Clinical Law Prof Blog

CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student or Team Award: The University of Maryland Carey School of Law is thrilled to announce that Fasika Delessa, a student in the Low Income Tax Clinic, received the 2022 CLEA student award. Over the course of her 2 semesters in the clinic, Ms. Delessa helped negotiate Currently Non-Collectible status for a 61-year-old client, who is a caregiver for her mother who has dementia, filed an amended return for a barber whose income was decimated by COVID-19 that lowered his tax bill from $37,000 to $4000 and negotiated restoration of a nursing license for a client whose license was being withheld for non-payment of taxes. 
 

May 24, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student or Team Award: Rebecca Desta, Best Clinic Student (Youth Justice Section) Supervising Clinic Faculty Member: Clinic Professor Hector Linares

During the year she spent as a student practitioner with the Youth Justice section of the Law Clinic, Rebecca represented clients in both special education advocacy and delinquency proceedings. She filed a request for a due process hearing on behalf of a student with disabilities who had been denied special education services for years despite reading at a third-grade level as a junior in high school. Rebecca successfully obtained eligibility for the student and negotiated a settlement agreement for compensatory education and services to help her client make up for lost time. Rebecca also worked incredibly hard for another client facing multiple felony petitions in juvenile court. She helped the youth obtain release from detention and get back into school. Rebecca also performed admirably at trial conducting the opening, closing, and multiple cross examinations. She was ultimately able to secure a disposition of probation on a single adjudicated offense for her client.

CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award: Brandan Bonds, Best Extern (Orleans DA Office of Civil Rights) Externship Program Supervisor: Clinic Professor Davida Finger

Brandan served as the inaugural extern at the Orleans DA Office of Civil Rights (OCR). He worked on police misconduct cases and with a team of attorneys, reviewed past cases on policing and sentencing issues. His work was outstanding and he accepted a job with OCR for Fall 2022.

May 23, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student or Team Award: Michael Briggs (3L) and Kevin Kilroy (2L) for the Outstanding Clinic Team Award from the Restoration and Justice Clinic at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law.

All semester, Michael and Kevin demonstrated excellence in their representation of their transgender, human trafficking client. They established rapport early and communicated regularly with their client, and gleaned additional information through trauma-informed interviewing and counseling to better portray their client's criminal convictions as result of sex trafficking. In the five years the clinic has represented this client, we had not previously learned this information. To do this, they prepared extensively, revised and reflected on their approach, and also shared their vulnerabilities with their client; in fact, Kevin shared her own coming out story with their client.

Kevin and Michael also edited the client's declaration and pleadings with more trans-inclusive language. In today's transphobic climate, the care and concern they took to humanize their client not only honors her but also serves to educate stakeholders and decision makers who will read these pleadings. Their contribution to the clinic for future students, as well as the broader community at Pepperdine and the legal community combatting sex trafficking in Los Angeles cannot be overstated.

Their collaboration was excellent, and Kevin described it like this in her journal reflections: "We kept an open line of communication throughout the past few months, also met to strategize before asking to meet with a client or to plan what we would discuss when on the phone with her. We shared expectations for ourselves and motivated each other to do our best. There was never a moment where we did not know what the other was working on, or if they were able to accomplish a given assignment. The communication also fostered great trust between each other."

Michael and Kevin embody the intent and spirit this award seeks to honor.

CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award: Felicia Forman

During her 2L year, Felicia has excelled in her work with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office Sex Crimes Division. Her work supervisor noted that, "Felicia is committed to helping victims of sexual abuse become survivors. She has incredible drive, an outstanding work ethic and she takes the initiative to find ways to help all of the attorneys here at Stuart House. Felicia will be an outstanding lawyer and our Deputy In Charge continues to tell her that having her as a law clerk is like having another Deputy District Attorney in the office. I am looking forward to Felicia working with us again next semester."

May 22, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Prof. Ron Hochbaum, able editor, CLEA has published its Spring 2022 Newsletter this week. 

Download the CLEA Spring 2022 Newsletter here.

May 9, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Prof. Jane Stoever and the Committee: 

The CLEA Awards Committee is thrilled to announce that Ian Weinstein (Professor of Law at Fordham Law School) and Sheila Bedi (Clinical Law Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) are recipients of the CLEA Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers.  

 

CLEA is equally thrilled to announce that the University of Maine School of Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic and Cornell Law School’s Death Penalty Program are recipients of the CLEA Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project, and an Honorable Mention is being awarded to the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative’s Ambassadors for Racial Justice Program.  

 

The 2022 CLEA Awards will be presented at the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education on Thursday, May 12, 5:15-6:15 pm Eastern. We look forward to celebrating the remarkable award recipients and our clinical community! 

 

Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers: Ian Weinstein 

 

CLEA’s Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teaching Award recognizes those who have served as a voice for clinical teachers and contributed to the advancement of clinical legal education. Ian Weinstein, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, has enthusiastically advocated for clinics since he was a clinic student and fellow at New York University and Georgetown. At Fordham, he helped Jim Cohen and others build a robust program under the visionary leadership of then Dean John Feerick. For more than 35 years, he has been devoted to his students, has fought passionately for his clients, and has stood shoulder to shoulder with his colleagues to advance our work.  

