Importance of Legal Assistance Is Subject
of Fromkin Research Project

David Pate (left) and Tonya Brito

UWM Director of Libraries Ewa Barczyk and the members of the Morris Fromkin Memorial Research Grant Committee are pleased to announce that David Pate, Associate Professor in UWM’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare, Department of Social Work, has been awarded the 2013 Fromkin Research Grant and Lectureship.

Pate, along with his co-researcher Tonya Brito, Professor, UW-Madison School of Law, proposes to examine the question, “How do lawyers (or legal assistance) matter?” Their ongoing project, Pate says, looks at “child support enforcement hearings in order to understand how right-to-counsel and lesser forms of legal assistance shape civil contempt proceedings for low-income litigants.”

Collecting and comparing data from two states with differing legal assistance programs, Wisconsin and Illinois, their investigation will “include ethnographic observations of child support enforcement hearings, review and analysis of corresponding case record data, and one-on-one interviews” with legal professionals handling child custody cases.

Among the hoped-for outcomes of the project, Pate says, is “the real potential to advance social justice for poor noncustodial parents and their families.”

Pate's presentation, to be delivered in the fall, will be the 44th in the Fromkin lecture series, the longest-running continuous lecture series on campus.

This year's committee members were Ewa Barczyk, Johannes Britz, Raoul Deal, Jennifer Doering, David Fromkin, Sandra Jones, Peninnah Kako, and Max Yela.

More information about the annual $5000 Fromkin Research Grant is available at http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/special/fromkin/grant.cfm