Gabrielle Grossman ’24 is a recipient of the 2024 Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Awards. The awards are presented annually to students from each law school for outstanding clinical coursework and contributions to the clinical community. Students are selected by full-time clinical faculty at each law school who are members of CLEA.
Grossman is honored with the 2024 CLEA Outstanding Clinical Externship Student Award in recognition of her extraordinary commitment to the Child Advocacy Clinic, where she has completed four semesters of externship placements across three organizations. As a Fellow of the Youth Advocacy & Policy Lab (Y-Lab), Grossman leveraged each externship and Fellow experience into a comprehensive education and developed a sophisticated understanding of the youth advocacy landscape.
“My experiences with the Child Advocacy Clinic have far and away been the highlight of my time at Harvard Law,” says Grossman. “It changed my life and helped me discover my passion for working with kids and centering the autonomy of young people. This award is a testament to the hard work that Crisanne Hazen and Mike Gregory put into making youth advocacy clinical opportunities at Harvard such a wonderful experience.”
The Child Advocacy Clinic offers students the opportunity to work with external organizations on substantive topics related to youth advocacy including child welfare, education, and juvenile justice. Grossman has taken full advantage of these opportunities, completing externships with Pine Tree Legal Assistance, Children’s Rights, and the Juvenile Law Center. Each opportunity was a new educational experience: in client representation, impact litigation, and juvenile legal system reform, respectively.
“Each of the three agencies at which Gabby has externed has a substantive focus on one of three different child-facing systems, and each agency employs a different primary advocacy strategy,” says Crisanne Hazen, lecturer on law and director of the clinic. “The result of this constellation of placements is that Gabby has embraced the spirit of the Y-Lab mission: to understand in a deep and holistic way the complexities of working in the youth advocacy field.”
“I’ve learned so much from my peers within Y-Lab, from Crisanne and Mike’s wonderful guidance, and from all my supervisors at my clinical placements at Pine Tree, Children’s Rights and the Juvenile Law Center,” Grossman reflects. “With each internship or even individual young person I worked with, I learned that the obstacles my clients faced were multi-faceted, and therefore required a holistic response. I always wanted to gain more experience, to look for more perspectives from which I could approach my advocacy for young people. I’ve been lucky enough to do direct services, policy work, and impact litigation involving the three major child-facing systems: education law, foster care, and the juvenile legal system. I’m so grateful to the clinic for helping me find my passion and getting to work with young people who teach me so much about how to be a better and more creative advocate every day.”
Hazen commends Grossman’s determined spirit and positive attitude as integral to her talent as a student attorney: “She is a compassionate and empathetic advocate, earning the trust of her clients and her supervisors to handle the great weight of the work before her.”
As a Y-Lab Fellow, Grossman has made a mark on the child advocacy field at HLS: She has mentored students interested in youth rights, completed a capstone writing project, and served as a teaching fellow for the Art of Social Change course. Grossman also spent a summer interning with the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice. After graduation, she will be clerking in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and she hopes to do litigation in pursuit of youth education rights in the future.
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