Studying Food Law: Jenna Khoury-Hanna's Experience

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Although I hemmed and hawed a bit over whether I wanted to do an LL.M while in law school, I ultimately landed on not doing one, at least for the time being. Instead, I decided to focus on developing lawyering skills and learning how to practice as a lawyer, knowing the possibility of doing an LLM would always be there.

But then came COVID-19.

As I wrapped up my articling in May 2020, things were still shut down due to COVID-19. I had known going into my articling position that I was not going to be hired back but I was now watching classmates I had graduated with get job offers that did not start until the fall, or even January 2021 in some circumstances. One day around this time, Sarah Berger Richardson sent me information for an LL.M program and a Food and Agriculture Graduate Law Fellowship at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University (Pace Law), which is located in White Plains, New York and suggested that I apply. With some encouragement from her and Jamie Baxter, my prior boss, I decided to.

At the time of writing this, I am halfway through the fellowship and the LL.M program. The fellowship in conjunction with the LL.M program has been an amazing experience and for me – it has been a perfect mix of hands-on practical experience and academia. I will also add that although I am doing everything remotely from my home in Canada because of COVID-19, I feel like I have still had a great experience. My classes overall have been small, and professors have tried really hard to still be engaging and inclusive despite the online format. I even connected with some classmates last semester for a study group for an exam despite everything being online!

As the Food and Agriculture Graduate Law Fellow, I provide support to both the Pace-NRDC Food Law Initiative (FLI) and to the Food and Beverage Law Clinic (FBLC). I did not fully understand what this meant before I started the Fellowship, but basically the FLI was founded in 2015 and is a partnership between Pace Law and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that aims to address the “unmet legal service needs of farmers, food and beverage entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations seeking to improve our food system”.  One of the ways in which it does this, is through the FBLC, but the partners in the FLI also collaborate to identify policy issues to guide policy work and plan educational events.

The majority of the work that I have contributed thus far to the FLI has been assisting with organizing educational events. For example, on November 19th, 2020, we hosted a webinar consisting of four different sessions under the heading, Farm Leasing and Conservation Practices: Incentivizing Secure Tenure and Climate Resilience. I assisted with the planning and managed all the logistics for the event, such as the registration and hosting the Zoom call for the event. Despite anticipating possibly lower attendance numbers due to Zoom fatigue, we had 92 people attend!

This coming semester, we are collaborating with a non-profit called New York Kitchen to provide a Farm Law 101 training that is happening in February and will be planning another big webinar like the one we did in November sometime in the Spring.

If you would like to learn more about the Food Law Initiative, you can find more information here.

If you would like to watch the webinar, all four sessions were recorded and can be found here.

The real bread and butter of the fellowship is also where most of my time has been spent and that is assisting with running the Food and Beverage Law Clinic (FBLC). The FBLC is actually the first law school clinic in the United States dedicated to providing direct transactional legal services to food and beverage entrepreneurs, businesses and non-profits. It runs like any other law school clinic, where each semester, between 5-8 students are accepted into the clinic. Students work in pairs to provide legal services to clients, and each student is assigned two clients. The students are also expected to attend a weekly seminar where they are taught skills to help them succeed in assisting their clients, such as how to interview clients and how to negotiate an agreement.

The clients and subsequently the client work, is broad and wide-ranging. Some examples of the types of things that are done at the clinic include drafting lease agreements, business entity formation (e.g. setting up corporations or non-profit structures), purchase and sale of farmland, setting up charitable loan investment structures, creating alternative forms of land ownership through cooperatives and helping clients navigate everchanging hemp and CBD regulations. To assist the students and make sure that their deliverables are good quality for the clients, the clinic director and I split up reviewing all of the students work and meet with every student in weekly supervision meetings to go over their work and provide comments and feedback.

As I articled in-house with a municipality, most of the work that is done at the clinic are things that I did not do during articling and so I feel like the opportunity to get exposure and learn how to do these things now, even in the American context, is incredibly useful and it has rounded out my legal skills. Having to take the time to review all the students’ work and come up with constructive feedback and comments has also given me a better idea of what I think is a good work output and what are some of the things I see as being important when providing a service for clients, such as knowing who your client is and being able to write or provide an explanation in a way that they understand it.

If you would like to read more about the clinic, that information can be found here. As a note – the website does feature some client profiles if anyone is interested in learning more about the types of clients that the clinic has.

Finally, I should probably say some things about the LL.M. program. The LL.M is in Environmental Law and at Pace, there are a number of specializations under the environmental law umbrella. I am specializing in land use law and sustainable development law. The LL.M can be completed in two semesters. Last semester I took five classes, including an introduction to American Legal System class that is a crash course for the international students to get up to speed on how the American legal system works and learn some key case law in several areas of law such as constitutional and criminal law. This semester I will be taking three classes and writing a thesis.

My classwork has had some hands-on aspects to it which I have really enjoyed. For example, last semester I assisted with training local land use officials and lawyers in New York State through the Land Use Leadership Alliance Program. This program provides training on technical and process tools and information to local leaders in communities and has trained over 3,000 people since 1995. In 2009, this program won the American Planning Association’s (APA) 2009 National Leadership Award for Planning Advocates, where it was called “the most extensive land use leaders training program in the country”. As part of this program, I worked with lawyers and community leaders from the City of Mount Vernon to help them create a process to create a comprehensive plan for their City. I am going to be continuing to work with them this semester for another one of my land use classes.  

All in all, the LL.M and Fellowship have been an amazing and very rewarding experience. Despite it taking COVID-19 and a nudge from Sarah and Jamie to apply, I have no regrets and would highly recommend that anyone interested in food law work apply.  If anyone would like to learn more about the fellowship and/or the LL.M program, please feel free to reach out! I can be contacted at jennakhouryhanna@gmail.com.