The document outlines a 1 hour and 40 minute lesson plan on the North/South dynamic and how it impacts international human rights law clinics. It includes objectives, materials, and a detailed agenda. The agenda involves a warm up on the North/South concepts, a group activity to discuss whether clinics reproduce unequal relationships, and presentations of readings on this topic which provide differing perspectives. The readings examine issues such as whether fact-finding reports adequately represent local contexts and knowledge or reinforce imbalances. Students are asked to critically examine the relationships between clinics in the Global North and South.

1. 1
Lawyers & Justice Lesson Plan
Lesson: The North/South and Immigration Justice
Date: November 1, 2016
Total Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Prepared By: Teri Meyer, VB, JL, and IS
Objectives
 Students will understand how to:
o Explain the Global North/South dynamic and how it impacts international human
rights law clinics.
 Students will be able to:
o Critically examine arguments for and against the unequal relationship between
clinics in the Global North and South
Materials
 Assigned before class:
o Survey on polleverywhere.com. Questions will include:
 Are you interested in human rights or international law?
 Are you familiar with the concepts of the Global North and Global South?
 Are you interested in taking a legal clinic?
 What is the purpose of a legal clinic?
 Distributed in class and attached below:
o Reading 1 handout – Daniel Bonilla
o Reading 2 handout – James Silk
o Reading 3 handout – Deena Hurwitz
Agenda Time
Group Presentation Introduction:
1. Begin by going around the room and asking everyone to give the first
thought that comes to mind when they think of human rights and
immigration.
2. We will then lead the class in taking a short quiz on PBS about
immigration. The link to the quiz is:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/immigration-quiz-2/.
2:00 - 2:10

2. 2
The Global North & Global South
Warm Up
 Review survey results participants completed before class
 Play YouTube clip from an episode of “West Wing” that highlights key
North/South issues
o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY
2:10 – 2:16
Re-cap
 Briefly go over key concepts from video showing inequality
 Mercator vs. Peters Gall Map
o http://www.businessinsider.com/mercator-projection-v-gall-
peters-projection-2013-12
 Brandt Line Map
o https://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/6AFE1B7F-9141-472A-95C1-
52AA291AA679/0/60sGlobalNorthSouthDivide.pdf
2:16 – 2:18
Group Activity: “Think-Pair-Share”
 Participants will be placed in 3 groups
 The task is to consider this question raised by Professor Daniel Bonilla:
“Do law clinics reproduce unequal relationships between the Global
North and South?
 Each group will be given a paper with selected quotes from the literature
that supports or refutes the task question.
 Participants will discuss in small groups and then the facilitator will ask
for brief whole class feedback about their discussions.
 This portion will conclude with maps which will set up the next portion of
the presentation.
o The maps show refugee destinations and nations with high
immigrant populations
o Refugee Destinations:
https://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/6AFE1B7F-9141-472A-95C1-
52AA291AA679/0/60sGlobalNorthSouthDivide.pdf
o Immigrant Populations:
http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=15
2:18 – 2:30
Read 2 mins.
Discuss 5
mins.
Feedback
5mins.
Other Presentations Omitted 2:30 – 3:30

3. 3
Reading 1 – Daniel Bonilla
Question: Do law clinics reproduce unequal relationships between the Global North and
South?
Daniel Bonilla has argued that legal clinics in the Global North and South 1) reproduce unequal
North-South relationships in legal academia 2) because the educational benefits to students
and professors take precedence over social justice objectives and 3) it is advantageous for legal
clinics form the North and South to work together.1 He applies this argument to three types of
clinics: fact-finding missions, consultancies, and conferences.
Task: Read the following excerpt on fact-finding missions.2 With a partner discuss the
questions that follow.
[T]hese projects also have serious structural issues. First, the idea that you can understand
and evaluate a complex social, political, cultural or economic situation after a few days of
fieldwork is questionable. Usually the reports of fact-finding missions include not only
descriptive sections but also critical and normative ones. I wonder what the reaction of Canadian
law schools would be if a group of law professors and students from Argentina or South Africa
published a report on the situation of indigenous people in Canada that was the result of a one- or
two-week visit to the country. Most Canadian professors and students would likely ignore the
text or criticize it harshly. As you can see, these types of clinical projects are sustained by a
questionable attitude rooted in the beliefs that the legal academia of the Global North is so solid
that it can produce knowledge after a tangential direct contact with the reality being studied and
that a week or two is enough time within which to determine what the problems are, how to
evaluate them and how to fix them.
Second, the relationship that such projects establish with the local academic knowledge is
problematic. Although the reports resulting from fact finding missions are based largely on the
information generated by professors and activists from the country visited, they are rarely
presented as a synthesis of this knowledge or as heavily dependent on it. Rather, these
documents are usually presented as a description of a set of facts that is articulated after direct
contact with the reality of the country under study. The very name of the project indicates this:
'fact-finding mission." Something very similar happens with the critical and normative sections
that these reports typically include. Although these texts are also usually dependent on local
knowledge, they are offered as a standalone product. Obviously, I do not wish to say that these
reports do not explicitly refer to the local academic products on which they are based. They
usually have numerous footnotes. I want to say only that the typical forms that give structure to
these types of projects tend to marginalize the local academic products that support them. The
report is delivered by its authors, and generally received by the international organization or
government institution, as an original product that describes and evaluates the reality of the
country visited. However, given one or two weeks of fieldwork, it is obvious that this will be
1
Daniel Bonilla, Legal Clinics in the Global North and South: Between Equality and Subordination - An Essay, 16
YALE HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT L. J. 1, 3-4 (2013).
2
Id. at 22-23