 

Long a leader at Fordham, in 2009 Ian joined the CLEA Executive Committee and worked with Claudia Angelos, Kate Kruse, Robert Kuehn and many others to oppose the weakening of key rules supporting clinical faculty and to support the expansion of experiential education. Clinical legal education needed a defense lawyer on the team, and he stepped up.     

 

Ian is also a co-convenor of the Stephen Ellmann Clinical Theory Workshop series with Deborah Archer, Donna Lee, and Richard Marsico. They continue Steve’s commitment to supporting clinical scholarship and fostering community. Ian’s scholarship includes work on client counseling and clinical pedagogy as well as criminal law and access to justice. Starting from the experiences of clients and students, he foregrounds a central aspiration of clinical legal education – the pursuit of social justice by intentional lawyering. Although he may play the contrarian and cynic, Ian’s unabashed faith in his students, his colleagues, and the clinical method is contagious.

 

Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers: Sheila Bedi 

 

Sheila Bedi, Clinical Law Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, is the founder of the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, which concentrates on developing and executing legal strategies that target racism and violence in our criminal justice systems. Her work focuses on ensuring that federal litigation strategies are responsive to and driven by the communities most affected by over-policing, mass imprisonment, and other forms of repression and social control.  

 

Sheila’s work founding the Boyd-Barnett Fellowship Program, a first-of-its-kind program that allows organizers to take classes with law students, has created a platform for students to learn about how clinics can help build power in local communities. Sheila models client-centered movement lawyering as she works hard to reimagine and further clinical education and make clinics relevant to and responsive to the needs of Chicago’s Black and brown communities. 

 

Sheila regularly delivers presentations about her innovative approach to legal education, advancing the role of clinicians and clinical education, including at law schools in Chicago and at clinical and other conferences. She also unites litigators and clinicians to address prisoners’ rights. She is a deeply committed mentor to younger clinicians and clinicians-to-be, particularly women of color. Sheila’s scholarship also reflects her values and her work; she is a co-author of the only casebook on the Law of Incarceration and has published in multiple journals.  

 

Congratulations, Sheila and Ian! 

 

Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project: University of Maine School of Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic 

 

The University of Maine School of Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic (RHRC) undertook a multi-year, multi-faceted project investigating the problematic practices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Boston Asylum Office (BAO), as described in the project report: Lives in Limbo: How the Boston Asylum Office Fails Asylum Seekers. RHRC students, working under the supervision of RHRC Founder and Director Professor Anna Welch and her colleague Adjunct Professor Erica Schair-Cardona, drafted the Report in collaboration with project partners ACLU of Maine, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, and Dr. Basileus Zeno of Amherst College.

 

The BAO has a stunningly low approval rate for affirmative asylum petitions. Denials at the BAO delay the resolution of meritorious petitions by several years, causing further trauma to asylum seekers and requiring their family members abroad to remain in danger. The RHRC’s BAO project included litigation in U.S. District Court to compel government production of documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative investigation into the BAO’s practices and policies.  

 

The Report, which received local and national media coverage (including Human Rights First), details findings from analysis of documents and data received as a result of the FOIA lawsuit, as well as hours of student interviews with asylees, asylum seekers, former asylum officers, and immigration attorneys. It exposed several systemic problems with adjudication of affirmative asylum applications across the country, including bias, a culture of distrust toward asylum seekers, and violations of their due process rights.  

 

Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project: Cornell School of Law’s Death Penalty Program 

 

The award to Cornell School of Law’s Death Penalty Program honors the work of the Capital Punishment Clinic, the International Human Rights Clinic, the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, and the Death Penalty Project, representing the efforts of Professors Sandra Babcock, John Blume, Sheri Johnson, and Keir Weyble, and generations of their students, alumni, community partners, and clients. The faculty have collectively devoted more than 100 years to the defense of people facing the death penalty, leveraging law school and university resources to provide enduring support to individual clients and to the capital punishment abolition movement in the United States and around the world. They have worked not only to overturn convictions and death sentences of individual clients, but also to assist and train capital defense attorneys in dozens of countries, conduct groundbreaking empirical research and scholarship, and promote ever-higher standards of defense practice both in the United States and abroad. Countless alumni have gone on to work in criminal defense or in the capital punishment field as a result of their clinic experience, and many continue to collaborate with the faculty and current students. 

 

Honorable Mention: Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative’s Ambassadors for Racial Justice Program 

 

Through the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program, co-founded by the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic and The Gault Center (formerly the National Juvenile Defender Center), youth defenders across the country receive the resources and training they need to battle racial injustice. In response to the tremendous racial disparities they have witnessed during the Clinic’s many decades of work, faculty, staff, and students began to incorporate data and research on implicit racial bias and the traumatic effects of policing on youth of color into their legal arguments and written pleadings. Ambassadors for Racial Justice was conceived as a way to extend the impact of the Clinic’s racial justice advocacy beyond the walls of the law school. 

 

During the year-long program, an annual cohort of ten Ambassadors gathers for weekend-long retreats and monthly webinars covering topics such as incorporating data in advocacy, strategies to end the criminalization of normal adolescent behavior, and probation reform. Additionally, each Ambassador develops a capstone project aimed at legislative advocacy, training, coalition building, litigation strategy, or community education in their state. 

 

Now in the program’s third year, the Ambassadors spread across 19 states and advance justice for youth of color by serving as mentors to other defenders and sharing motions through Defend Racial Justice for Youth: A Toolkit for Defenders. In the words of one Ambassador, the program equips defenders to “fight a system that thrives on the insidious corroding thread of dehumanizing and caging children of color,” and “disrupt everything… that says …our kids’ lives don’t matter.” 

