Aiming for a ‘holistic representation’ career as dual-degree Law and SP2 grad

After earning her bachelor’s degree from Yale, Christina Bartzokis went to work in the rural Oregon desert town of Burns, population 2,730, as a case worker with Child Protective Services.

The entire county had two attorneys—one for every 3,720 people—which put a strain on the legal system, and especially on Bartzokis’ clients.

“Access to justice in Burns was incredibly poor,” she says. “My role was very limited to doing a 60-day safety assessment and making a decision about whether the child that I was working with could stay in the home or not,” she says. “I found that really frustrating. I wanted my role to be more about supporting families.”

After three years in Oregon, she set her sights on law school, aiming to help people like her former clients. She also wanted to earn a social work degree, giving her the tools to practice a legal model called “holistic representation,” often used in larger cities such as Philadelphia or New York.

Under that model, serious crimes such as homicide or aggravated assault have social workers assigned to cases alongside public defenders. They help with mitigation and to help clients navigate resources for mental health or addiction treatment.

Bartzokis says that by the time someone is arrested and enters the criminal system they already at a disadvantage. It is important that they have help “navigating and advocating for themselves,” she says.

In May, Bartzokis will be graduating with a dual degree from Penn Carey Law and the School of Social Policy & Practice. The program takes four years, with the traditional first year in law, the second year in social work, and the third and fourth years including both subjects.

Bartzokis will then head to Louisiana, where she plans to begin work this fall in the Baton Rouge public defender’s office after passing the bar. She says the dual-degree program has been very flexible and came with a lot of institutional encouragement.

“I wanted to set myself up for an education that would allow me to meet the broadest range of needs that the clients I was working with in Burns had expressed to me,” she says. “Lawyers often see someone’s criminal charge as the most pressing issue that their client has, and that’s often simply not the case.

“To be able to respond authentically to a client’s need for advocacy, you have to be equipped to recognize what their priorities are and to help them find the resources they need to deal with the issues that they see as the most pressing, not necessarily the issues that you see as the most pressing,” she says.

For the clinical field placement for her master of social work degree, she is working with the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), assisting children charged as adults and doing mitigation work to attempt to get them back in the juvenile justice system. The organization provides additional support for children leaving juvenile residential placement or remaining in the adult legal system.

For several years, she has also been involved with the Youth Advocacy Project, a student-run pro bono initiative at the law school supervised by YSRP, and has managed to build lasting relationships with six children in particular.

“I’ve been able to see the whole case through sentencing and through supporting kids who are going to placement or upstate to prison,” she says. “I’ve built relationships with them that are really meaningful to me.”

The Project’s work has allowed her to maintain consistency with her clients. “I can meet with a kid and say, ‘No matter what is going on with your case, you are going to see me every two weeks for the rest of the life of your case. You will have an opportunity to ask me whatever questions you have about what’s going on.’ ”

She asks clients about their families and support networks and then works to develop relationships with those people. She says that she believes the criminal system can be “dehumanizing,” reducing people to charges and sentences, and that being able to connect and recognize the challenges people face can restore their humanity. Youth in solitary confinement, for example, can only see members of their legal team, “so being able to tell their parents how they’re doing, being able to see them when they’re otherwise denied any human contact is important,” she says.

A summer internship with the Alaska Public Defender Agency, working in the remote fly-in community of Kotzebue, a predominantly Alaskan native area, gave her a chance to refine her legal skills. Alaska, Bartzokis says, allows certified legal interns to work with a large degree of autonomy. “It was a really important opportunity for me to start figuring out what my style is as an attorney, how to manage my own caseload, how to work independently,” she says.

While at Penn, she has been a member of the Penn graduate boxing team. She says the sport is a good stress reliever and says that boxing and the law both require adaptability. “Legal training, and criminal law especially, can become this really formulaic thing where you get into a routine,” Bartzokis says. “Rolling with the punches, changing your priorities, changing your strategy based on the needs of the moment is representative of how I would like to practice law.”