The monetary allocations will bring together existing programs and concentrations to provide legal services and care to victims of domestic violence.  Dean Paul Schiff Berman said the collaboration should bring together “students in law, social work, nursing psychology, and criminology to work holistically on the complex web of issues surrounding family violence.”

Retired Justice O’Connor echoed Berman’s collaborative focus, saying, “Solutions for domestic violence require a comprehensive approach to connect the wealth of resources that are needed to tackle this issue — from legal to social welfare to health services.”

The Family Violence Legal Clinic will deal with issues of child abuse, spousal abuse, protective orders, custody, prosecutions, family law, juvenile law, and health law matters.  The Halle Center for Family Justice will include legal-based initiatives such as a legal assistance program to help children through the juvenile court system, a research project to advocate reforming the child support system, outreach efforts to mentor high school students in law, and a juvenile law externship program.

The law school’s press release did not indicate student guidelines or qualifications for the clinical program.

The newly-named Center for Law, Science & Innovation now features a Program in Law and Sustainability, a Public Health Law and Policy Program, and The Prevail Project, a behavioral development research initiative we covered earlier this month.

The renaming ceremony also served as an anniversary of the center’s forerunner, which has been in existence on the law school campus since 1984.  According to a school press release, the center was the country’s first “to address the special legal problems arising from rapid developments in science and technology.”  Last week’s announcement signals a more interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter.

“New advances in genomic-level manipulation allow human beings to alter our own evolutionary path…and so on,” said Dean Paul Schiff Berman.  “Such advances require multidisciplinary approaches, bringing together experts in law and policy, science, technology, ethics, and culture.”

Additional programs centered on post-conviction DNA samples, healthcare entrepreneurship, and the future of science are also proposed.

An author and former reporter, Joel Garreau has been named the school’s Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values.  His appointment creates institutional framework for his research on The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures.  As director, Garreau and the project will take “an unprecedented look at the hinge in history at which the human race has arrived,” as indicated by a school press release.  Such research will examine how modern technologies impact human development.

According to Garreau, “the critical issue, of course, is not technology, but where all this takes society.”

Of the project’s name, the term “prevail” refers to a successful co-evolution of society and such emerging technologies.

Said Paul Schiff Berman, dean of the law school: “[Garreau] will be a major addition to the Center for Law, Science, and Innovation, linking the extraordinary work in science law and policy being done here to the broader national and international policy audience.  His new think tank promises to be at the cutting edge of thought about how our humanity can be maintained amidst rapidly growing scientific innovation.”

Indeed while the Prevail Project will be housed within the College of Law, its broad research scope speaks to an interdisciplinary nature.  Therefore other facets of the university at large, such as the ASU Center for Nanotechnology in Society, will participate in the development of the project and its explorations.