 

We are inspired by our award recipients and look forward to celebrating our clinical community on May 12th. 

The CLEA Awards Committee 

Anju Gupta  

D’lorah Hughes  

Tameka Lester 

Serge Martinez (co-chair)  

Esther Park  

Thiadora Pina   

Jane Stoever (co-chair)  

May 3, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Dena Bauman and the AALS Clinical Section Communications Committee: 

Here is the AALS Clinical Section Spring 2022 Newsletter, "chockfull of wonderful news from around the country of the innovative and invaluable work of clinicians and students."

April 24, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Claire Raj and Cindy Wilson, AALS Clinical Section Executive Committee Co-Chairs: 

On behalf of the AALS Clinical Section Executive Committee, we are delighted to announce the winners of two 2022 Section awards – the William Pincus Award recipient Professor Lisa Brodoff from Seattle University School of Law, and the M. Shanara Gilbert Award recipient Professor Bernice Grant from Fordham University School of Law. Please join us to honor and hear from the recipients at the virtual Clinical Conference on Wednesday, May 11 at 5:30 p.m. EST.  

  

The Pincus award is intended to honor someone who has made an outstanding contribution to the cause of clinical legal education. The criteria include scholarship and activities beneficial to clinical education or to the advancement of justice. Professor Brodoff is an Associate Professor and directed the Ronald A. Peterson Law Clinic from 2010 to 2021. She has been instrumental in developing innovative programs to spread clinical pedagogy broadly throughout the law school curriculum and to integrate externships into the clinic program. She is a frequent presenter at clinical and other conferences and was the chair of the Planning Committee for the 2019 clinical conference. Professor Brodoff is known for her creative approach to teaching, scholarship, and learning, including introducing lightning rounds, a community quilt, and a karaoke session to the 2019 clinical conference. She has mentored new clinicians for many years and is known for taking a compassionate, supportive, and respectful approach to her mentorship. Her clinical work includes both individual representation and broader advocacy, and she is very active in community service related to issues of elder, disability, and queer law.

 

Designed to honor an "emerging clinician," the M. Shanara Gilbert Award honors a clinical professor with ten or fewer years of experience. This year’s recipient, Bernice Grant, is the founding Director of the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic (ELC) at Fordham. The theme of the ELC is “Transactional Lawyering with Social Impact.” Its clients include a formerly incarcerated entrepreneur who ran a business that hired 50 formerly incarcerated individuals with a 0% recidivism rate. In addition to her clinical work, Professor Grant designed and launched a legal podcast for entrepreneurs called “Startup LAWnchpad," hosted by Fordham Law students. The podcast focuses on social, economic and racial justice topics such as access to capital for minority and female entrepreneurs, impact investing, social enterprise law, and immigration law considerations for entrepreneurs. Professor Grant is also a leader in the national transactional clinical community. She is a frequent presenter at the Transactional Clinical Conference, AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education, and the NYU Clinical Law Review Writers’ Workshop. 

 

Please join us in celebrating these two amazing clinicians and we look forward to hearing more about their work on Wednesday, May 11^th! 

April 22, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m not a big hugger.  Hugs have meanings from my past I struggle to understand sometimes.  Last week it came back to the fore for me again.

Because last week was my stepfather’s funeral.  It was a hard day, and the days since have remained hard for me.  I am talking to very few people other than saying hello or general pleasantries—I seem able to communicate well with my students and clients, but hardly at all with others.  Perhaps the most I have really spoken since he died other than in doing my job was at his funeral, where I forgot to say all he might have wanted me to say—perhaps highlighting his civil rights career in the late 60’s and 70’s, where he did things like organize protests while working as a civil rights worker for the City of Evanston along with a locally well-known reverend in the black community so people would feel their voices were heard after Martin Luther King was shot; maybe talking about his hopes to create a foundation to train lawyers to help poor people and minorities fight injustice; maybe noting the love he had for his children and how happy he had made my mother by building a life with her; and maybe even how he helped me build my last place soapbox derby car as a cub scout.  I couldn’t say any of that—I somehow did not think about how it might be my place to speak at his funeral before it just happened.  I mostly talked about being lucky to share part of my life with him and his family and how I’d miss him.

A day before he lost consciousness for the last time during his final ambulance ride to the hospital where he died, I had been teaching my students about connections in the context of cultural competence and interviewing.  I gave them my goals for their learning prior to the class:  the biggest thing I wanted them to learn was that to be culturally competent, you need to know yourself and that all people are not just like you.  You come from a culture and from a past that has shaped you, and if you do not understand that, you cannot understand why you see the world the way you do.  Your clients come from a culture and an individual past that has shaped them, too.  It may be similar or quite different from your culture and past.  You do not have the ability to understand all that goes into who they are and how they see the world but must listen to people and hear what you can.  You might have helpful stereotypes of your clients from working with and being part of their communities that might help you understand your clients.  However, you can’t be bound by those stereotypes, but must see individuals as such, and be ready to see how those stereotypes do and do not describe your clients.   Your clients may have different views of the same facts you see that are shaped from their experiences, and in their work with you, they may have different goals than you might expect and may tolerate different legal and life strategies than you might think they would, perhaps due to these things.  We are the same and we are different.  We need to recognize both.  We cannot let our vision of reality and our vision for our clients’ lives dominate and diminish our clients’ own but must learn to see our clients and their needs and try to meet them.   

