Women Legal Leaders & The Legal Feminism Clinic
Dana Myrtenbaum (Haifa University Faculty of Law & Itach-Maaki Women Lawyers for Social Change)
Abstract
The Legal Feminism Clinic and its’ program, 'Women Legal Leaders', is a unique cooperation between the Haifa University’s Faculty of Law and Itach-Maaki –Women Lawyers for Social Justice along with other partners in Israeli civil society and the mainstream public. This cooperation has created one of the most innovative and challenging models in legal education in Israel, as well as in the feminist movement and in Israeli civil society. The program's vision is to promote access to justice for women from disadvantaged communities and marginalized individuals (due to circles of poverty, gender based violence, ethnicity, nationality, etc.) in Israel, as well as to challenge the existing power structure in the legal world, and its gender and cultural blindness.
The program aspires to impact future legal figures by exposing Jewish and Arab law students at Haifa University to women’s struggles and strengths and to the power of the law in the process of social change. Along with the law students, a group of Arab and Jewish women from marginalized communities go through an empowerment process as they are trained to be “legal leaders” whose voices will be heard in the public spheres and who are committed to issues of gender and status shared by all marginalized Israeli women.
Bringing together academia and community, this innovative clinical model has created a unique program. Pairing together women leaders with the law students, the program’s participants act together in designing and implementing seed projects to enable marginalized voices of women and disempowered communities to be heard and seen by decision-makers, the legal system, courts, media, the general public and more. The model, co-coordinated by a Jewish attorney and an Arab-Druze psychologist, equips a multi-cultural group of women activists and law students with effective social change tools and guides them in their quest for long-term social change.
In its past four years of activity the program had impact on many communities and effected the lives of many women through the activity of ten seed-projects that were initiated and incubated in the program. The seed projects are bringing the voices of Russian immigrant women in prostitution that are in rehabilitation; Arab women who are victims of murder (known as Honor Crime Killings); Druze-Arab women facing divorce; Single Arab women over 30; Arab women over 30 that seek to access higher education; and other issues, addressed by the seed-projects. The seed-projects are bringing the voices of the communities and various women in Israel to the front stage of the legal and public and academic sphere, and they critically changed the discourse and attitude towards women in the margins, promoting gender and cultural sensitivity.
The team work of the women legal leaders and the law students, together with partners in the communities and civil society; the models developed in the program to work for changes of policies and hearing "voices not heard before" by the mainstream, together with unique ways to promote leadership of the participants and the sustainability of the seed-projects and the way the program incorporates feminist philosophy and practice - make it one of the most fascinating models of partnership of academia and community in Israel.
