By MATT CHANDLER
Buffalo Law Journal

It's a classic case of criminal trespassing: Someone breaks into a rural home while the occupants are away, stealing food and damaging property - and the homeowner returns to catch the perpetrator in the act.

Sounds like a cut-and-dry case for any prosecutor, right?

Well, if the defendant is the iconic fictional character Goldilocks and the jury is comprised of schoolchildren who are sympathetic to the plight of a tired and hungry little girl, a guilty verdict may be tough to come by.

Members of the Minority Bar Association of Western New York are using the classic children's tale as a way to reach young children and teach them about the U.S. legal system.

The association's Diversity Task Force, in conjunction with the Buffalo Public Schools and the University at Buffalo Law School, kicked off a two-tiered approach to educating minority students about the legal world with its first Goldilocks on Trial presentation last week at Martin Luther King Multicultural Institute, PS 39.

With students playing the parts of the three bears, the lawyers and even the plaintiff herself, association members and UB Law students guided the students through a "trial" of Goldilocks with the third-grade audience acting as the jury.

For many elementary-age students, these presentations will be their first experience hearing about life as a lawyer.

"The objective is to create a program starting in grammar school to make sure that minority students see the legal profession as a realistic objective," said Tasha Moore, regional director of the New York State Division of Human Rights, who was part of the team organizing the event. "We also want the little kids to see that the legal world is more than what they see on TV."

Opening the presentation with the question "What does a lawyer do?" Moore said the goal with such young students is to offer broad answers to that question and give the 8- and 9-year-olds a flavor of what being a lawyer is all about. By speaking to assemblies composed largely of minority students, she said, she and her colleagues hope to plant the seeds at an early age that a career in law is a possibility.

"The impetus for this program came from a recent reduction in minority applicants to law school, and it created the question of ‘Why is this happening, and what can we do?' " she said. "What we found out is, especially with the younger children, a lot of them don't know who (lawyers) are or what we do."

The Goldilocks program will be presented at a second Buffalo school later this month, and the first of two engagements with high-school students took place Monday at Bennett High School. More than 100 students there heard from lawyers who brought a message that as minority students, they are a sought-after group in the legal community.

"We want them to see they can be a professor with a law degree, they can be a CEO, you can be a city planner," Moore said. ‘We want them to know that this is a dream that can happen if they want it."

Hodgson Russ LLP attorney Joseph Brown was one of four speakers at the Bennett event. He said he never had these kinds of resources when he was in school, and he is glad to be part of educating students about the opportunities available to them.

"For a Monday morning listening to a bunch of lawyers talking, I was pretty impressed with the students' response," Brown joked. "They were very engaged, and I think they appreciated hearing each of our perspectives and learning how we got where we are today."

Julie Christiano, an English teacher in the Bennett High School Law Magnet program, says the message reached her students loud and clear.

"The students were very interested in the presentations and they asked very good questions," she said. "The lawyers spoke about the need for minority law students, telling them they were a ‘demand group' and people were seeking them. I think that is a different message than these kids are used to hearing."

Minority Bar President Sheldon Smith, a senior associate at Nixon Peabody LLP in Buffalo, says getting that across to the students, especially the older ones, is one of the key elements the task force hopes to see come out of the presentations.

"Extending our pipeline initiatives further will hopefully increase the interest even more," Smith said, "and help accomplish our goal, which is to increase diversity in the legal profession."

Phillips Lytle LLP attorney Minryu "Sarah" Kim, one of the presenters at the Goldilocks event, said the group went into the first presentation unsure of what to expect from the young audience.

"Talking with them afterwards, it was amazing," she said. "We asked them, ‘Do you think you can be a lawyer?' and we saw so many kids raise their hands."

Kim said she was impressed with the third-graders' ability to grasp legal concepts.

"I think they really got the concept of right and wrong and what the attorney does in that context," she said.

As for the fate of young Goldilocks, the crowd was divided. While most students saw what she did as wrong, many defended her actions, pointing out that she was tired, hungry and scared when she entered the bear's house. While that may sound rudimentary to the average reader, Moore, Kim and Smith say it is the entire point of the program.

"We are not trying to get them to make a choice about whether Goldilocks was right or wrong," Moore said before the first presentation. "We are trying to get them to think about the process and be aware of the role a lawyer plays in it."