For about a month this summer, some extraordinary students will occupy the classrooms in Keller Hall. The School of Law will be one of six Ohio law schools to host the Law & Leadership Summer Institute, a program that gives students who have just completed 8th grade the chance to develop leadership skills, confidence, and vision, as well as an introduction to the study of law. Its goal is to establish and sustain a pipeline, as the students advance through high school, into the legal professions for disadvantaged students from underserved communities.

The idea, based on New York City’s Legal Outreach, is to target students the summer after 8th grade and begin preparing them for college by focusing on the nourishment of skills useful in legal studies that will also assist them in their current studies, for college prep, and any profession they may ultimately choose, explained Maxine Thomas, vice president, secretary, and general counsel for the Kettering Foundation, and executive director of the Law and Leadership Summer Institute.

Ideally, this effort will result in more minorities entering the legal profession in Ohio, where currently African-Americans compose 3.7% of attorneys, Asian-Americans 1% and Latinos 0.9%, according to the ACLU of Ohio.

A pilot version of the program ran last summer at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and Cleveland State University Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

UDSL student Simone Booth, president of BLSA, was an instructor at last summer’s Law and Leadership Institute in Columbus. “We taught the students how to prepare opening statements for trial and we taught them Ohio criminal law through games like Jeopardy,” she explained. “We also tried to find movies that they were familiar with to demonstrate such topics as jury selection, cross examination, examining witnesses, etc. At the end of the program we prepared the students to be lawyers for the prosecution, defense, and to be witnesses in their own mock trial.”

“We started out with 8th graders who seemed scared to death and seemed to be wondering what they had gotten themselves into and we ended with future attorneys who did not want to leave the program, their new friends, and their teachers/mentors,” Booth said.

This year the program will expand to six law schools, including UDSL. Maxine Thomas has worked with Professor Dennis Greene to coordinate the programs both years. Thomas keeps an office in UDSL’s Law Clinic and Dean Lisa Kloppenberg says that her presence on campus has been a wonderful resource for UDSL students.

“Maxine is a stellar example for our students and all lawyers, using her juris doctor degree in creative ways to promote justice, racial fairness, and equality,” Kloppenberg said. “She is not shy about rolling up her sleeves, getting people to collaborate and putting her immense energies to work addressing problems that might overwhelm many people. With her intellect, practical wisdom and problem solving skills, Ms. Thomas models what a lawyer can achieve as a leader in her community and profession.”

The program will run from early July to early August. Simone Booth looks forward to working again in the Institute. “I believe the program was more effective than the founders could have expected,” she said. “I had the opportunity to expose youth to the practice of law and cultivate their young minds and help them to see their full potential. I felt that I really made a difference in their lives.”

The Law & Leadership Summer Institute is a partnership between the Supreme Court of Ohio, the Ohio Bar Association, the Ohio Center for Law-Related Education and all nine Ohio law schools, including UDSL.