Lawyering on the front lines

Meghan Johnke guides the students of the Health Justice Project

Meghan Johnke might be getting her bearings to Chicago, but she’s no stranger to navigating a new challenge. As Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s new Health Justice Project (HJP) clinical teaching fellow, Johnke supervises students in a holistic manner.

Johnke’s interest in legal advocacy began while volunteering for a camp for adults and children with disabilities back home in Long Island. It was there that she observed the disparities in access to education, employment, and health care; the trickle-down effect of those inequalities; and the increased lack of support as someone comes of age. “Witnessing those stigmas first-hand ignited my hope to make a positive impact,” Johnke says.

Following her graduation from Brooklyn Law School, Johnke cut her teeth as an attorney at the Center for Family Representation (CFR) by representing about 60 clients at a time in child abuse and neglect proceedings. Similar to the HJP, the CFR followed an interdisciplinary approach by supporting clients through access to an attorney, a social worker, and a parent advocate. “The idea is that if you're not doing holistic care, it's really just a band-aid solution,” Johnke says. "It's not tackling the person as a whole and helping resolve what they're facing as a whole.”

At the CFR, Johnke built the foundation of her mentoring expertise by supervising first- and second-year attorneys. Through this experience, she learned just how much she enjoyed teaching law. “Seeing my supervisees gain their voice and kind of step into who they wanted to be as an attorney was really, really rewarding,” Johnke says.

This hands-on, empowering approach is one shared by HJP clinic director Kate Mitchell as well. “Kate's oversight of the clinic and giving the students the power to have this really frontlines role within this legal work for their clients is huge,” Johnke says. It’s an approach that doesn’t stop at theory but is driven by students’ actions that create a long-lasting impact on people’s lives.

Johnke and her students have jumped right into their first semester at the HJP. Student teams have been assigned their two to three cases for the semester, they’ve met with partners from Stritch School of Medicine, and they’ve attended orientation and a community tour in the village of Maywood, the region that the HJP serves. Johnke is ready to support her students so that they do not feel that they are “just students,” but rather that they have “the capacity, the power, and the voice to ignite change and make a difference for the clients,” Johnke says. –Gabi Caruth (October 2026)