4. 4
mainly a synthesis of preexisting local knowledge.
In addition, this document becomes a standard text for understanding the reality of the
country of the Global South. Paradoxically, the success of the reports helps to reinforce the
negative effects on local legal knowledge. The document is positioned as an unavoidable
reference for understanding the problem being examined, simply because it was written in
English by a group of professors and students from the Global North. Consequently, the
assumption of the Production Well comes into operation. The context that actually creates legal
knowledge is that of the Global North.
Questions for Discussion
After reading, discuss in any order you like.
 What are the 3 main critiques Daniel Bonilla makes regarding human rights fact-finding
reports?
 Consider his example of the Canadian law schools. Change the scenario to a group of
South American law students and professor who come to the US to report on the
human rights situation of immigrants in American detention centers. Do you think that
most American professors or students would ignore the Latin American fact-finding
report or criticize it harshly?
 At the end of the passage, Bonilla mentions that a report may gain prominence because
it was written in English. Does language create an unequal balance in legal knowledge?
 Do you agree or disagree with Bonilla’s critiques?

5. 5
Reading 2 – James Silk
Question: Do law clinics reproduce unequal relationships between the Global North and
South?
Daniel Bonilla has argued that legal clinics in the Global North and South 1) reproduce unequal
North-South relationships in legal academia 2) because the educational benefits to students
and professors take precedence over social justice objectives and 3) it is advantageous for legal
clinics form the North and South to work together.3 He applies this argument to three types of
clinics: fact-finding missions, consultancies, and conferences.
Task: Read the following excerpt from James Silk,4 who responds to Daniel Bonilla’s argument
in regards to clinical fact-finding missions. Then discuss the questions that follow.
Daniel asserts that fact-finding reports are, although useful "in the abstract," deeply and
inherently flawed and, practically, of limited effectiveness. He writes that these reports only
synthesize local knowledge; they can generate no new knowledge of local circumstances
affecting human rights. Taken one way, this seems indisputable: If, by local knowledge, we
mean local people's knowledge of their own experience, then gathering testimony about that
experience necessarily involves collecting local knowledge. But Daniel is talking about a more
specific meaning of local knowledge, "local academic knowledge": the collection, analysis and
understanding of experience by local legal elites." This raises a number of concerns. It suggests
that the publication of human rights reports simply takes pre-existing knowledge and publishes it
for a foreign or transnational audience. However, even if it were true that such reports only
synthesize local knowledge, this is not itself a compelling criticism. This is what the classic
human rights fact-finding report does: It brings together knowledge from diverse relevant
sources and makes it into a compelling and reliable story, analyzed by the standards of human
rights, to use for advocacy by bringing the facts and the issues to the attention of various
audiences with potential to influence policies and practices affecting peoples' ability to exercise
their human rights. Local knowledge may be fragmented, diffuse, diverse, and not systematically
assembled locally to represent a particular issue. Furthermore, there may be obstacles-from
political to practical-to local researchers investigating and documenting local issues.
If, however, we take the second meaning, the local knowledge amassed by local scholars,
then we must be concerned about where we draw the boundaries between North and South. The
Northern and Southern collaborators undoubtedly have more in common with each other
socioeconomically, educationally, ideologically-than the legal academics of the Global South
have in common with the vulnerable populations in their countries whose human rights concerns
are at stake in the collaborative clinical enterprise. There are, to be sure, disparities between
Southern and Northern academics and their approaches and expertise, but they manifest
themselves to a greater or lesser extent depending on the issues, contexts and areas of law at
3
Daniel Bonilla, Legal Clinics in the Global North and South: Between Equality and Subordination - An Essay, 16
YALE HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT L. J. 1, 3-4 (2013).
4
James J. Silk, From Empire to Empathy - Clinical Collaborations between the Global North and the Global South
- An Essay in Conversation with Daniel Bonilla, 16 Yale Hum. Rts. & Dev. L.J. 41, 46 (2013).

