Law students around the country are creating an online manual to provide information to lawyers and to residents of hurricane-stricken areas in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
The manual examines state and federal laws that hurricane survivors may encounter as they contend with insurance claims, landlord-tenant disputes, bankruptcy filings, and consumer scams. It is being posted on several Web sites, including the University of Mississippi School of Law’s (http://www.katrinalegalrelief .org/wiki).
The manual will be posted as a wiki, or communal Web site that can be edited by those who visit it. For instance, if hurricane survivors are being preyed on in one area by a fraudulent business, a legal expert could update the site to include that information. Other users could post comments and questions.
The manual will include advice from law professors at the Universities of California at Berkeley, of Georgia, of Mississippi, of New Mexico, and at Drake and Harvard Universities. The Association of American Law Schools and the Clinical Legal Education Association are also participating in the project.
Faculty experts are reviewing the students’ work, as is the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
“Initially, people are taking care of necessities like shelter and food, but as the enormity of how the hurricane affects their lives becomes clear, any number of legal questions are coming up,” says Suzanne Levitt, a professor of law and director of clinical programs at Drake University Law School, where 11 students are participating in the project. “This is designed to help them get started.”
Elizabeth Horton Plasket, a second-year law student at Drake, is doing research on consumer-protection laws in Mississippi that protect people from fraud.
“A friend told me about an elderly woman in her church who lives 25 miles from Biloxi, in the middle of nowhere, who had a tree slice her house right in half,” says Ms. Plasket. “She called a tree contractor who wanted to charge her $4,000 to remove the tree. That’s the kind of abuse we want to prevent.”
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Meanwhile, some students at the University of New Orleans are preparing to head back to class, but in virtual classrooms.
As of last week, more than 6,600 students had signed up to take at least one course from the university when it starts its semester this week. Most of those courses will be taught online, by UNO professors who have temporarily relocated to other cities.
That number is about a third of the 17,000 students who had planned to attend the college before Katrina devastated the city. But it is more than college officials had projected, says Juan A. Henriquez, director of academic computing for the university. “It looks very good,” he says.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 52, Issue 8, Page A31