And then he died.  And I thought about how I and my family and friends might gain comfort.  And I did not want to think about my culture and what in my past might make me different—there was not really time.  I should have.  I was about 3 when my biological father died, a death I am too young to remember.  However, I remember clearly the years long reactions to his death that partly have shaped me.  It made it difficult to comfort me then and today. The relatives who came up to me for years after he died and wanted to hug me because I had lost my father.  The teachers and friends’ parents who did the same at a time when two parent families were more the norm and having no father was strange and pitiable.  They made me feel outcast.  They made me feel damaged.   Their hugs were meant to comfort me, but instead felt like pity and sorrow and misfortune.

So I thought about what I had been teaching my students.  Do I know myself?  Do I even know my friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues well enough to understand their realities and how they might find comfort and deliver it?  Is it like I do?  My students often leave our discussion about connection with clients feeling like it will take them a full 10 minutes to understand their clients enough to help them, a position from which I try to dissuade them.  After years with my family and years at the same job and within the same community, did I even understand the culture and lives of others around me well enough to comfort people and be comforted?

I think my answer is probably not.  My mother needed comforting, and I knew I had to and wanted to provide that.  I sat with my mother at the funeral and hugged her and held her hand during the service.  The funeral was a confusing event for her due to her age and dementia, and I did my best to comfort her within my capacities—I listened, and mostly she just wanted to get away from the event and share her fears about how she can live without my stepfather, doing so in the repetitive but real way she could express that due to her dementia. 

I talked to and hugged his children and grandchildren and tried to hear what they had to say about losing their father and grandfather.  To some extent, they are from a different world than I.  Their ancestors were buried at that site, including one of his kids, who was a stepsister to me but a sister, mother, and grandmother to several there.  They were trying to process things, and they needed me to respect their feelings and leave them be.

But when it came to comforting me, I realized what people saw.  I do not seem like a person able to be comforted.   I still think of distant attempts at comforting me that I couldn’t appreciate.  I likely radiate that today.  Here I was years later, and I was becoming insulted by the friends and colleagues that sent perfunctory emails and did not check in again, while at the same time rebuffing some others that wanted to talk with and comfort me.  Maybe the people who did not try to comfort me know me best.  Maybe they know that a hug or a kind word has to come with an explanation of why it is not expressing pity but love or I cannot handle it.  Or maybe they have their own culture or experience that triggers things in them so they react in a way unrelated to what I am experiencing.

So I am coming to understand me—my culture, the things about my life that make me different from many in my culture, and the way that I see the world and connections.  I thought I would have accomplished this by now in my somewhat older age but I clearly have not.  And maybe that will help me with my clients, my students, my family, my friends, and perhaps it will even help me with me.  But to my students who learn about connection and understanding oneself and think it is a short-term process, it is not—at least for me.  And if I give you a hug some time, remember I will have thought about it and will not do so from pity but only from love and connection

April 12, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (3)

UDC Law is proud to present the second in our new remote Conversations with Clinicians series. 

On Friday March 25 at 12:30pm EST, we will host two leading lights in our community: Prof. Laila Hlass currently serves as Associate Provost for International Affairs and Co-Director of the Immigrants Rights Clinic at Tulane, along with Allison Korn, Assistant Dean for Experiential Education at UCLA Law, where she also directs the Food Law & Policy Clinic. Together, Profs. Hlass and Korn conducted a key survey of law schools and published the results here with the Villanova Law Review.

UDC Law's Associate Dean for Clinical and Experiential Programs, Lindsay M. Harris, will engage with Profs. Hlass and Korn. We will discuss a little bit about our speakers' path into experiential education, the leadership roles they hold, the survey they conducted and the key takeaways. We will also likely touch on the emerging amendments to ABA standard 303 and think about how law schools might adapt to think about professional identity formation and addressing racism, bias, and cultural humility throughout the curriculum.

Bring your lunch or coffee and engage with us next Friday March 25 from 12:30-1:30EST. The flyer is attached and you can register here: https://bit.ly/ConvosUDCLaw

March 23, 2022 in ABA Standards, Conferences and Meetings, New Clinical Programs, Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (0)

UDC Law is launching our Conversations with Clinicians speaker series. Each conversation in our series will feature a UDC Law clinician hosting a special guest or two to discuss a topic of interest to the clinical community.

UDC Law has a dual mission: to provide legal services to indigent district residents and to empower students from marginalized and unrepresented communities to join the legal profession. A pioneer in clinical legal education, UDC Law remains deeply committed to the advancement of clinical education. The Conversations with Clinicians series will engage leading clinicians across the country to explore various topics of interest to our community. Here are details on the three conversations scheduled this semester:

On Friday March 11 from 12:30-1:30pm EST UDC Law Dean Renee Hutchins will be in conversation with the University of Maryland’s Michael Pinard. Dean Hutchins and Prof. Pinard will explore career trajectories for clinicians. To register for this first conversation, please visit https://bit.ly/UDCLawConvos

On Friday March 25, UDC Law Associate Dean for Clinical and Experiential Programs, Lindsay M. Harris, will engage with Prof. & Associate Provost Laila Hlass of Tulane and Assistant Dean for Experiential Education Allison Korn of UCLA to discuss trends in experiential legal education discussed in their 2020 Villanova Law Review article, Assessing the Experiential Revolution. Save the date!

