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An Army of Lawyers in West Texas

In next week's issue of The National Law Journal, reporter Amanda Bronstad looks at the army of roughly 350 lawyers who are volunteering their time in West Texas to represent the more than 400 children taken by the state from the polygamist ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Bronstad writes:

While the majority of the attorneys are family law practitioners, about one-third come from others fields, such as commercial litigation and personal injury law. Attorneys have spent long evenings and weekends studying the state's legal protections for children, researching the tenets of the FLDS faith and trading e-mails and calls to one another to locate the siblings of their clients.

Earlier this week, on the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer that I cohost with fellow Law.com Blog Network blogger J. Craig Williams, we spoke to one of those volunteers, Betsy Branch, a family-law attorney with the Dallas firm of McCurley, Orsinger, McCurley, Nelson & Downing, who serves as attorney ad litem for several children in the West Texas case. We also discussed the civil liberties issues raised by the massive raid with lawyer and social critic Wendy Kaminer, who has written about the case at the blog thefreeforall.net. Full details about this podcast can be found here.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on May 1, 2008 at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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