Rebecca Rubin ’20 won first place in the Family Law Writing Competition of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and Hofstra University’s School of Law with an article on medical-legal partnerships.
The Family Law Writing Competition, which has reached its ninth year, is run in partnership with the editorial staff of the Family Court Review. In addition to a $500 cash prize, Rebecca Rubin’s winning paper will also be published in the Family Court Review in the fall.
Rubin first wrote the article—entitled Medical-Legal Partnerships: How Legal Services Can Dramatically Improve Health Outcomes—as a final paper for the Poverty Law course taught by Professor Clare Huntington. Professor Huntington encouraged the students in the course to submit their papers for the competition. Rubin described the course as “one of the most interesting classes I’ve taken so far at Fordham.”
Professor Huntington noted that “Rubin’s paper was a standout, both for the originality of the argument and the depth of the research.”
“I worked on medical-legal partnerships two years ago, while I was an AmeriCorps Legal Advocate at the Justice Center of Southeast Massachusetts,” Rubin said. “The article explains how social factors can have detrimental effects on someone’s health. Medical-legal partnerships train doctors to identify legal causes and solutions to health issues and then refer the patients to lawyers for follow-up legal work.”
Rubin, who started studying at Fordham Law in 2017, is a staff editor at the Fordham Law Review and the president of the Advocates for Sexual Health and Rights student group. She is also a member of the Dispute Resolution Society; in April, she traveled to Hong Kong for two weeks to participate in an international arbitration competition.
Before Fordham Law, she pursued a B.A. in Spanish and Psychology at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
“I am originally from New York, so after spending six years in Boston, I was ready to come home,” said Rubin of her decision to attend Fordham. “I was particularly drawn to Fordham’s Stein Scholars Public Interest Program.”
Rubin said she is passionate about immigration law and litigation matters. She is also hoping to do more work related to medical-legal partnerships in the future.
Winning the competition, she said, has been a big honor for her: “It’s wonderful to see my work on a topic I care so much about getting recognition. It’s important to address some of the issues related to poverty in the United States. If this article can get more people interested in this beneficial model — that would be amazing.”