Last but certainly not least, on Friday April 22, UDC Law General Practice Co-Director, Tianna Gibbs, will engage with Prof. Norrinda Hayat, Director of the Civil Justice Clinic at Rutgers Law, to discuss Prof. Hayat’s critically important 2021 Clinical Law Review piece, Freedom Pedagogy: Towards Teaching Antiracist Clinics. Save the date!

All are welcome to join in these conversations. 

March 1, 2022 in ABA Standards, Conferences and Meetings, New Clinical Programs, Scholarship, Teaching and Pedagogy | Permalink | Comments (0)

PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY CARUSO SCHOOL OF LAW seeks applicants to serve as its Director of Externships and Pro Bono Programs.

The Director will be responsible for teaching and administering the School of Law's JD externship program, offered every term with more than 200 field placements annually in California, the United States, and global sites. The duties include course and program design, teaching in the classroom and other modes, placement approval, supervisor training and engagement, intensive student advising, and managing enrollment and assessment systems. The Director works with the Clinical Program Manager for administrative and technical matters and with the Assistant Dean of Clinical Education and Global Programs to ensure compliance and educational excellence. The Director works with the Career Development Office to post and promote placements and with law faculty who serve as advisors. The Director will work with faculty and staff to facilitate externships in Washington DC, London, and other international sites. The Director works extensively with hundreds of field placements and supervisors to ensure the students’ work and experiences advance high academic and professional objectives. The Director will participate in local and national professional organizations dedicated to externship education.

The Director will direct the School of Law's pro bono program. This includes opportunities for creative program design and renewed engagement with external and internal partners, student organizations, and communities in need. The School of Law encourages robust pro bono and volunteer work to advance the School of Law's missions of service and professional formation. The Director will have the opportunity to study, design, and implement volunteer pro bono programs and will participate actively in local, state, national, and international pro bono organizations.

This is a twelve-month position with teaching and administrative responsibilities in Fall, Spring, and Summer terms. The Director will also have an appointment as adjunct faculty.

Duties

Advise every student in an externship every semester to approve field placements and confirm student planning.

Teach externship workshops and provide on-going, continuous, faculty-guided reflection in various forms and modes. Liaise and communicate regularly and effectively with field supervisors and field placements and other external partners and stakeholders.

Develop and implement voluntary pro bono programs.

Manage significant externship documentation and records with the Clinical Program Manager.

Conduct regular orientations for students in externships and considering externships.

Conduct periodic program reviews to improve learning outcomes and student experiences.

Perform additional duties as necessary or required.

Uphold University mission through work performed.

The above information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.

Skills and Qualifications

Required: JD degree from an ABA-accredited law school. At least three years of active law practice experience. License to practice law in good standing with a bar association in the United States. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, high volume practice, with a wide range of constituents within the diverse law school community, including teaching fellows, program assistants, faculty members, and the law school administration. Ability to make consistent application of standards to evolving situations, and the ability to manage significant documentation, records, and correspondence with students and field placements.

Preferred: At least five years of active law practice experience in diverse practice areas. Experience teaching in law school or other contexts. License to practice law in California in good standing.

Ideal candidates will have diverse practice experience and demonstrable interest in different contexts, as well as a strong academic record and experience working in a higher education setting in the areas of teaching, academic assistance, academic counseling, or similar administrative, or practice experience.

Qualified individuals should be able to articulate a strong commitment to diversity, and have the ability to work effectively with individuals from different backgrounds.

Offers of employment are contingent upon successful completion of a criminal, education, and employment screening. Qualified individuals with criminal histories will be considered for employment in compliance with applicable laws.

Salary

Commensurate with experience.

Apply and learn more at this link.

March 1, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pandemonium!  Okay, it was not pandemonium.  It was me running around in the dark teaching.  Half an hour before class was to start, the power had gone out.  And what did my students and I decide to do when the power stayed out?  Learn together in the dark!  Would it have worked on Zoom?  No!—the power was out!  And it wouldn’t have been as much fun, been as good learning, or worked as much to help me and maybe my students get out of some February doldrums.

It had just promised to be an annoyance when the power went out in the law school building and some buildings around us.  A student and I were feeling lucky.  We had just done a hearing by phone in a room that would have gone very dark with no windows.  We had left it for my office to debrief.  What would have happened in an administrative hearing if the lights went out?  It would have failed and likely would have ended.  Our client would likely have had to wait months for another chance at a hearing.  But we had done it and were debriefing in my office when the power went out.  It was darkish, but we kept going by the light from my windows, both of us Monday morning quarterbacking the hearing a bit and taking down the adrenaline from the hearing. 

But then the power stayed out and we were supposed to have class.  Our classroom is on the sixth floor, my office on the first, and whether the elevators worked or not, we weren’t going to get in them.  And then the emails came from my students on my phone, telling me they were upstairs.  They were?  Except for me and my student who had just done the hearing, they were upstairs all around the building.  Up the five flights I went, finding students who were wondering what was going on along the way.  I pulled them together in the classroom and almost in unison, they said to me they wanted to have the class!  I thought about class with no power.  Computers would work if charged but the internet would not work—imagine a class without internet!  Without even the possibility a text messages and emails to interrupt us.  The students told me it would be an adventure, and that they would have a story to tell about learning in the dark.  And they would not do what we might have had to do otherwise—go home and be on zoom.  We have a little light in the classroom from a large bank of indoor windows grabbing light from an atrium with a skylight two flights up.  They wanted to continue.  And we did.  It took my going up and down five flights three or four times, but we were all together and ready to learn.