6. 6
stake. A well-designed project of cooperation would comprehend differences and take advantage
of the understandably varied strengths of the cooperating parties. Failures to cooperate on a basis
of equality, then, as Daniel himself suggests in passing, are not structural but a failure of design
in the particular, the individual instance.
Questions for Discussion
After reading, discuss in any order you like.
 What does Daniel Bonilla think about human rights fact-finding reports?
 How does his definition of “local academic knowledge” fit into a discussion of a
North/South divide and how might it influence collaboration between clinics in the
North and South?
o How does James Silk respond to this critique?
 Do you agree that fact-finding reports are of limited effectiveness, or do you think that
the failure is in the design?
 Do law clinics reproduce unequal relationships between the Global North and South?

7. 7
Reading 3 – Deena Hurwitz
Question: What values, if any, should legal clinics instill in students?
Task: Many authors writing about international human rights clinics have focused on themes of
justice. Read the following excerpt by Deena Hurwitz5 and then discuss the questions that
follow.
David Hall affirms that social justice must be a core value, integral to lawyering, and
internalized by practitioners:
Social justice is not charity. It is not something we give to others, it is something
we do for ourselves. . . . Justice is a virtue that . . . serves as the basis of our integrity
and legitimacy as individuals and as a society .... Social justice is not a static state.
It is not a place we reach. It is a process that we are constantly and forever engaged
in.
But what does that mean in practice? For one thing, individuals have a right to participate to their
fullest in the realization of justice. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, for that
matter, all international human rights instruments, recognize that the first obligations of the state
are to respect, protect, and fulfill the rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals and to
create conditions whereby individuals may enjoy their rights without discrimination of any kind.
International human rights is a fundamentally values-driven area of the law, and studying
and working on human rights can stimulate a sense of justice in students. How can law schools
teach international human rights lawyering in a way that maximizes the process by which
students integrate these values? A social justice pedagogy must impress upon new lawyers the
systemic nature of most persecution. Human rights lawyering, to that end, demands active
engagement. Lawyers should seek not only to observe and understand the transnational legal
process and the role of international human rights norms, but to influence them as well.
Human rights lawyering, like all social justice advocacy, also requires empathy.
Typically, this involves being able to view the legal system through the client's eyes, which can
mean crossing a wide metaphorical, cultural, and geographical chasm. While such advocacy
presumes a kind of altruism, there is at the same time an inevitable "otherness" to the
undertaking. As such, Jane Aiken notes, that compassion is something of a skill:
In the social justice context, the skill of compassion is the ability to appreciate that we
operate with only a partial perspective and to recognize that many of us, law students and
practicing attorneys, have privileges-most of them not earned through any personal
effort on our part-which color our perceptions both of the client and the legal claim.
Empathic lawyering is fundamentally engaged and requires an ability to overcome one's
own needs and limitations of perspective to experience the world as others do. More than
intellectual curiosity, empathetic lawyering requires sympathetic identification and knowledge of
others' experiences.
5
Deena R. Hurwitz, Lawyering for Justice and the Inevitablity of International Human Rights Clinics, 28
Yale J. Int'l L. 505, 522-223 (2003). (footnotes ommitted)

8. 8
Questions for Discussion
After reading, discuss in any order you like.
 What values, if any, should legal clinics instill in future lawyers?
 Do all lawyers have a professional responsibility to influence international human rights
norms? How do human rights issues impact an area of law that you are interested in?
 If social justice is not charity, what is it?
 What does Hurwitz mean when she says there is an “otherness” to human rights
advocacy?
 How might the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflect a North/South division?
Can human rights be universal?
 Other thoughts?