Past, Present & Future

Staffed out to various groups around the city, UDSL students have been working with New Orleans’ past, present and future. Molly Buckman (3L), Jay Rivera (3L) and others have been wading through the history of families in New Orleans to establish ownership of homes destroyed in Katrina and her aftermath. “This is nothing like I learned in Ohio,” Buckman quipped. Louisiana operates under the Napleonic Code and property interests are more complicated then a DNA helix. Suppose Mary bought her home in1930. Mary had five children and they all grew up in the home but only Robert, Mary’s son, lived in the house when Mary died. Robert passed the house on to his son Michael and he, in turn, passed the house on to his daughter Lisa. Lisa is living there when Katrina hits and Lisa now needs FEMA grants to rebuild. Only she is not the owner of record. USDL students have been securing releases of interest from all the siblings, cousins and second cousins. Why? Because when Mary died her estate was divided into fifths – one for each child. When those children died, their interest was divided among that child’s children and so on. “You can have 30 or 35 people to track down to get releases from so the person living in the house at the time can get help to rebuild,” explained Buckman.

In another part of the Pro Bono Project, students worked on securing divorces. They filled out papers for clients, searched for missing spouses and finished up cases started by students that came before. “I got two people divorced today,” Kelly Diggins gleefully announced one day on our commute home. Well before Katrina, Louisiana had a procedure to secure divorces from missing spouses. It involved getting something called a curator – a lawyer to represent the missing partner’s interest. There is a desperate need for curators now: Benefits and federal grants can by stymied by a long-dead marriage. If someone has applied for FEMA money or state benefits and is still married – even though the spouse is long gone – the “familial” income can disqualify the New Orleans resident from funding. “Our boss told us that it used to be no problem to get attorneys to act as curators because they did their pro bono work in their free time,” Diggins said. “But they lost their homes to Katrina, too, and now are all their free time is spent trying to get their lives back to normal.” But for at least a few people in desperate need, the divorce team at the Pro Bono Project made a difference in someone’s life today.

And Jennifer Maco (No-L) was working on the future. “I wrote a grant proposal to fund a project to bring diversified, educated women into New Orleans. The idea is to get women to move here and live in a particular community in homes in the area. In exchange for the forgiveness of their student loans, they would be given a place to live and be required to spend so many hours sharing the skills, their education with the residents of the community.” She also worked on a proposal to fund building of eco-friendly homes that would be built using an apprenticeship program which would target residents for training as plumbers, electricians and other specialized skills. “They get the training and become skilled tradesman by building these new, better homes. Everybody wins.”