Was it my best teaching?  Maybe.  I drew on a dimly lit white board laws they could not find online that we were discussing.  We did case rounds where we were able to laugh about what students remembered with and without their computers from previous classes they’d taken and they got to think about what might actually be relevant from their non-clinical classes when they were lawyers.  We gave a few ideas to the student presenting in case rounds, left, and went on to the rest of the day.  We learned that while we were learning, the school had reasonably decided to close for the rest of the day.  I met with several students later in the day individually on zoom, but we had escaped it for at least one class and did some good learning in the process.

I had been looking for something to brighten up the class, the clinic, my mood, and maybe my students’ moods.  I’ve written before in this blog about the general melancholic blues of early February.  Winter holidays are long over, and other than a mostly illusory spring break for many students and at least for this clinical teacher who will need to work through it, there is little outside of school to enliven our lives until Memorial Day and summer begins.  Two years of on and off zoom classes and Covid, including delayed in-person teaching at our school as well as most every other school I know due to the latest Covid variant, have only made February blues worse.  We could not stand another visit of the Ghost of Zoom Teaching Past, and at least for a few hours, I benefitted from my students’ resilience, and we learned and enlivened our lives together.

February 15, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the organizers: 

Dear Externship Community, 

We hope you and yours are well.

We look forward to gathering for Externships 11 in sunny California October 7-9, 2022!

For those who would like to present but have a half-baked or not-at-all baked idea, the deadline to submit an  RFP Interest Form has been extended to May 15, 2022, after the AALS Conference. A committee member will be in touch to discuss your interest. The RFP submission deadline has been extended to June 17, 2022. Please mark your calendars.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, please check out the Externships 11 website! You’ll find all of the links to complete registration, submit proposals, etc. Please bookmark the page and circulate widely!

 

February 14, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Prof. Tim Iglesias: 

The third edition of the ABA Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development has been published:

This book is a comprehensive legal guide to the development of affordable housing for practitioners and housing advocates. It covers all aspects of the development process, including zoning and building codes, financing, monitoring and enforcement of regulations, fair housing, preservation of affordable housing, and relocation requirements. It also includes brief chapters on the history of affordable housing and the future of affordable housing.

February 11, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three years ago, my role at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law expanded to include administrative leadership for our Global Programs, including the London Program, Washington DC Externship Semester, and summer exchange program in Augsburg. It’s required a heavy learning curve, especially with pandemic complications. These are all well established programs with talented directors, and I am the next steward in a long line of professors who have developed and led these programs. For much of its history, the School of Law has developed and encouraged studying and working abroad through these Global Programs, externships, and the Sudreau Global Justice Institute. International study and engagement is deep in Pepperdine’s DNA.

This is exciting to me, because I did not study abroad in college or law school and always regretted it. I have traveled and worked abroad much since then, including teaching engagements in India, Brazil, England, and the Philippines, and an active international practice in the Community Justice Clinic. It’s cliché to say that foreign travel can change lives, but it’s true. As Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, “Travel is fatal to prejudice,” and we need it. But this role is new territory for me outside of dedicated clinical education, and I have tried to bring the virtues and values of clinical education, professional formation, access to justice, cultural competence, and readiness for practice into these initiatives.

Prof. Nancy Hunt leads the Washington DC Externship Semester and literally wrote the book on Lawyering in the Nation’s Capital. It’s an expanded, sophisticated externship program that gives our West Coast students serious, full-time experience and relationships in DC where many stay for their careers.

Prof. Peter Wendel directs the Augsburg Exchange Program each summer with the University of Augsburg and its Summer Program on European and International Economic Law. Each summer our students study in Germany, and each fall we welcome German students to Malibu. They contribute much to our community, and our students develop expertise and cross-cultural compassion and sophistication.

The London Program is our oldest study-abroad program, beloved of alumni, and it has passed through several iterations. In this age of exploding (or exploded) student debt, less predictable and shifting JD job markets, and complex, competitive global markets, we’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of the London Program and its return on investment for students who take a semester abroad. For law students, studying abroad is too expensive to be merely a cool diversion or change of venue; it should tangibly advance their work, vocation, and careers.  

With my colleagues who have served as Faculty Directors, including Prof. Rob Anderson in 2021 and Prof. Naomi Goodno this year (and Prof. David Han in 2020 had not the pandemic interrupted everything), and our heroic Associate Director Karen Haygreen, we have redoubled our efforts on developing curricula and experiences that are useful and particularly valuable to students with global practice in mind. We focus the curriculum on international and comparative law, international human rights, transnational conflict resolution, arbitration, entertainment, and business. Collaborative experience in practice is essential to professional formation and learning, for us and our students, so the program offers extensive externship opportunities in London, study tours to international courts and institutions (pandemics permitting), and energetic moot court competitions with British law students and young lawyers. Our Faculty Director from Los Angeles teaches alongside brilliant British faculty and practitioners.

We welcome visiting students, too; they enrich our students, classes, and community in London.

