Photo credit: Candace diCarlo
Louis Rulli knows what it means to be poor.
The New York City native and Penn Law professor spent most of his childhood living in public housing, and his family’s struggles instilled in Rulli the conviction that our society’s less fortunate both need and deserve our help.
It’s a conviction that has guided Rulli throughout his entire career.
Though he began his undergraduate years as an engineering major, Rulli eventually switched to the law, a field in which he immediately felt at home. He earned a J.D. from Rutgers University and, right after graduation, began working the kind of cases that made him interested in the law in the first place: The ones that help people.
He started out at Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services—a Philadelphia institution that for four decades has provided legal assistance to low-income city residents—and, after years of service, was eventually named the organization’s executive director. There Rulli remained until 1995, when he was invited to join the faculty at Penn Law.
Even with the change of address, however, Rulli never forgot why he got into law in the first place. At Penn, he’s been instrumental in guiding students through the real-world experiences of the Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies, which, like CLS, provides free legal services to those in need. And starting this summer, Rulli will take over as the Center’s director, replacing Douglas Frenkel, who is stepping down from the position after 28 years.
With just weeks remaining until he takes the director’s chair, we sat down with Rulli to talk about his legal and teaching career, his interest in pro-bono work, and why he believes the Gittis Center is one of Penn’s best-kept secrets.
Q. How did you first become interested in the law?
A. You want to go way back, huh? Well, I grew up in New York City. And I grew up in a poor family. I spent the first 16 years of my life or so in public housing, and I think through the experience I gained an appreciation for issues ... that affect ordinary folks and the importance of having access to the process of resolving disputes through the law, as well as the disadvantages people face when they don’t have access to legal representation and legal help to resolve their disputes. Although I started out as an engineering major, I switched to the law because I think it really tracked the kind of things that I was most interested in. I also had an internship in government that probably had a big influence on me as well. Interning with the local government allowed me to see the front lines of the resolution of disputes that residents had and I got to see how the law interacts with almost everything we do in our society, and increasingly so. The law is both an immensely challenging and intellectually rewarding pursuit, but at the same time, it’s a helping profession. You can apply the things that are so challenging and interesting to the resolution of a real problem and really help the people who need your help.
Q. Tell me about your career path and how you ended up here at Penn.
A. I graduated from law school in 1974 and went to Community Legal Services right out of school. That was what I always wanted to do. I wanted to put my legal education to work for poor people. I actually started out as a staff attorney there. I went on to become a supervising attorney specializing in public housing. Ultimately I became a managing attorney, running an office in South Philadelphia, and also worked in a neighborhood office in West Philadelphia. It was actually Pennsylvania’s first neighborhood law office for low-income folks, and it was right down at 4053 Market St. So I’ve had, for a long time, roots here in the local communities. Eventually I became executive director of Community Legal Services.
Q. Was it a difficult decision to leave Community Legal Services to come to Penn?
A. I don’t think it was a hard decision. It was a change, and it was an adjustment. But I felt I had accomplished many of the things I really wanted to accomplish and realized that as time went, one of the things I really enjoyed most was working with young people, working with young lawyers, working with students to help them fulfill their career goals. I like when students get excited about seeing the possibilities of the law.
Q. What is the focus of your work here?
A. I teach in a number of our clinics. I teach a civil practice clinic, which is a traditional, litigation-based clinic in which we supervise students who go into court and actually represent low-income individuals with their civil disputes. The students are the front-line lawyers. They are certified by our courts to represent clients as well as do the fieldwork necessary in terms of actually representing clients. I also teach a legislation clinic which I created after I came here. The idea there is to give students more sophistication in legislative lawyering. See, lawyering takes places in many different contexts. Litigation is certainly the one that the public is most familiar with, but in our clinics we try to cover all of the major lawyering competencies—transitional lawyering, human rights, mediation and certainly legislative lawyering. I also teach lawyering in the public interest, which is a seminar course. It’s geared toward students who are interested in public-interest careers or students who want to go on to work in the private sector but want to do pro-bono work once they’re there. It’s a course for those students who are interested in learning how to become more sophisticated in pro-bono work.
