CARLISLE, Pa. – Penn State’s Dickinson Law today announced the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic, a collaboration between the Law School and Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. This is the first partnership of its kind to be offered in the Harrisburg-Carlisle region.
The clinic will provide low-income patients and patient-families with critical legal assistance under the supervision of Medha D. Makhlouf, the founding director and clinical professor of law.
Students participating in the clinic will have the opportunity to work collaboratively with the faculty and staff of both Dickinson Law and Penn State Hershey, as well as participate in joint class sessions with students of medicine and other health-related disciplines. The program will enable health care teams to provide holistic services to patients, including understanding and addressing some of the underlying social and environmental causes of poor health. Law students will take the lead role in all aspects of their cases, including conducting intake interviews, developing case strategies, researching the applicable laws and regulations, preparing legal documents and advocating in hearings on behalf of patients and their families.
Makhlouf, a graduate of Yale Law School, will join the Dickinson Law faculty on July 1, 2015. An experienced advocate for vulnerable populations, Makhlouf currently serves as staff attorney at the Central West Justice Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she directs the day-to-day operations of the organization’s medical-legal partnerships with area community health centers and hospitals.
Prior to her work at the Central West Justice Center, Makhlouf was an associate of Ropes & Gray LLP, where she focused on complex business litigation and served as immigration team leader for the firm’s pro bono medical-legal partnership clinic at the Dorchester House Multi-Service Center. Makhlouf previously provided legal services to refugees and asylum seekers at Asylum Access Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador. After receiving her J.D. from Yale Law School, Makhlouf served as a Yale public interest fellow at the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project in Boston, supervising legal interns with asylum cases and focusing on gender-based asylum claims.
Makhlouf is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in human biology , with honors, and Middle East studies. In addition to teaching in the clinic, Makhlouf will teach courses on law and medicine, and immigration law.