Helping homeowners of limited means avoid foreclosure has turned out to be a boon for 3L Jon-Jorge Aras as well as his clients.

This fall, Aras spends one day each week at Philadelphia's Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program in City Hall, linking vulnerable homeowners with housing counselors and attorneys.

"Foreclosure is such a hot issue," Aras said. "Big banks are litigating against really small clients."

With the many Philadelphia families at risk of losing their homes, Aras faces a throng of people in City Hall each week.

"There are hundreds of clients," Aras said.

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No one who's met Professor Deborah Gordon would call her a drama queen, but the newest addition to the law school's fulltime faculty has a decided weakness for well-turned tales of joy and sorrow.

For starters, Gordon can't get through a year without re-reading "Jane Eyre," the Charlotte Bronte classic whose heroine triumphs over decades of adversity while keeping a firm grip on her principles.

It's a habit she began while studying at Williams College and then teaching Shakespeare at New York's elite The Spence School, where her students included Gwyneth Paltrow.

An expert on wills and estates, Gordon went to law school after deciding not to pursue a Ph.D. in literature. After all, she reasoned, a lifetime of teaching literature had the potential to "tarnish" her passion for the written word.

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Through lyrics about violence, illicit drugs and relationships between the powerful and the powerless, hip-hop music offers a wealth of perspectives on the law and the U.S. Constitution.

Hip-hop has emerged as a topic of interest among legal scholars in recent years, and will take center stage in a path-breaking course and lecture series Professor Donald Tibbs will launch in the spring.

"A lot of professors are writing about hip-hop and the law, but other law schools have not organized a lecture series or offered a specific class on the subject," said Tibbs, whose article, "From Black Power to Hip Hop: Discussing Race, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment Through the 'War On' Paradigm," is forthcoming in the Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice.

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The law school is offering an unprecedented class that gives students a role in a legal drama swirling around Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale formation.

Starting this fall, Professor Alex Geisinger began teaching Hydrofracking and the Clean Water Act, an environmental practicum.

"Obviously, fracking is a very significant, important and timely issue, particularly in Pennsylvania but for the entire Northeast and for other places as well," Geisinger said, referring to hydraulic fracturing, the process of injecting a pressurized chemical-infused liquid into rock layers to release embedded natural gas.

Fracking has the potential to release hazardous chemicals into groundwater and surface water and greenhouse gases into the air, raising environmental and health concerns. But because the process is exempt from most federal environmental laws, drillers have moved aggressively to set up operations in many states.

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The recently launched Entrepreneurial Law Clinic just might make the City of Brotherly Love a friendlier place to start a business.

Launched this fall, the clinic aims to nurture the burgeoning startup community in Philadelphia, said Karl Okamoto, professor of law and director of the law school's Business and Entrepreneurship Law Program.

"Through discussions in Law and Entrepreneurship class last year, we talked about things lawyers could do to make Philadelphia a better environment for startups," Okamoto said, noting that the city has often labored in the shadow of communities like Boston, Austin, New York City and Silicon Valley.

Entrepreneurs commonly struggle with legal issues that have the potential to sink their businesses before they get off the ground, but they often lack the funds to pay lawyers.

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For law school alumna Kim Magrini, it's less important to have a lot than to do a lot.

But if action equaled wealth, Magrini would be filthy rich.

Now an associate at Ballard Spahr (the same firm that former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell joined early in 2011), Magrini recently spent a year traveling to destinations in Asia and Australia, where she completed an internship in environmental law.

Magrini squeezed in some exercise, serving as captain of the USA Rugby Women's National Team and defeating South Africa to place third in the Nation's Cup in Ontario, Canada, in August.

Competing at that level was not new for Magrini, a member of the USA Rugby Women's National Team in 2010 when it defeated Canada to finish 5th in the Women's Rugby World Cup.

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