True to clinic style, these new experiences have provided rich opportunity for my own fresh reflection in our Program of Clinical Education. The fundamental lessons transfer and continually inform each other: that lawyering is lawyering but context is everything, that the rule of law is essential to justice and access to justice is essential to the rule of law, and that an abiding commitment to the dignity of all human beings is critical for democracy – here and everywhere. We should manifest these commitments wherever we find ourselves and our work, locally or globally. Collaborating with lawyers and professors around the world makes me a better lawyer and teacher, and a focus on formative outcomes in one program makes us better in every other place. My great hope is that the law students in these programs glean as much from the lawyers, teachers, and students whom they meet out in the wide world, wherever they end up practicing.

February 2, 2022 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Prof. Ron Hochbaum: 

Please join us for the 20th Annual LatCrit-SALT Faculty Development Workshop

The Faculty Development Workshop (FDW) is designed for those who are planning to enter or who have recently joined the legal academy. This day-long workshop includes sessions on topics facing prospective, junior, and pre-tenured faculty, while providing opportunities to network and form mentoring relationships with established faculty. The FDW is an invaluable learning and professional development opportunity!

Thursday, October 7, 2021
11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST
The FDW will be held virtually. Participation links will be provided following registration.

Attending the FDW is FREE for LatCrit 2021 Biennial Conference registrants; however, separate registration is required.

For more information and to register for LatCrit 2021 Biennial Conference: Resistance and Transformation, October 8 – 9, Sponsored by University of Denver Sturm College of Law, please visit: www.latcrit.org.

Questions can be directed to Professor Ron Hochbaum at rhochbaum@pacifc.edu.

Download the LatCrit 2021 FDW Flyer here.

September 27, 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Prof. Sophia Hamilton and Prof. Stephanie Davidson: 

Dear Externship Community,

 

After much reflection, the Externships 11 Planning Committee, in consultation with the Site Selection Committee, has decided to postpone Externships 11 to Fall 2022. While we were eager to convene this year, we have received a great deal of feedback that the emphasis on coming together in person is important to our community members – as it is for each of us. So, we are postponing the conference in hopes of increasing our chances of having meaningful, in-person time to rebuild together next fall in Southern California.

 

We will announce the new date shortly. In the meantime, the RFP is still open, and we are extending the deadline several months into the future. We will send an updated RFP document in the coming weeks, which will include an invitation to folks who are interested in presenting but don’t yet have an idea outside of a general area of interest We hope to take advantage of the additional time by pairing those of you who are interested (but not yet inspired) with other similarly-minded individuals, so that you can spend some time this winter and spring building out your ideas. 

 

Thank you for being a part of this vibrant, warm community. We are grateful to be your colleagues, and we look forward to seeing you all in person next year. In the meantime, please do not forget that the AALS Externships Committee has many opportunities to meet (you can find them here) and share ideas.

 

All our best,

 

The Externships Planning Committee

 

Sophia Hamilton, Co-Chair

Stephanie Davidson, Co-Chair

Nira Geevargis

Anahid Gharakhanian

Kendall Lynn Kerew

Stephanie Davidson

D’lorah Hughes

Dena Bauman

Sande Buhai

Kathleen Devlin Joyce

Thiadora Pina

Derrick Howard

 

September 9, 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Prof. Leigh Goodmark: 

[T]he Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at Maryland Carey Law is hiring an inaugural Director for our new Federal Appellate Immigration Clinic for Fall 2022.  The Director will . . . pursue the Chacón Center’s goals of human rights, racial equity and social justice for immigrants.  The new Director will be charged specifically with designing and teaching a clinic to engage in federal appellate litigation that will work in collaboration with our existing Immigration Clinic and will be focused on the immigration consequences of convictions, humanitarian protection, and other impact issues that affect immigrants.  We especially welcome applicants with strong backgrounds in legal practice, applicants of color, applicants with disabilities, veterans, women, and other members of historically disadvantaged groups.

The official job posting is here.  This position is a full-time, tenure-track faculty appointment and sits on the Faculty Council, with voting rights on all matters. We will consider both entry level and junior lateral candidates with potential for outstanding legal practice, clinical education, and scholarly achievement.

The position will begin July 1, 2022.

The Federal Appellate Immigration Clinic will be part of the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at Maryland Carey Law, which also includes the Immigration Clinic and student support and activity programs to provide pro bono representation to people facing deportation at the trial court level and in the federal appellate courts, to educate and mentor students interested in practicing immigration law, and to advance the law to benefit immigrants in Maryland and nationally, with particular emphasis on eliminating racial inequities in immigration law.  The Federal Appellate Immigration Clinic will represent low- and moderate-income individuals and amicus curiae parties in federal appellate matters relating to immigration and criminal law, with particular focus on the overlap of these two fields of law and on asylum law, using litigation to pursue goals of racial equity, human rights and social justice.  Maryland Carey Law has a long and robust tradition of experiential learning reflected in its Cardin Requirement that every full-time day student enroll in a clinic in order to graduate.

Responsibilities:

The responsibilities of the Director of the Federal Appellate Immigration Clinic include: designing and implementing a new appellate immigration clinic in coordination with other Chacón Center faculty and staff; designing and teaching a weekly seminar component to the appellate clinic; engaging in strategic case selection and development in light of immigration case law, legislation and public policy in Maryland and nationally; teaching, through case supervision and mentoring, students engaged in all aspects of appellate litigation, with emphasis on written and oral advocacy and professional responsibility; exercising ultimate professional responsibility for the appellate clinic’s caseload; pursuing independent scholarly and professional research and writing; and participating in the governance of the law school through committee and faculty council work.  The position may also include non-clinical teaching responsibilities in the law school as appropriate and feasible.

