Maria Burnett integrates her dual pursuits of architecture and law to do human rights work. This seemingly odd pairing makes perfect sense once she tells of the work she did before coming to Yale Law and the projects she does with the Lowenstein Clinic. Burnett received an undergraduate degree in architecture from Princeton and her Master's in architecture from the Architectural Association, in London. She then went to West Africa, did some freelance journalism work, and researched city infrastructures to look at housing issues there. After that she worked at Human Rights Watch in New York. Through this progression, she realized that there was a legal advocacy component to the problems she wanted to solve and that law school was the next step. "Architectural questions can't be in a vacuum," says Burnett. "They must have a legal context." Even when political unrest is over, housing remains a major architectural and legal issue in many countries. In South Africa, for example, many people were, historically, not allowed to have houses. Now, in Cape Town, there are one million new homes being built, says Burnett. There is much architectural work to be done, but also much legal work, such as figuring out how these houses will have electricity and water. Burnett, a third-year law student, is one of the two Student Directors of the Lowenstein Clinic this year and has been with the clinic since the second semester of her first year. Her work for the clinic goes beyond housing issues into broader human rights concerns. Last summer she went to Swaziland with two other Yale law students to do research on labor rights. In Swaziland, the law students interviewed factory workers for two weeks on employment conditions. The research was for a report on workers' rights in specific countries being compiled by an organization in Washington, DC. The students asked the workers about discrimination problems—on the basis of HIV-status or gender—and also asked about general workplace standards, says Burnett. Despite her extensive human rights work prior to law school, Burnett says the clinic has been "irreplaceable for my legal education." Working with the clinic allows law students to connect with people "beyond the four walls of the law school," she says. Knowing what others on the outside are doing is "invaluable" for those who want to go out and work in the wide world. After graduation, Burnett will clerk for a year with a justice on South Africa's highest court, the South African Constitutional Court. After Rahul Rajkumar graduates from Yale Law School in spring 2006, he will do a medical residency. Of course, it helps that he will also receive a medical degree from Yale at the same time. Like Burnett, getting a law degree will allow Rajkumar, a second-year student, to do the finer points of his interest within his primary field. "I'd like to be a human rights advocate within medicine," says Rajkumar. The Lowenstein Clinic, therefore, is "a natural place for me to be," he says. He wants to focus his medical practice on infectious diseases, especially HIV-AIDS. Saying he does not have the expertise to be a researcher looking for a cure, Rajkumar wants to use his law degree to push for greater healthcare access for people both in the United States and abroad. At the Lowenstein Clinic, among many other projects, Rajkumar has worked on a project looking at the ethical questions involved with the recruitment of nurses by U.S. hospitals and medical schools from developing nations. The nursing shortage in the United States sparked the recruitment trend, but this could in turn cause a nursing shortage in the nurses' home countries, depriving developing nations of medical staff. Rajkumar is interviewing hospital recruiters and recruitment agency staff to find out how the international recruitments work and to formulate a policy that might become a "Good Housekeeping seal of approval" for recruiters. This way, hospitals would know if recruiting was being done ethically, balancing the needs of the nurse's home nation with the nurse's individual desire to work in the Untied States. Rajkumar quotes pathologist Rudolf Virchow when talking about how his work with the Lowenstein Clinic will benefit him in medical practice: "Physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor." Virchow's quote goes on to say "…and social problems should largely be solved by them." This, says Rajkumar, is what he wants to put into practice. Heloisa Griggs is also in her second year at Yale Law and a member of the Lowenstein Clinic. She, too, is pursuing a law degree as the missing piece in her desire to improve the lives of indigenous peoples and their human rights. Originally from Brazil with dual British-Brazilian citizenship, Griggs sought a liberal arts college education and came to Yale as an undergraduate. She stayed in the United States, working for a human rights advocacy organization in Washington, DC. She realized there that when she wanted to get something done, she had to talk to lawyers. Thus she came to see lawyers "in a hopeful light, as opposed to the general cynicism about lawyers," she says. In Griggs's first semester with the clinic, she landed on a project that had been part of her work prior to law school, involving questions of land restitution to indigenous people. The clinic students developed an amicus brief for a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, examining the South African Land Restitution Act to demonstrate that land restitution is not necessarily a "Pandora's box," she says. Restitution of land is a controversial issue, says Griggs. "It can make people nervous." The issue needs to be addressed through balancing many factors, she says, such as how long the land has been out of indigenous hands, how practical it would be to give it back, and whether an equivalent amount of land elsewhere could be given instead. Working in the Lowenstein Clinic allows her to apply legal skills to indigenous people's issues, enabling her to engage directly with possible solutions; this is "tremendously rewarding," says Griggs.

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