Survivor Representation & Advocacy Clinic
“The students all showed a ton of initiative in terms of representing their clients in these cases, but also really pursuing some of these systemic issues and really thinking through, ‘What can the clinic do to make these processes easier for survivors?'”
Written By Mike Weatherford
The first-ever Survivor Representation & Advocacy Clinic was “designed around a population rather than a type of law,” says Professor Courtney Cross, who launched the clinic for the spring 2024 semester.
Through a partnership with the SafeNest domestic and sexual violence crisis center in downtown Las Vegas, 10 2L and 3L students met weekly with clients looking to file for protection orders. They saw cases all the way through, though the end results varied..
“We’re applying much more of a harm-reduction lens to the work that we’re doing, rather than simply a victims-rights focus,” Cross adds. “We’re really looking holistically at folks, thinking about, ‘What do you want? Do you want to see this other person arrested? Do you want to see this case dropped because you need their income for child care?’”
“It is always the clients’ goals that drive what we’re doing, rather than some innate sense on our part about what is right or what is best,” she says. “We have to trust the instincts of our clients to know better than we could know.”
Students signed up sight-unseen for the first clinic in the spring of 2024, though some of them had taken Cross’s domestic-violence practicum the previous fall semester. All 10 juggled active and fast-moving cases for protective orders, she says.
The mutual benefits for both SafeNest and the students make it easy to imagine the long-running partnership Cross had in mind when she came to UNLV from the University of Alabama. “The beauty of it is how few cases the clinic students have. They may take longer to work things out, but they devote an unbelievable amount of time to a case someone else may be able to give only a fraction of the hours to, just by nature of the caseloads,” she says.
Students guided clients from initial interviews at SafeNest to same-or next-day initial hearings for protective orders, then followed through to be in for court three or four weeks later, fully ready to negotiate, put on a trial, argue to a judge.
The big picture surrounding domestic violence is Cross’s field of specialty. She came to Boyd Law expressly to continue the work she did at the University of Alabama, where her publications included a study of the problems women face when coming home after incarceration.