Minimum Qualifications:

Admission to practice law and good standing in a U.S. jurisdiction is required, as is a demonstrated record of excellence in legal practice, including appellate, immigration and/or criminal litigation; experience teaching or supervising law students in legal practice; and interest in scholarly and practice-oriented research and writing. Proficiency in Spanish is preferred.

Compensation

Salary will be commensurate with experience. Maryland Carey Law offers faculty a competitive compensation and benefits package.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The University of Maryland has a strong commitment to diversity. We welcome applications from persons of color, people with disabilities, veterans, women, and other members of historically disadvantaged groups.

I am more than happy to talk about this opportunity, but I’m going to be offline for a bit soon.  If you want to reach out to me, please do so by Aug 10 or after Aug 23.  Thanks for your help in finding a terrific new clinician!

August 9, 2021 in Jobs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via California Western release:

SAN DIEGO—California Western School of Law has announced that the faculty and Board of Trustees have voted to adopt a unitary tenure track. This change to the institution’s Faculty Bylaws creates opportunities for its clinical, Legal Skills, and other skills professors who were hired as full-time faculty to achieve tenure, with the same faculty governance and voting rights that come with an existing tenure-stream faculty position.

 

At the heart of this change is California Western’s commitment to living its values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Faculty hired without tenure are disproportionately under-represented in the academy, and yet face much more uncertain employment. A unitary track system provides these individuals with a clearer career pathway while promoting a spirit of collegiality and equality amongst all faculty.

 

“This is a momentous occasion for the California Western School of Law” reports Dean Sean Scott. “Moving toward a unitary tenure track reflects our desire to dismantle the traditional hierarchies within faculty ranks, which is part of the larger goal of addressing structural inequalities within legal education.”

 

The new system will also benefit the intellectual life of California Western. It incentivizes research and writing amongst faculty that typically fill legal skills positions, which solidifies the intersection of theory at practice. Adds Dean Scott: “we’re sending a signal to students about the need within their own careers to blend deep thinking and research with legal skills; to be successful they must have mastery of both.”

 

Read more:https://tinyurl.com/4zpm6bf7

August 6, 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Harvard Law School Assistant Dean for Clinical and Experiential Education and Pro Bono Programs 

Harvard Law School Clinics provide students hands-on legal experience under the supervision of licensed attorneys who are experienced practitioners and trained clinical legal educators. The Assistant Dean for Clinical and Experiential Education and Pro Bono Programs will largely be responsible for the annual development of clinical curriculum for HLS’s 23 in-house clinics and 13 externship clinics, the management of externship clinics and 12 student practice organizations, and oversight of all independent clinical opportunities. In addition, the Assistant Dean will oversee the Law School’s Pro Bono Program. The Assistant Dean will collaborate with the Vice Dean of Clinical and Experiential Education and the Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs to develop and implement clinical enrollment policies and processes with respect to HLS’s goals and clinic capacities.

The Assistant Dean will:

- Oversee annual development of clinical curriculum and related policies and processes;

- Review, in consultation with clinical faculty directors, clinical course and teacher evaluations and pro bono placement evaluations for teacher/clinic or placement/supervisor effectiveness;

- Develop, review, and approve pro bono placements and coordinate with the Registrar’s Office on tracking students’ completion of degree requirement;

- Develop advising programs and opportunities for students regarding clinical education and pro bono opportunities;

- Oversee ABA, state bar, and other regulatory compliance for clinical academic program, including for international students, and related review of regulations and development of policies and processes;

- Provide effective staff management for a group or team of employees, including hiring and orientation, training and development, workflow and performance management, and the promotion of an inclusive and innovative work environment;

- Build and manage key relationships and outreach among various HLS departments and external stakeholders, including groups such as Admissions, Registrar, and Communications; and

- Working in conjunction with Office of Communications, oversee communications, marketing, media outreach and public relations for HLS clinical work and academic programs

Qualifications. A JD is required, together with a minimum of ten years of clinical or externship management experience or law firm pro bono management experience, including work experience in a law school environment. Knowledge of budget management and supervisory experience is strongly preferred. Candidates must have knowledge of legal services, non-profit, government and industry as well as a demonstrated commitment to public service. Candidates must have an eagerness to work with law students and faculty and participate in the vibrant public interest community at HLS. Candidates must have excellent writing and communication skills and be able to demonstrate professionalism, sophistication, and diplomacy in working effectively with diverse constituencies (students, faculty, law firms, practicing attorneys, and clients.) The ability to manage competing demands and priorities is essential. Candidates must be willing to take initiative in identifying and evaluating new opportunities.

Review of candidate materials will begin immediately and continue until the appointment. A complete application will include a letter of interest, a curriculum vitae or resumé́ and contact information for five professional references who can speak about the candidate’s qualifications for this appointment. Named referees will not be contacted without the candidate’s prior consent. Chuck O’Boyle of C. V. O’Boyle, Jr. LLC is leading the search. Expressions of interest, applications, nominations and inquiries should be directed to Mr. O’Boyle at chuck@cvoboyle.com.

EEO Statement: Harvard University is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.

August 2, 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)