Hi, my name is Schuyler Lamb.
I am a junior at Mount Holyoke and an art history major.
I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how
I spent this summer.
This summer, I was working at Brooklyn Legal Services.
A little bit about Brooklyn Legal Services, Brooklyn Legal
Services is a 50-year-old organization
that provides free legal advice and representation
to residents of Brooklyn.
They work in a wide range of legal practice areas,
including housing, government benefits, employment, family,
immigration, LGBTQ rights, and the rights of people with HIV.
It has a staff of over 120, which includes attorneys,
paralegals, and support staff.
My unit was the LGBT and HIV advocacy unit.
The LGBTQ and HIV unit represent LGBTQ and HIV-positive
Brooklynites, and there were a ton of cases--
government benefit cases, asylum cases,
and other immigration cases, and discrimination cases,
among other things.
So usually if you have a case and you
fit into either of these categories,
you would be sent to our unit, case loads permitting
for all the lawyers there.
It started out as an HIV unit during the AIDS crisis
and only recently expanded into a broader LGBTQ unit.
And as an HIV unit, it was primarily
focused on government benefits and housing.
So what I did, I did a bunch of different things.
I'm going to talk to you about some of them.
One of the things I did was I went
to different courts and administrative agencies
with attorneys, including housing court, the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission,
and federal district court.
At the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
I was able to see a case where a transgender man was facing
discrimination at work and was filing a lawsuit
against his place of work.
I also helped clients apply for a New York City
rent freeze program for low-income, disabled,
and senior citizens.
What the program did was it would freeze people's rent,
so that the rent would still go up but the city would
pay the difference.
So what I did there was I called clients who we currently had,
and I saw if they were eligible.
If they were eligible, we brought them in and filled out
the application, made sure we had all of their paperwork,
and sent it in to the department of finance.
One of the more interesting things I did was I
had to search public records for a case.
We were trying to prove that our client had
lived in his house at the same time
his mother for a succession case.
It was hard to kind of think about what
was in the public domain that I could use to prove
that they lived together.
So I went to the New York Public Library.
I went through all of the '90s phone
books in Brooklyn in microfilm, printed about 40 pages,
and that was actually used in discovery for that case.
And then one of the main things I did
was I researched country conditions.
On my first day, I was like, they're probably going
to have me photocopy something.
And they're like, can you look up human rights violations
in Kenya?
And I was like, sure, sure.
I'm definitely qualified for that.
[LAUGHTER]
But what you do for country conditions is it's
for a asylum interview.
You're presenting a list of sources
that proves that that person is part
of a particular social group that is unsafe in their home
country.
So for us, that was often people who were HIV-positive
or who are LGBT.
You would go look for things from the State Department
and other human rights organizations as well
as articles.
And I was able to work closely with a man for Turkmenistan.
He's actually my age.
He had experienced a lot of violence in his home country
and was applying for asylum.
I was able to help get the country conditions ready
and also put in his initial application for asylum.
Anyway, what I took away from it-- so I did
get a lot of experience researching and writing.
I can find a Kenyan law for you in like 30 minutes flat.
But another thing I got was an opportunity
to look at the legal system.
It wasn't a surprise that it's a very [INAUDIBLE] system that
is set up for people to fail.
But the question of the matter is
you are guaranteed a lawyer for a criminal case
but not for your other cases.
And having a lawyer, it makes a huge difference
in people's lives, whether it's in housing court--
having a lawyer can mean the difference between keeping
your home and being evicted.
With asylum cases, it's literally a life or death
matter.
And organizations are underfunded and understaffed.
The LGBTQ immigration specialist in my office
had over a hundred open cases and the marker
for how many you're allowed to have at Brooklyn Legal Services
is 40.
So I came in interested in what I
was going to do but I really developed a passion for it.
And I'm hopefully going to go to law school,
and I hope to work on LGBTQ immigration some day.
[APPLAUSE]