In CUNY Law’s Disability Rights and Social Justice Clinic, McDonald wrote the brief, argued it, and discovered she is ready.
On a Tuesday morning the week before her commencement, Paige McDonald stood at a podium in a Manhattan appellate courtroom and argued before the First Department of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division. She had four minutes.
“I just put a checkmark next to exactly what I needed to get to,” she recalls. “Not the fluffy words. Not the rhetoric. You’ve got four minutes — get to the point.”
That composure didn’t come naturally. It was built methodically over months of preparation inside CUNY Law’s Disability Rights and Social Justice Clinic — working with fellow student Taylor Wisniewski, with whom she co-wrote the brief, and throughout numerous practice sessions with two supervising professors, a team of attorneys at Mental Hygiene Legal Services (MHLS) led by Sadie Ishee, and the steady encouragement of classmates across nearly every clinic in the building.
“If you had asked me last year if I would raise my hand to volunteer to argue in front of the First Department,” McDonald says, “I would have told you there’s no way.”
McDonald came to CUNY Law the way many students do: following a throughline of public service that had shaped her life since childhood. She was involved in Girl Scouts, community service organizations, a co-ed service fraternity in undergrad, then a master’s degree in human rights at John Jay College. When she was ready for law school, the choice was straightforward. “As soon as you look up a law school that’s going to help people directly, CUNY is number one,” she says. “I got the acceptance, I put the deposit down. There was no question.”
She arrived expecting to pursue human rights work. Then, at a clinic fair, she stopped by a table that didn’t have a crowd. One conversation with Professor Natalie M. Chin, director of the Disability Rights and Social Justice Clinic, changed the direction of her final year.
“The disabled voice is always the less heard voice,” McDonald explains, “because there are so many layers to identity that disability gets packed down. I’ve always been someone who wants to root for the underdog.”
What followed was unlike anything she had imagined clinic would be. In one case, McDonald and her student partner Taylor Wisniewski represented a man with no history of mental illness who had been involuntarily committed after calling the police about a suspected break-in. She describes reading back the transcript of his initial hearing and seeing clearly that the outcome had been decided before he ever entered the room. The team researched a body of mental hygiene law largely stacked against their client, met twice a week with Professor Chin to work through every detail, and drafted a brief that would eventually make it to oral argument. Though appeals don’t require client interviews, the Law School’s commitment to client-centered lawyering meant they sat down with him anyway. “Even speaking with our client,” McDonald says, “it was really moving — you feel this burning desire to help.”
In another matter, she and her classmates traveled to Sing Sing and Eastern Correctional Facility to interview incarcerated people as part of building potential impact litigation around forced labor. What she encountered there shifted something. The people she spoke with weren’t focused on the legal theory that had brought the clinic to them. Instead, they wanted to talk about the conditions of their daily lives. “You just can’t deny what you’re hearing,” McDonald says. “You feel so moved.” She left questioning whether she was going on to the right work—perhaps she was meant to advocate for decarceration? But Professors Natalie Chin and Stefen Short assured her that opportunities to contribute to or join that work would always be within reach.
McDonald felt the clinic was, above all, a community. When life intervened—and it did—classmates across clinics stepped in to read drafts, hear arguments, and offer perspective. “You can rely on your other classmates,” McDonald says. “Even if they’re not working on your case, you can say, I’m having a hard time here. Can I bounce some ideas off you?”
When the brief was complete, Sadie Ishee at MHLS asked if a student wanted to conduct the oral argument. McDonald volunteered. The preparation was rigorous: Ishee helped set up practice rounds at Mental Hygiene Legal Service’s offices, practice moots with alumna Renna Novotnak ’20, now an associate attorney in the special litigation unit at MHLS, observations at the appellate court, sessions on campus in unfamiliar classrooms, and feedback from attorneys who had never heard her argument before. “You’re scared because you care,” she says one of her mentors told her. “That just means that you have heart in what you’re doing.”
On argument day, she took the train in from Long Island, reread the record one more time, and walked into the courtroom. When Mental Hygiene Legal Service asked the bench for permission to let a law student present the argument, she says the judges lit up. They cut her allotted time significantly — appellate judges, she learned, are not known for their patience with the clock — and gently corrected her when she said “I rest my case” before her rebuttal minute had begun. But the room was warm. “Judges love baby lawyers,” she was told beforehand, and she felt it. Once that initial exchange broke the tension, she knew she would be all right. She approached the podium, checked off what mattered, and made her argument.
McDonald graduates this month and will join a Long Island law firm as a labor and employment attorney — a role she’s been building toward since her first summer internship. She plans to bring what she learned in the clinic with her.
“I’m going to push it forward,” she says, “because this is what we talked about in class — the impact this could have.”