Faculty Spotlight: Jennifer Rosen Valverde on Teaching Advocacy in Law

Jennifer Rosen Valverde, Esq., MSW, is a Professor of Law on the Newark campus. She spends most of her time educating students in the Education and Health Law Clinic (EHLC), where students “learn by doing” as they advocate on behalf of children with disabilities and their families around matters such as special education and social determinants of health. In 2010, Professor Valverde co-founded and for the next decade served as the legal director of H.E.A.L. (Health, Education, Advocacy and Law) Collaborative, a medical-legal-social work partnership with the Pediatrics Primary Care Clinic then at Rutgers-NJ Medical School.  As Rutgers’ first interprofessional program to bridge Arts and Sciences with Biomedical Health Sciences, H.E.A.L. aimed to improve the health and well-being of children and families by addressing the non-medical causes of poor health that typically result from poverty; it advanced this mission by providing interprofessional education opportunities (for those studying law, social work, medicine, and public health) and offering collaborative, community-engaged service delivery. Professor Valverde’s scholarship has focused on special education law, cross-systems educational advocacy, clinical law teaching, social determinants of health (a.k.a. health justice), and interprofessional education and collaboration.

"I aim to bring students and professionals across disciplines at the University together with the community to change the way that we define, approach and address complex education, health and social justice issues."

How does your research, scholarship or professional experience inspire your teaching? 

My teaching, legal practice, research and scholarship are inextricably linked. Each piece feeds the others in a cycle that keeps me forever thinking, reflecting, innovating, studying, writing, and… repeat. I find that I learn from my students, my clients and the representation and advocacy processes just as much as I teach. These experiences—good and bad—provide excellent opportunities for dialogue and reflection as well as for reassessment and reorientation of one’s norms, values, assumptions, beliefs and perspectives on the law and lawyering; on issues of race, poverty and equity; on resilience; on collaboration; on best practices in clinical teaching and legal practice; and more. One example of how my research inspired my teaching comes from my years co-directing H.E.A.L. Collaborative, a medical-legal-social work partnership that aimed to identify and address the non-medical causes of poor health for children with disabilities and their families. We surveyed clients pre- and post-H.E.A.L. involvement on whether self-reported stress levels decreased following receipt of legal and social work services and learned that clients reported statistically significant reductions in their stress levels following H.E.A.L. We also surveyed graduate students in law and social work as well as medical residents on their opinions about interprofessional education and collaboration at the start and the end of their participation in the program. Interestingly, while students had unquestionably positive feelings about collaboration at first, their sentiments grew more negative over time because true teamwork is hard. I realized, then, that collaboration skills are not innate and must be taught, resulting in the development and implementation of a curriculum specifically focused on communication and working with others. Having the opportunity to innovate in my scholarship on clinical legal education and special education advocacy, apply these innovations in my teaching and lawyering, assess their efficacy in my research, and vice versa, keeps me engaged, excited, and eager to learn and do more.  

What is one innovative or unique teaching practice you’d like to share? 

I routinely incorporate social work principles into my law teaching, although I don’t always tell my law students I am doing it because it is often perceived as “outside the norm” of traditional legal education (i.e. not in my job description). However, in my view, they are critical skills for the social justice advocacy we do in the EHLC and beneficial regardless of what area of law they end up practicing. For example, I teach law students to perform social histories as they interview potential clients, so they understand the person both as an individual and in context (person-situation-environment). I incorporate journaling and process recordings so that students are pushed to analyze their communications with others, both verbal and nonverbal, and reflect on their experiences. I raise topics such as secondary trauma, self-care, trauma-informed care, etc. in my weekly case rounds with students so they can process their feelings associated with client work. I have students use systems theory to map clients’ multi-system involvement and pinpoint where best to intervene and the effects that interventions in one system will have on the others. And, in recent years, I adopted a narrative therapy framework to help students develop a positive professional identity. I use this framework to encourage students to explore and deconstruct dominant law student and lawyer narratives; to expose the principle discourses that underlie these narratives; and to envision the lawyer they want to be. This creates space for students to re-author what it means to be a lawyer and to practice law in a way that aligns with their own values and beliefs while promoting the public good.  

