My Work at Common Ground

-JACK O'BRIEN
I enjoyed my work at Common Ground Legal Advocacy this week. The week encompassed a wide range of tasks including researching liens and bonds for home improvement projects, drafting a demand later to an employer for a hotel employee's unpaid wages, writing a memorandum about J-1 visa expiration and guidelines/penalties for delayed renewal, briefly standing in as a legal observer in the event that community activists cleaning out a high school slated for destruction in the Ninth Ward were stopped by police, and navigating the complex statutory program for adversely possessing blighted properties in New Orleans.

The unique range of work was mirrored by the surrounding New Orleans community. The strange combination of desolation and rebirth that is omnipresent in New Orleans simultaneously motivates and depresses. A family rebuilding their home often sits next door to an unrecognizable property seemingly without any promise of future repair. New Orleans, although prideful and content, seems to be stubbornly progressing without a comprehensive federal plan or even state-wide plan for regrowth. Although we 14 Villanova law students willed our effort toward the cause, such pockets of positivity can only do so much without an overlying framework in which to fit into. Further issues then arise, and have arisen, as to what framework is best for New Orleans, whose view determines the selected framework, and what cultural and social narratives are omitted from that framework.