Although she is now associate dean for faculty and administration and director of the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law, Lisa Kelly describes herself as “just a working class kid from Pittsburgh.” This working class kid has enjoyed a remarkable career as a civil rights advocate, a legal educator and a champion for the rights of children and families.
Kelly grew up the child of Hungarian immigrants. Most of her older cousins also worked at the steel mill, and her maternal grandparents made and sold kolbasi to the workers from their butcher shop across the street from the mill.
Now the co-author of Adoption Law: Theory, Policy and Practice, Kelly recalls that her first personal experience with adoption occurred at a very young age. Her father died when her mom was pregnant with her brother and she was just a year old, and Kelly was later adopted at the age of four by her mother’s second husband. One of her earliest childhood memories is of being in court for the proceedings that led to her adoption by her stepfather.
She remembers the heavy wooden paneling that embraced the courtroom, the tall bench behind which the judge sat with his big black glasses and the big round clock that ticked away the minutes as she waited her turn. She remembers sitting on her stepfather’s lap and having the judge ask her a question or tell her something about this man being her father.
She brings this moment with her into her work as director of the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic and chair of Washington’s Children’s Representation Workgroup. It is a reminder that children’s lives are impacted by the legal processes that adults create to remedy the family tragedies that befall them.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, Kelly always knew she wanted more from life than working in the butcher shop or marrying a mill worker, but when she told this to her counselor in high school, she was advised to go to secretarial school. Kelly, in response, signed up for college courses at the University of Pittsburgh a year early, and ended up graduating summa cum laude with a double-major in English writing and Spanish, and a minor in women’s studies.
She still was not sure what lay ahead for her in the future. As a college student, she house-sat for the first professional woman she had ever met, other than her college professors. This woman asked her about her interests and when she heard how Kelly went on about her women’s studies courses and how she loved to write, she asked Kelly the fateful question, “Why don’t you think about law school?” So, at the age of 20, Kelly started law school at the University of Pennsylvania. (She remembers being too young to legally have a drink at the TGIFs.)
Law school was where Kelly began to focus on issues surrounding labor, women and minority rights. She knew she wanted to do civil rights work. Her first job out of law school was with a small firm in Little Rock that partnered with the ACLU in Arkansas.
Kelly is remembered for a few notable cases at that time: she filed a class action challenging Arkansas’s restriction requiring the sale of non-prescription contraceptives by a pharmacist and she represented a class of Muslim inmates who wanted an imam as their chaplain and accommodations for Jumah prayer and a pork-free diet.
As her reputation grew, she was approached by one of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund local counsel and was offered the opportunity to concentrate nearly all of her time in civil rights work. Kelly joined a firm in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where she was the only white attorney partnered with an African-American attorney in a predominantly African-American community.
She handled class actions involving employment discrimination and voting rights. Her biggest case challenged Arkansas’s method of electing judges under the Voting Rights Act. Her work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund paved the way for the first black judges to be elected in Arkansas.
After 10 years in Arkansas, Kelly decided it was time to move closer to home, so she applied for and got a teaching position at West Virginia University, where she taught Race and the American Legal System and family law, and directed a domestic violence clinic.
She received a grant to train law students to represent children: West Virginia has a law that every child in foster case should have trained legal representation, but there was a shortage of counsel who had undergone the required multi-disciplinary training. So, she developed a program under which she was able to certify more than 100 law students to represent child clients under the supervision of attorneys.
This work got Kelly excited about working in the field of child abuse and neglect, and she began to desire more freedom to do interdisciplinary work representing children in a clinical context. So she cast her net again and in 2003 was hired by the U.W. School of Law as the director of the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic, after serving as a visiting professor at the U.W. in 2002.
Professor Kelly will be installed this January as the Bobbe and Jon Bridge Professor in Child Advocacy. This endowed professorship was established by Washington Supreme Court Justice Bobbe Bridge and Jon Bridge, her husband. The Bridges, both 1976 graduates of the U.W. School of Law, are active members of Seattle’s professional, academic and charitable communities and have been leading advocates for the well-being of children.
In addition to her research, writing and teaching, Kelly also serves as the chair of the Children’s Representation Workshop, appointed by the Washington State Supreme Court Commission for Children and Foster Care. The mission of this group is to provide recommendations for how children should be represented in Washington.
Her work on child advocacy brings together her lifelong commitment to women’s issues, family issues and the impact of race and culture on the law. Kelly believes that child advocacy is the new frontier for civil rights and she credits her time in Arkansas and her relationships with civil rights leaders there for teaching her how to be an effective civil rights advocate.
Those of us who have had the privilege of working with Lisa Kelly know — you cannot help but be infected by her enthusiasm, passion, intelligence and warmth.
n
Sharon Perlin is the director of outreach for the Clinical Law Program at the University of Washington School of Law.