How does this work advance the university's mission as a publicly engaged anchor institution?  

The EHLC and H.E.A.L. Collaborative both serve as a bridge between “town” (i.e. the City of Newark) and “gown” (i.e. the University). The EHLC is one of 14 law clinics housed in the law school in Newark; the clinics provide a training ground for law students while meeting vital legal needs of individuals, groups, and organizations in the local community and across the state. Through this work, I aim to bring students and professionals across disciplines at the University together with the community to change the way that we define, approach and address complex education, health and social justice issues. Law students partner with the Greater Newark families we represent to identify their legal and social needs and determine the best way(s) to address them. This can take a variety of forms, such as helping a parent of a child with a disability to obtain proper educational programming and services from the local school district; or representing local and statewide disability- and education-related organizations as a “friend of the court” in a federal court class action challenging the state’s failure to adhere to the 45-day timeline for hearing and resolving special education due process matters; or partnering with local area medical providers and health-related associations to get a city window guard ordinance amended to place the onus on landlords to inquire if children under age ten reside or spend substantial time in a rental unit and install protective window guards to prevent window falls if the answer is yes.  Our client-centered approach to legal representation and advocacy and community engagement are pillars of this work.  Ultimately, I hope to stop the revolving door of needing legal representation by empowering clients and community in the problem-solving process.  

Also from or about Jennifer Rosen Valverde:

• Jennifer N. Rosen Valverde, A Panoramic IDEA: Cabining the Snapshot Rule in Special Education Disputes, 55 Ariz. St. L. J. 1445 (2023)

• Barajas-Ochoa A, Mackie TI, Fofana B, Rosen Valverde JN (2023). On Legal Guardianship: An Exploratory Assessment of Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of Resident Physicians. Medical Teacher, 2023 Sep 18:1-7. DOI: 10.1080/0142159X.2023.2256965.

• Jennifer N. Rosen Valverde, Using Narrative Therapy to Re-Author the Dominant Law Student Narrative, Foster Professional Identity Development, and Rediscover Hope, 28 Clin. L. Rev. 329 (2021)

• Traba C, Jain A, Pianucci K, Rosen Valverde J, Chen S. (2021). Down to the Last Dollar: Utilizing a Virtual Budgeting Exercise to Recognize Implicit Bias. MedEdPORTAL. 2021 Dec 6;17:11199. DOI: 10.15766/mep_2374-8265.11199.  

• Jennifer N. Rosen Valverde, Jeffrey Backstrand, Laurie Hills & Hanan Tanuos (2019). Medical-Legal Partnership Impact on Parents' Perceived Stress: A Pilot Study, Behavioral Medicine, 2019 Jan-Mar; 45(1):70-77. DOI: 10.1080/08964289.2018.1481011.

• Jennifer Rosen Valverde, Preparing Tomorrow's Lawyers to Tackle 21st Century Health and Social Justice Issues, 95 Denver L. Rev. 539 (2018)

• Jennifer Rosen Valverde, Counterpoint—An Indefensible Idea: Eliminating Individualization from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 46 J. L. & Educ. 235 (2017)

• Jennifer Rosen Valverde, A Poor IDEA: Statute of Limitations Decisions Cement Second-Class Remedial Scheme for Low-Income Children with Disabilities in the Third Circuit, 41 Fordham Urb. L. J. 599 (2014.

• Jennifer Rosen Valverde, Hindsight is 20/20: Finding Teachable Moments in the Extraordinary and Applying them to the Ordinary, 20 Clin. L. Rev. 267 (Fall 2013).

Reader Bonus! Jennifer’s Favorite Books:

In my spare time I prefer to read fiction. Recent books I have greatly enjoyed are The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, James by Percival Everett, and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.