Q. What in your opinion are the strengths of the Center?
A. I think we have a good array of courses that cover all of the basic lawyering competencies—legislative, transactional lawyering, mediation, interdisciplinary work, international human rights, criminal defense. We touch on all of the major areas that a law student should be exposed to as they complete their entry into the profession. My hope is to keep this going, strengthen these areas. We’re blessed with a very talented and motivated clinical faculty. I look forward to working with my colleagues and strengthening the Center. I also think we’ll be able to grow the clinic. There is no shortage of possible areas to move into, and give students a more in-depth legal experience.
Q. Do you have any specific areas in mind?
A. I haven’t made any decisions yet. And of course I haven’t even started yet. But there are so many areas that are just natural for Penn to consider, in particular health. A health law clinic is an area that we have such strengths already on campus in the health disciplines, and social work, and all of the related areas, so it makes sense to consider a health law clinic that would bring together the law and medicine and serve low-income clients in the health law area. We currently have a child advocacy clinic and that’s already broken new ground in interdisciplinary work. I think we’ve proved that it can be a successful way to proceed and it fits nicely with the mission and directions in which the University of Pennsylvania has distinguished itself.
Q. How do you find your clients?
A. We get many requests for civil legal services. Many people would love to have Penn Law students at their disposal. Courts also send us clients, and there is a broad range of organizations in Philadelphia that will send us cases they can’t handle. We also get referrals from agencies as well as other courts and then there’s word of mouth—there’s nothing like a satisfied customer to spread the word in the neighborhood. And unfortunately we can only help a small number of the folks who seek our representation. There’s no shortage of referrals here.
Q. Among all the cases that you’ve seen students handle, does any one stand out?
A. There are so many exciting cases. One that we always tell our students about is this: Right on the day after graduation, one of our student teams from our civil practice clinic won a $1 million verdict in an age-discrimination case in federal court. That’s about as exciting as it can get—a jury rendering a verdict in a client’s favor for an extraordinary amount of money. Imagine as a law student achieving a $1 million verdict. That’s something most lawyers won’t achieve in their career. What it shows is that there is no limit to what our students can achieve here. But there’s a broad range of what our students do, and it’s all exciting. That case gets a lot of attention because of the size of the verdict. But if we save a person’s home, or if we get them social security benefits that will give them some financial security—what that means to the client is just extraordinary.
Q. I imagine that students are excited to work in these clinics, after several semesters of only ‘book learning.’
A. Absolutely. We begin every course by asking them, ‘Why did you want to take this course?’ And what you’ll often hear is, ‘After sitting in class and taking all of this data in, I’m ready to get out of the classroom and actually apply what I’m learning to help real clients and get real client contact.’ But there is an adjustment for them. I also often hear, ‘I didn’t realize this was going to be so difficult. I didn’t realize this was going to be so time-consuming.’ In their early law school courses, the facts are given to them. Here, they have to find the facts. They have to get out of the office. They have to interview witnesses. They have to roll up their sleeves and learn how to develop facts and relate to clients. They have to put their interpersonal skills to use in representing their clients. The legal research and writing is in some ways the easier part of representing a client. The hard part is working with the client, dealing with the emotional and challenging problem they present and developing the facts because they’re ever changing. We spend a lot of time working with the students on their relationship with clients, helping students get a better understanding of themselves and of their client and how they can build a strong relationship. If you don’t build confidence and trust with your client, you’ll never get the kind of cooperation and information that you need to succeed on the behalf of those clients.
But I want to emphasize that we do much more than just litigation. We do mediation, for instance, where students serve in the role of mediators in actual disputes on behalf of courts and agencies. They have to really summon their most valuable interpersonal skills to see how disputes can be resolved. What a great opportunity while you’re still here in law school.
Q. Is there anything you would like people to know about the Center, and its work, that they might not already know?
A. This is a jewel here. It’s a teaching law firm. And I think it’s one of the best-kept secrets at Penn. One of my many goals is to let everyone know about this jewel. It’s my hope that as more people learn about it, we’ll be able to have an even greater impact on the students here at Penn Law, on the University as a whole and the larger community. And if we can do that, I’ll think we’ll have succeeded.
Originally published May 22, 2008
