Yet when contact is so limited that it prohibits crucial infant-parent bonding, it cannot be in the child's best interests. The child's lawyer can advocate for more frequent contact and use of volunteers or other relatives to help facilitate visits. Or, the child's attorney could advocate for the child to live with other relatives, rather than in foster care, while the parents work to improve themselves and their home sufficiently for the child to be returned to them. Sometimes the child's lawyer will side with the agency and other times with the parents, but in any event the lawyer remains independent of either the agency or the parents and advocates only the child's interests. District Judge Jeanne Meurer of Austin speaks to the law students every semester.
Great creativity is required to serve the interests of the individual child.
Both judges emphasize the crucial role that a student attorney ad litem can play in the litigation. Our clients have been as young as a week old and as old as seventeen. They come from all social and economic strata, but most are poor. Representing these children is an eye-opening experience to most law students, an education about a world many of them never had encountered before enrolling in the Clinic. This representation also becomes part of the law students' legal education.