the clinic, to get a practical application of Indian law.”
As a
Tribal Judicial Support Clinic participant, Boggan helped
tribes develop new legislation and review existing legal code, double-checking
everything from grammar errors to federal statute references.
Boggan’s work to develop a guardianship code for a tribe
relocating to Kansas proved to be his most rewarding clinic experience.
“Guardianship is very important to Indian tribes because the federal government
has gone so far as to forcibly remove Indian children from their families and
place them with white families to assimilate them to white culture,” Boggan
said. “A guardianship code allows tribes
to keep their children in a way that not only serves the child’s interests, but
also serves the tribe’s interests in terms of allowing them to keep their culture,
to keep their tribe together.”
Boggan researched guardianship codes of other states and
tribes, then created a new one that accommodated his client’s circumstances yet
still followed the letter of the law. “Making sure it was a functioning code
was the hardest part,” Boggan said. “There were good parts of other codes that
I wanted to stitch in there, but everything had to be added in a way that it
would be functional by the time it got to the tribe.”
Clinic participants collaborate with tribal attorneys who
know their subject area well but lack resources and support. “Tribes have
really thin, stretched legal resources. They might have a sizeable tribe or
reservation, but have one tribal attorney or no tribal attorney. Anything we
can do helps them out tremendously,” Boggan said. “They don’t need to be told
what to do, they just need help doing it, and that’s where we come in.”
While the hands-on legal research and writing was
beneficial, Boggan found the practical aspects of team collaboration,
interoffice communication and client interaction to be among the most valuable
lessons of his clinic experience. Tribal Judicial Support Clinic students and
Professor Elizabeth Kronk Warner, the clinic director, met once a week to
discuss projects, interview clients and assign tasks.
“Most of the time Professor Kronk Warner put the client on
speaker phone and had us ask questions so we could get used to soliciting the
information we needed, get used to interacting with clients and get that
confidence to act like an attorney,” Boggan said. “We’d meet and talk about
what we were going to do, what our responsibilities would be, then start diving
in.”
Boggan plans to move back home to Tennessee to launch his legal
career. He’s confident that his clinic experience has prepared him for life
beyond law school, both because of his exposure to a specialized area of the
law and because of the hands-on experience he gained.
“Whenever you mention Indian law, it’s pretty impressive to
a lot of practitioners because it’s so unknown. Everyone knows about contracts,
torts, business associations, but hardly anyone knows about Indian law. If an
attorney has any connection to it, it stands out,” Boggan said.
“Law school gets so abstract. It’s important to learn how to
practice, and clinics start you on that path. If you take a class in contracts
or workers' comp, you aren’t going to be ready to try a case or go in front of a
mediator, but when you do a clinic and interact with real people and see how it
happens in the real world, you’ll be more confident.”
— Zach Boggan is a third-year law student from Kingsport, Tennessee.
Labels: federal Indian law, Indian law, practical experience, Tribal Judicial Support Clinic, tribal law, Zach Boggan
