Dialog reporter
DOVER — James McGiffin Jr. arrived in Delaware in 1985, fresh out of Boston College Law School, and began working with the Community Legal Aid Society Inc. (CLASI) in Georgetown. Thirty-one years later, he’s doing a lot of the same work to help the indigent and others in distress, who otherwise may not have legal representation.
The St. Thomas More Society, a diocesan group of attorneys and others in the legal profession, recently recognized McGiffin with its Mgsr. Paul J. Taggart Award.
McGiffin said he would not have been so surprised had he been selected when he was president of the Delaware State Bar Association or executive director of CLASI.
“I was surprised that anyone was paying attention to what I was doing anymore,” McGiffin said in his office in Dover. “If it had happened 10 years ago when I was really in the mix, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But I was delighted. I’m glad that people recognize that what we do here is a valuable thing. That means a lot.”
McGiffin, 58, is the senior staff attorney in CLASI’s Kent County office and works in its poverty law program. He is in Family Court a lot, helping clients get protective orders, working on custody cases, and representing tenants facing eviction, among other issues. He also represents a lot of older people who have purchased manufactured housing but live on leased land. Delaware law prevents landlords from raising rents too high, too fast, and McGiffin helps ensure that law works.
McGiffin, a member of Holy Cross Parish in Dover, has been with CLASI for all but four of the 31 years he’s lived in Delaware. From 1994-98, he was a commissioner on state Family Court. After returning to CLASI, he was its executive director until 2005, when he assumed his current position.
“The executive director doesn’t get to do much lawyering. It’s a great job, and I enjoyed it for seven years, but I really missed lawyering,” he said.
“Plus, my kids were still in school, and I was missing a lot because that job is sited in Wilmington. A lot of commuting.”
Music to law
Growing up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, McGiffin saw himself on a different stage. He was a bass player and attended North Texas State University – now the University of North Texas – which had the largest music program in the United States.
“After being there for three years, I realized I was not the best. There were 50 bass players there, and I was far from the best,” he said.
He shifted his attention to the law, and in his second year at Boston College, he found his vocation. He worked in a clinic sponsored by the school, doing work similar to what he does today.
“As soon as I started doing it, I loved it. I could see that this was what I was made for. I discerned it as my calling,” he said.
The Jesuits who operate Boston College have a strong sense of social justice, and McGiffin said that was evident in the clinic. One person who had a great influence on him when he was young was not a priest, however, but a sister who was his principal in eighth grade at St. Leo the Great School in Fairfax, Va.
“She was the first person to talk to me as if I was a person and not an annoying kid. She and I had a lot of interaction, and we developed a really solid friendship. We weren’t peers, but she treated me with a lot of respect and helped me develop my relationship with God,” he said.
He met his wife, Kathleen Doyle, at the Boston College clinic, where she was a secretary. They decided that after she received her master’s in teaching and he earned his law degree that they would move wherever one of them found a job. That’s how they ended up in the First State. They lived in Milford for three years while McGiffin was working in Georgetown at the Sussex County office, then relocated to Dover.
They have two adult children. Daughter Bridget is a social worker in Washington, D.C., while son Conor is an actor based in New York.
McGiffin is active at Holy Cross in the music ministry. He plays bass at the 9:15 a.m. Sunday Mass during the choir season, and percussion at the 11 a.m. contemporary Mass. He and his wife also were presenters for Engaged Encounter for the diocese for 25 years. In addition, he’s been an advocate for the diocesan Tribunal.
He has been active in several musical endeavors, including as a member of “Profundo Bono,” a group of Delaware lawyers who sing for bar-related fundraisers, and Celtic Harvest, a traditional Irish music group.
In the community. McGiffin was a Dover city councilman for five years, chairman of the state Equal Employment Review Board and vice chair of the Dover Human Relations Commission, among other activities. He used to coach mock trial at the high school level, and he is currently counsel to the majority caucus of the Delaware state senate.
McGiffin said he feels fortunate to have had the career he has and the feeling of being in the right place throughout the years.
“A lot of lawyers graduate not knowing what they’re going to do, and it takes them years and years to figure it out, but I was lucky,” he said. “I figured it out before I even graduated.”
