Legal Aid chief counsel quoted in The Daily Record

Legal Aid Chief Counsel Shawn Boehringer

An article about FreeState Legal Project, a new legal service that provides help to members of the LGBT community, quoted Maryland Legal Aid’s chief counsel about the niche FreeState fills.

“Shawn Boehringer, chief counsel at Maryland Legal Aid, said his organization deals with the LGBT community on a regular basis, especially through a federal grant targeting the legal problems of people with HIV/AIDS,” wrote reporter Kristi Tousignant. “It also handles a limited number of employment cases, Boehringer said, but it does not do any name-change work or estate planning for LGBT individuals, like FreeState.

“’There is a niche there they have identified,’ Boehringer said. ‘There is an unmet need there they are addressing through their work that we would probably not address at Legal Aid. . . . To have one group focus on those issues I think is entirely appropriate and needed. To have an organization that focuses on that issue, that puts some life into the protections that community now has.’”

To read the article (behind a pay wall), click here.

Human rights lawyering comes to Maryland

From the Public News Service:

BALTIMORE – “Human rights lawyering” is a new mission for Maryland Legal Aid, which has been selected as a project partner to explore ways to integrate human rights arguments and international law into the everyday cases handled by Legal Aid.

Chief Counsel Shawn Boehringer says basic human rights are at the root of most of their legal work.

“The three most important needs of our clients are affordable housing, access to health care, and jobs that pay a living wage. We created this human rights framework to try to address those issues.”

Local staff will receive training and support to help them include human rights points in the cases they work on.

Project director Lauren Bartlett at American University says there are many international human rights conventions and treaties that have been approved by Congress and that could play a role in local court cases.

“A right to housing under the International Convention for Economic, Social, Cultural Rights. Or, talk about a right to housing might help a judge interpret state law.”

Maryland Legal Aid was one of two partners selected nationwide for the Local Human Rights Lawyering Project. It’s part of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law. The other partner is a legal aid bureau in southern Texas.

Building a human rights framework

Legal Aid Chief Counsel Shawn Boehringer

Maryland Legal Aid Chief Council Shawn Boehringer has an article in the summer edition of the MIE Journal, “Building the Momentum for a Human Rights Framework in Legal Services Programs.” “[T]he human rights framework provides meaningful leadership development for newer staff, can energize their work, and give them a sense of purpose in their day-to-day advocacy,” Boehringer wrote. “These factors will hopefully lead to greater retention of talent and can build on the emerging presence of human rights curricula and programs at U.S. law schools.” Maryland Legal Aid recently adopted a human rights framework for its advocacy.

Legal Aid featured on Midday with Dan Rodricks

Maryland Legal Aid Chief Counsel Shawn Boehringer was a guest on today’s Midday talk radio show, hosted by Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks on WYPR-FM. The topic was proposed funding cuts to the Legal Services Corporation now pending in Congress.

“We’re seeing triple the number of unemployment cases in most of our offices,” said Boehringer when asked if the number of clients coming to Legal Aid is up. “The proposed cut to LSC would reduce our funding by $774,000, which would pay the salaries of 12 attorneys. And the cut would come at a time when we’ve lost local funding–Baltimore City was $250,000 a year and it’s proposing cutting to zero. And we’ve lost significant amounts in Anne Arundel and Harford counties.”