WEBVTT

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Hi, my name is Schuyler Lamb.

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I am a junior at Mount Holyoke
and an art history major.

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I'm going to talk to you
a little bit about how

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I spent this summer.

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This summer, I was working
at Brooklyn Legal Services.

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A little bit about Brooklyn
Legal Services, Brooklyn Legal

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Services is a
50-year-old organization

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that provides free legal
advice and representation

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to residents of Brooklyn.

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They work in a wide range
of legal practice areas,

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including housing, government
benefits, employment, family,

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immigration, LGBTQ rights, and
the rights of people with HIV.

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It has a staff of over 120,
which includes attorneys,

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paralegals, and support staff.

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My unit was the LGBT
and HIV advocacy unit.

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The LGBTQ and HIV unit
represent LGBTQ and HIV-positive

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Brooklynites, and there
were a ton of cases--

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government benefit
cases, asylum cases,

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and other immigration cases,
and discrimination cases,

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among other things.

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So usually if you
have a case and you

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fit into either of
these categories,

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you would be sent to our
unit, case loads permitting

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for all the lawyers there.

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It started out as an HIV
unit during the AIDS crisis

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and only recently expanded
into a broader LGBTQ unit.

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And as an HIV unit,
it was primarily

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focused on government
benefits and housing.

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So what I did, I did a
bunch of different things.

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I'm going to talk to
you about some of them.

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One of the things
I did was I went

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to different courts and
administrative agencies

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with attorneys, including
housing court, the Equal

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Employment Opportunity
Commission,

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and federal district court.

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At the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission,

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I was able to see a case where
a transgender man was facing

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discrimination at work
and was filing a lawsuit

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against his place of work.

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I also helped clients
apply for a New York City

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rent freeze program for
low-income, disabled,

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and senior citizens.

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What the program did was it
would freeze people's rent,

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so that the rent would still
go up but the city would

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pay the difference.

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So what I did there was I called
clients who we currently had,

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and I saw if they were eligible.

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If they were eligible, we
brought them in and filled out

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the application, made sure we
had all of their paperwork,

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and sent it in to the
department of finance.

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One of the more interesting
things I did was I

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had to search public
records for a case.

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We were trying to prove
that our client had

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lived in his house
at the same time

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his mother for a
succession case.

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It was hard to kind
of think about what

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was in the public domain
that I could use to prove

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that they lived together.

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So I went to the New
York Public Library.

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I went through all
of the '90s phone

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books in Brooklyn in microfilm,
printed about 40 pages,

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and that was actually used
in discovery for that case.

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And then one of the
main things I did

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was I researched
country conditions.

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On my first day, I was
like, they're probably going

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to have me photocopy something.

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And they're like, can you look
up human rights violations

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in Kenya?

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And I was like, sure, sure.

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I'm definitely
qualified for that.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But what you do for
country conditions is it's

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for a asylum interview.

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You're presenting
a list of sources

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that proves that
that person is part

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of a particular social group
that is unsafe in their home

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country.

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So for us, that was often
people who were HIV-positive

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or who are LGBT.

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You would go look for things
from the State Department

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and other human rights
organizations as well

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as articles.

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And I was able to work closely
with a man for Turkmenistan.

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He's actually my age.

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He had experienced a lot of
violence in his home country

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and was applying for asylum.

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I was able to help get the
country conditions ready

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and also put in his initial
application for asylum.

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Anyway, what I took
away from it-- so I did

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get a lot of experience
researching and writing.

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I can find a Kenyan law for
you in like 30 minutes flat.

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But another thing I
got was an opportunity

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to look at the legal system.

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It wasn't a surprise that it's
a very [INAUDIBLE] system that

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is set up for people to fail.

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But the question
of the matter is

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you are guaranteed a
lawyer for a criminal case

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but not for your other cases.

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And having a lawyer, it
makes a huge difference

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in people's lives, whether
it's in housing court--

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having a lawyer can mean the
difference between keeping

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your home and being evicted.

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With asylum cases, it's
literally a life or death

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matter.

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And organizations are
underfunded and understaffed.

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The LGBTQ immigration
specialist in my office

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had over a hundred open
cases and the marker

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for how many you're allowed to
have at Brooklyn Legal Services

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is 40.

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So I came in
interested in what I

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was going to do but I really
developed a passion for it.

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And I'm hopefully going
to go to law school,

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and I hope to work on
LGBTQ immigration some day.

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[APPLAUSE]

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