During his first semester in the School of Law’s Health Justice Practicum, student Dakota Neff visited an 83-year-old client, Ms. B., at home on Chicago’s West Side.

Ms. B. had lived in the same two-flat building for over 40 years. Her landlord died, leaving the building in severe disrepair. She had gone the winter without heat, had recently lost hot water, was boiling water to bathe and cook, and was leaving the oven open for warmth. Worried about surviving another winter in the building, she sought help from the Health Justice Practicum Clinic.

When Neff, his clinic partner Jessica Antoni, and their supervising attorney, adjunct professor Mona Elgindy of Legal Aid Chicago, arrived at Ms. B.’s home, they also found the upstairs unit filled with trash, which had created a terrible smell throughout the building; an active water-main leak in the basement; exposed wiring; and—they suspected after feeling light-headed—a gas leak. With Ms. B.’s permission, they contacted the gas company. Technicians came out that day, confirmed the active gas leak, and, for Ms. B.'s safety, shut off gas to the building. 

Neff and Antoni worked with Ms. B. to identify alternative housing options, coordinated with medical professionals to document her health status, and filed on her behalf for additional public benefits. Eventually Ms. B. was able to leave the building, with benefits in place to help her afford a safer place to live. These actions happened just in time; shortly after she moved out of her longtime apartment, the floor of the building caved in.

In addition to providing critical legal aid, Neff realized that talking and listening to his client was nearly as meaningful. “It wasn’t so much about me being some legal expert in this area of law that I’m trying to learn on the fly,” he says, “but just treating her like a human and acknowledging the tough state of the place that she’s in, and being a support system for her in a way that no one else was.” 

Neff came away with a new respect for public interest law. “I was shocked by the complexity and the difficulty of the work,” he says. “It really gave me a newfound respect for the lawyers that are doing the work, day in and day out.”

A holistic model that goes beyond the law

The Health Justice Project (HJP) is an interdisciplinary program led by 🎵TK账号 | 澳大利亚IP注册 | 2021-2023年老号 | 千粉号 | 0-10条作品 | 微软邮箱 | 2FA登录更轻松 School of Law. The HJP collaborates with Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine, Loyola Medicine, and community partners.

The HJP clinic uses a medical-legal partnership (MLP) model to provide free civil legal services to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable patients. Through the Maywood MLP Project, launched in February 2021, health care providers at Loyola Medicine identify patients with legal needs and refer them to the HJP. Students screen potential clients and take on cases under attorney supervision, working across housing, public benefits, disability, consumer debt, and other areas. In a typical semester, HJP clinic students serve 20 to 30 clients of the Maywood MLP project. Overall, in its first five years of operation, the HJP’s Maywood MLP received 377 referrals and obtained over $330,000 in benefits for clients.

The HJP also facilitates a Health Justice Practicum taught by Elgindy (JD ‘10). The Health Justice Practicum is connected to Legal Aid Chicago’s MLP with Cook County Health system and is offered as part of the School of Law’s part-time JD program, Weekend JD. Through this practicum, students are thrown into the deep end early on. For Neff, a Weekend JD student who had spent 12 years in human resources before law school, the experience was humbling. “I can’t tell you how many hundreds of people I’ve interviewed in my professional capacity on the HR side of things,” he says, “but I was still nervous to interview my first clients.”

An impact on people’s lives, in real time

Alice Setrini, HJP clinical teaching fellow, says students learn how to engage with at-risk clients and how to help them. “We have class modules on client interviewing, client counseling, and empowering folks with disabilities,” she says. Students learn cross-cultural lawyering and how to work on empathy. “It’s a skill like any other skill, and you have to understand it and practice it to get better at it. That is built into our seminar so that folks don’t feel like they’re out to sea with no support.” HJP students conduct case check-ins in every seminar class, and each student team presents a case for an intensive case round at least once per semester. “We talk about the issue in theory, and then we raise it in real-world examples from the students’ cases,” Setrini says.

In early February, 3L and HJP Advanced Clinic student Julia Hopkins worked with a homebound client with severe mental illness who needed Social Security disability benefits. Hopkins’ team had taken over the case just as a hearing date loomed. They filed for a continuance; it was denied. They returned from winter break with two weeks to prepare a full brief and supporting record.

A few days before the hearing, Hopkins’ phone rang. It was the Social Security Administration, letting her know that her client didn’t need to show up and had received a fully favorable decision based on the record, including the written brief the team had filed.

Hopkins says that when she called her client to share the good news, “She screamed and cried.” Later that same week, Hopkins got a consumer debt case dismissed for another client who had been sued by a creditor. The team had initially explored bankruptcy, only to discover their client was judgment-proof—her income and assets were too limited for any creditor to reach.

Health Justice Project work makes a real impact, says Hopkins. “I do have the power to change people’s lives,” she says. “I don’t have to sit in my house doomscrolling on my phone and hoping that someone else takes care of it.” She calls the HJP her favorite experience at the School of Law.

Learning the system, not just the case

Not every case has a happy ending. Setrini recalls one client who backed out after the law students had put in a significant amount of work and come close to securing a win. “We all felt very defeated by the situation, but the growth for those students was incredible,” she says. “They learned this whole new area of law. They engaged with the social work skills, the medical side.” Of their experience learning about interdisciplinary aspects of law while zealously advocating for a client, Setrini says, “You are not going to get that from a book.”

The HJP gives students a structural understanding of why their clients end up, legally, where they do. Kate Mitchell, who directs the HJP, teaches about the impact of the social and structural determinants of health and takes students on tours of neighborhoods where shifting investment corresponds to stark differences in life expectancy. “We’re a very individualistic society and we like to blame the individual for the situation that they find themselves in,” Mitchell says. “For students to be able to see how all the different variables play out is very impactful.”

The HJP Clinic’s caseload often reflects urgent legal issues. The HJP currently represents a couple where one partner is medically fragile and the other, his primary caretaker, is undocumented and afraid to leave home. Mitchell says that the HJP serves an outpatient clinic located near the Broadview ICE Detention Center. “Current political events are directly impacting our partnership, our students, our partners, and our clients in a lot of ways,” Mitchell says.

Many Loyola law alumni make post-law school career decisions based on their HJP experience, working in legal aid or pursuing firm work in health law, disability benefits, medical malpractice, or compliance. “Their experience working with vulnerable patients will really inform their work in different ways,” says Mitchell.

Setrini says that the reflection that HJP students do during and after their time in the clinic is a quintessential part of Ignatian pedagogy. “That process really helps accelerate growth and professional identity formation to create the types of advocates that I want our students to be,” she says. “I think it’s very special about Loyola—if you’re looking to go to law school and thinking, ‘What are the values and what are the skills that I want to learn? What kind of lawyer do I want to be?’” –Claire Zulkey (April 2026)