Dec. 1, 2025
Creating a Street Medicine Law Practicum
Law students join medical students and other disciplines on night rounds to provide care and legal resources for Pittsburgh's unhoused population.
TOPICS: Education | School of Medicine
Look to the Stars
By Strategic Communications
Helena Oft, president of the student-run organization Street Medicine at Pitt, often finds herself at an intersection between medicine and law.
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has prepared her for emergencies like performing CPR and controlling bleeding but not for some of the other crises facing the unhoused people the program serves, like impounded cars, access to birth certificates or domestic violence.
“We do everything we can to support patients, but there’s a gray area we can’t cross,” said Oft, a fifth-year student at Pitt School of Medicine. “It became clear that some needs go beyond what medicine alone can provide. We’re not tapped into the legal side or the broader system-level issues.”
In fall 2025, Pitt’s Schools of Medicine and of Law launched the inaugural Street Medicine Law Practicum: Homelessness Law and Policy, an interdisciplinary course blending classroom instruction with hands-on fieldwork. For the practicum, law students collaborate with Street Medicine at Pitt to engage directly with the city’s unhoused population, addressing legal barriers to health care and housing. Designed to foster medicolegal partnerships, the course offers students a distinctive opportunity to deepen their understanding of homelessness and contribute meaningful support to those affected.
Students in the practicum heard from guest speakers—including Jim Withers, founder of the Street Medicine Institute and of Pittsburgh Mercy’s Operation Safety Net—and wrote papers analyzing legal or policy interventions to address homelessness at a systemic level. Following each week’s rounds, law students debrief with Mary Crossley, John E. Murray Faculty Scholar and professor of law, School of Law.
Crossley, who focuses on health care law, developed the practicum—which founders believe to be the first of its kind—with Anna Marie White, assistant professor of family and community medicine, School of Medicine.
I think I truly learned what it means to treat people with kindness and grace—to meet them wherever they are in their life journey and to respect that.
Madeline Richardson, Pitt School of Law student
“Our street medicine team has toyed with this idea for years,” said White, who is also the medical director for Street Medicine at Pitt. “Every week, we see somebody with some sort of legal or medicolegal need out there.”
The practicum is intentionally small, with only six students permitted to enroll. Though the students aren’t yet licensed to practice law or provide legal representation, they can provide legal information or make referrals to neighborhood legal providers.
“I think one of the most gratifying things about this experience is how supportive virtually every person involved was,” Crossley said. “Anytime I’ve reached out to folks, whether to be a referral or a guest speaker, the response has always been, ‘This is a great idea. What can we do to help?’”
Law students Madeline Richardson and Julia Derienzo were both interested in the course because of its hands-on experience outside of the classroom and its combination of law and medicine. Neither had worked alongside medical students before enrolling in the course.
“I always had a vested interest in the advocacy side of law,” said Richardson, a second-year student at Pitt School of Law. “When my advisor told me about the practicum, I knew it was going to be a unique opportunity to participate in pro bono work and interact with a population that I normally wouldn’t have the chance to as a law student.”
Both medical and law students were eager to collaborate, yet they initially carried a shared skepticism about each other’s fields.
“My father is a physician, so I grew up seeing the medical profession from the inside,” said Derienzo, who is in her final year at Pitt School of Law. “That perspective made me a bit cynical at first about how lawyers and doctors interact—it often seemed reduced to malpractice suits or conflict. But I wanted to challenge that narrative and explore how our fields could come together, not in opposition, but in pursuit of a common goal.”
Gaining first-hand interprofessional experience is also valuable for the med students, Oft said.
“I think lawyers get an unfair rap of not caring,” Oft said. “I’m guilty of being critical myself, but oftentimes they’re working with individuals in a vulnerable state—just like us.”
Crossley and White are hoping to open the practicum to more students in other fields. This past semester’s cohort included one undergraduate bioengineering student who hopes to attend medical school after graduation. Tomar Pierson-Brown, assistant professor of law and director of the Health Law Certificate Program, School of Law, started leading the course in spring 2026. Street Medicine at Pitt emphasizes accepting, understanding and engaging with individuals in the context of their current circumstances, perspectives and personal journeys—rather than trying to change them or impose outside expectations.
“I think I truly learned what it means to treat people with kindness and grace—to meet them wherever they are in their life journey and to respect that,” Richardson said. “It can be difficult to understand how someone ends up on the streets or struggling with severe addiction, but witnessing it firsthand was eye-opening. It made me more compassionate and empathetic toward the people we met, and it gave me a meaningful way to step outside myself and help them.”