Unmarked? Criminal Record Clearing and Employment Outcomes

An estimated one in three American adults has a criminal record. While some records are for serious offenses, most are for arrests or relatively lowlevel misdemeanors. In an era of heightened security concerns, easily available data, and increased criminal background checks, these records act as a substantial barrier to gainful employment and other opportunities. Harvard sociologist Devah Pager describes people with criminal records as “marked” with a negative job credential. In response to this problem, lawyers have launched unmarking programs to help people take advantage of legal record clearing remedies. We studied a random sample of participants in one such program to analyze the impact of the record clearing intervention on employment outcomes. Using methods to control for selection bias and the effects of changes in the economy in our data, we found evidence that: (1) the record clearing intervention boosted participants’ employment rates and average real earnings, and (2) people sought record clearing remedies after a period of suppressed earnings. More research needs to be done to understand the durability of the positive impact and its effects in different local settings and labor markets, but these findings suggest that the record clearing intervention makes a meaningful difference in employment outcomes for people with criminal records. The findings also suggest the importance of early intervention to increase employment opportunities for people with criminal records. Such interventions might include more legal services, but they might also include record clearing by operation of law or another mechanism that does not put the onus of unmarking on the person with a criminal record

The Clinic Effect

Lawyers, law professors and experts on professional education perennially proclaim that law schools teach students to think like lawyers but not to act like them. Legal education's emphasis in the cognitive dimension comes at the expense of critical professional development in the skills (expertise) and civic (identity) dimensions. Clinical legal education has long been prescribed as a pedagogic corrective to these perceived deficits in law school training, but little research exists to inform our understanding of whether much less how, when, why and for whom clinics deliver on this promise. With data from a new, nationally representative survey of early-career attorneys in the United States, this article explores evidence of clinical education's impact in the skills and civic dimensions of lawyer training. In the skills dimension, new lawyers rate clinical training more highly for making the transition to the actual practice of law than many other law school experiences, particularly the doctrinal core frequently the object of the standard critique. In the civic dimension, the study finds no evidence of a relationship between clinical training experiences and new lawyers' pro bono service, and no consistent evidence of a relationship between clinical training experiences and new lawyers' civic participation. Although there is no evidence of a general relationship between clinical training experiences and public service employment, the study finds a strong relationship between clinical training and career choice for those young attorneys who recall that they came into law hoping to improve society or help individuals. For this group of new lawyers, clinical training may have been an important factor in sustaining or accelerating their original civic commitments. As a result of these findings and the continued dearth of data on these important questions, the article concludes with a call for a new generation of research into the effects of clinical legal education on the preparation of students for the practice and profession of law. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.</p

The Clinic Lab Office

The article focuses on the clinical legal education movements which promote common agendas for measurement of stability and security in the U.S. It describes the assistance of law school clinics to empirical research program for providing delivery of legal services in poor communities. It emphasizes on the need for civil justice research to reform a strong legal services delivery system for better legal services.</p