Eight years ago, Julia Devanthéry, a housing justice advocate, founded the Housing Justice for Survivors Project at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School to train clinical law students to represent survivors of domestic and sexual violence facing housing instability.
This year, Devanthéry has designed and launched a curricular innovation initiative to ensure students across the Legal Services Center’s six public interest clinics develop consistent advocacy skills to be effective and inclusive lawyers — on issues ranging from client-centered lawyering to trauma-informed advocacy to lawyering for racial justice.
Through six in-house clinics — Consumer Protection Clinic, Family Justice Clinic, Housing Law Clinic, LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, Tax Litigation Clinic, and the Veterans Law & Disability Benefits Clinic — Harvard’s Legal Services Center helps train the next generation of public interest lawyers while providing free representation for individuals and families with legal needs related to debt and financial problems, disability, domestic violence, housing, income tax, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and veterans’ issues.
“Julia reflects the very best of clinical education and LSC. She is a truly gifted teacher, a fearless and highly skilled lawyer, and a visionary advocate who has created new models to achieve housing and gender justice,” said Daniel Nagin, faculty director of WilmerHale Legal Services Center and Veterans Legal Clinic.
Devanthéry, who was honored as a Top Women of Law by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in 2022, joined the WilmerHale Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School as a staff attorney in 2013, and she has co-taught Harvard Law School’s Housing Law Clinic, which represents low-income tenants in summary process eviction cases, for the past 10 years.
After serving as a lecturer on law for a decade, Devanthéry realized that many of the LSC clinics were teaching similar content across many different clinical seminars. In order to create a more consistent student experience, as well as to build community and shared knowledge building across the Legal Services Center, Devanthéry developed the idea to create several modules of shared curriculum.
Working closely with fellow clinicians, Devanthéry has designed cross-clinic joint sessions to create opportunities for students to connect and collaborate across the Legal Services Center’s specialty-area clinics, while developing consistent skills and ensuring best advocacy practices across clinics.
Last fall, Devanthéry led the launch of two of these modules for students, combining more than 60 students and a dozen practitioners across the LSC clinics. The sessions focused on foundational ethics for clinical work, client-centered lawyering and lawyering against discrimination and bias.
The opportunity to come together as a group across substantive legal areas to grapple with different scenarios drawn from clients’ lived experience and talk about what client-centered lawyering means in concrete terms really resonated with students, said Devanthéry.
“The students who enroll in LSC clinics have the unique opportunity to fight for justice alongside individual clients while simultaneously learning the fundamental lawyering skills they need to practice law on day one after graduation.”
“Students got a lot out of learning more about our client-centered lawyering philosophy at LSC, and why it is core to our values and who we are. Sharing this framing with students early in the semester allowed them to establish relationships with clients that prioritized self-determination and empowerment,” said Devanthéry.
To continue and build on this work, Devanthéry was named Director of Clinical Pedagogy and Curricular Innovation at the Legal Services Center and a visiting assistant clinical professor, effective Jan. 1.
“We are so fortunate that in her new roles, Julia will continue to expand the indispensable leadership she provides for the LSC and HLS communities,” said Nagin.
“I am honored to have the opportunity to continue to serve LSC’s students, clients, and staff in this new capacity. It is a privilege to work at LSC alongside so many incredible advocates in the fight for justice in Boston. I cannot imagine a better place to take on the many challenges that lie ahead for our client communities. I am also excited to collaborate with my colleagues across LSC’s six clinics,” said Devanthéry. “The students who enroll in LSC clinics have the unique opportunity to fight for justice alongside individual clients while simultaneously learning the fundamental lawyering skills they need to practice law on day one after graduation. I look forward to finding new ways to foster the development of students’ professional identities and their commitment to addressing the persistent access to justice chasm in this country.”
“I’m thrilled that Julia is stepping into this new role,” said Christopher Bavitz, HLS’s Vice Dean for Experiential and Clinical Education. “Students, clients, and all of us who teach in the HLS clinical program will benefit from her efforts and her considerable expertise.”
Devanthéry’s pedagogical and classroom design draws upon her long history of legal service. During her career, Devanthéry has assisted thousands of individuals in evictions, discrimination cases, subsidy termination cases, and cases involving early tenancy terminations, and she has secured life-saving eviction protection for domestic violence victims living in subsidized housing. She has also litigated precedent-setting appeals including a at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that established a domestic violence survivor’s right to raise a Violence Against Women Act defense to her eviction from public housing. She has also developed tenants’ rights publications published in the Boston Bar Journal.
She is also the co-author of the evictions chapter in “Legal Tactics: Tenants Rights in Massachusetts,” hailed as “the most comprehensive handbook on tenants rights in Massachusetts.” Since the overwhelming majority of tenants go through eviction without a lawyer, the tenants’ rights information and tactics included in Devanthéry’s evictions chapter serve as a lifeline for unrepresented litigants as well as a primer in tenants rights for advocates and new attorneys.
Over her tenure at Harvard Law, she has supervised countless students, many of whom have lauded her for her mentorship.
“Julia is the mentor that every law student needs. She is not only a brilliant, innovative attorney who works miracles for her clients, but she is an amazing teacher and supervisor as well,” said Lexi Gray ’23, a current Equal Justice Works Fellow at Northeast Legal Aid who said the training and supervision she received from Devanthéry during her three semesters in HLS’s Housing Clinic prepared her “extremely well” for her current work. “When I think about the advocate I hope to be, I think of Julia.”
Emily Mannheimer ’19, an associate at Jenner & Block in New York who served in Harvard’s Housing Law Clinic for three semesters as a student and who worked with Devanthéry on a case that ultimately went up to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, praised Devanthéry’s effectiveness as an advocate and teacher.
Working closely with Devanthéry during her time at the law school, Mannheimer said she came to understand that, for Devanthéry, educating students and serving clients were not separate goals.
“Rather, the best way to achieve justice for people facing housing crises is to educate the next batch of attorneys to understand and navigate the system, and the best way to educate is to patiently and graciously model a commitment to achieving justice,” said Mannheimer.
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