Clinical Legal Education Association News Blog

Joint Statement from CLEA and AALS Clinical Section on Congressional Attack on Academic Freedom

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:33:30 GMT

Joint Statement from CLEA and AALS Clinical Section on Congressional Attack on Academic Freedom

In the weeks since Donald Trump took office for his second term, we have seen the considerable erosion of democracy and the rule of law in the United States. The latest evidence is the unprecedented request for disclosure by the House Committee on Education and Workforce issued on March 27, 2025, seeking extensive information about Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, including its policies, procedures, sources of funding, and budget. This request specifically targets Clinical Professor of Law Sheila Bedi, Director of the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, and her constitutionally protected representation of clients.

This overreaching exercise of governmental power is an attempt to intimidate and interfere with academic freedom and Professor Bedi’s First Amendment rights. Academic freedom ensures that universities can fulfill their fundamental mission of teaching and disseminating knowledge for the public good by protecting the intellectual choices of faculty members. For clinical faculty members, such choices include the freedom to select cases and clients, develop their clinic curriculum, and make pedagogical decisions about how they structure their clinic. The government’s request is a blatant effort to interfere with academic freedom by seeking expansive information about the operation of and curricular choices by a law school clinical program, potentially including privileged work-product and constitutionally protected client selection. Northwestern and any other university receiving such a request should use appropriate legal processes to resist providing those records in order to preserve core academic freedom protections.

As experiential faculty members teaching and practicing law, we have duties beyond those as faculty members with academic freedom — we are representatives for our clients, officers of the court, and public citizens. Seeking to punish a lawyer for their ethical and zealous representation and advocacy compromises these core responsibilities. This, in turn, threatens the viability of our legal system — a system critical to the preservation of our democracy.

In the face of these challenges to the fundamental principles our country is founded on, we reaffirm our commitment to uphold the rule of law. We stand in solidarity with Professor Bedi, Northwestern University’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, and law students across the United States advocating on behalf of their clients, and we condemn this attack on higher education, academic freedom, and freedom of expression. At this moment, the collective strength of law schools and clinics is not merely our best defense — it is our obligation to the profession, our students, and our democracy.

Board of Directors

Clinical Legal Education Association

Executive Committee of the

Clinical Section of the Association of American Law Schools[*]

[*] The following is a statement of the Executive Committee of the Clinical Section of the Association of American Law Schools only. It does not necessarily represent the position of the Association.

CLEA Awards Committee Soliciting Nominations!

Madalyn Wasilczuk — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 01:30:35 GMT

The CLEA Awards Committee is currently soliciting nominations. For more information about the nomination timeline and awards, please see https://cleaweb.org/awards/.

New Clinicians Conference Registration NOW OPEN

Nickole Miller — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 04:29:35 GMT

Register here for the New Clinicians Conference at the University of Baltimore School of Law on Saturday, April 26th: https://www.cleaweb.org/event-6097985.

Thank you. We look forward to seeing many of you in April.

Best,

Nickole Miller and Paul Radvany

Conference Co-Chairs

CLEA and Applied Legal Storytelling Conference - registration is now live!

Tanya A Cooper — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 21:53:00 GMT

Registration for the Applied Legal Storytelling Conference is now live!

Please register here: https://www.eventzilla.net/e/10th-applied-legal-storytelling-conference-2138650345.

New Clinicians Conference - April 26, 2025 - Save the Date

Nickole Miller — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:17:13 GMT

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) invites new (and not so new!) clinicians to save the date for the New Clinicians Conference to be held on Saturday, April 26, 2025 at the University of Baltimore School of Law in Baltimore, MD. The all-day conference will take place prior to the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education. Please keep this in mind as you begin to make travel plans for the AALS Clinical Conference. Additional details and registration information will be sent out soon. Registration questions can be directed to Nickole Miller at nickole.miller@drake.edu.

Sincerely,

Nickole Miller & Paul Radvany

CLEA New Clinicians Committee Co-Chairs

2025-2026 Bellow Scholars Request for Proposals

Madalyn Wasilczuk — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 15:04:42 GMT

Dear Colleagues,

It is time to inaugurate a new class of Bellow Scholars! Please help us spread the word about this exciting program by forwarding the below information to your colleagues and contacts. The Bellow Scholars Program has supported several innovative empirical projects over the years, and we welcome proposals from across our community of clinical scholars.

2025-26 Bellow Scholars Request for Proposals

Find information at the Request for Project Proposals for the 2025-2026 Bellow Scholar cohort. We also encourage anyone interested in applying to attend our Prospective Bellow Scholars Workshop on January 31, 2025, to learn about the application process, gain empirical research tips and get direct feedback on their project proposals. Please register for the workshop here.

Applications with project proposals are due by Friday, February 7, 2025.

More about the Bellow Scholars Program:

Every two years the AALS Committee on Lawyering in the Public Interest (the “Bellow Scholars Committee”) seeks innovative proposals from clinical legal educators designed to improve the quality of justice in communities, enhance the delivery of legal services, and promote economic and social justice.

In particular, the selection committee is interested in recognizing and supporting projects that employ empirical analysis as an advocacy tool and involve substantial collaboration between law and other academic disciplines. Selected projects become the focus of information sharing, discussion, and critique at the annual AALS Clinical Conference and at annual workshops organized by the committee. Selected Bellow Scholars are appointed for a two-year term.

You can read more about the Program, the 2023-2024 Bellow Scholars, other past projects, and even view sample project proposals on our website. The new cohort of Bellow Scholars will be announced in March 2025.

Prospective Bellow Scholars Workshop: January 31, 2025

The Prospective Bellow Scholars Workshop, scheduled for Jan 31, is an opportunity to learn about the two-year program, hear from clinicians engaged in empirical research projects, and obtain feedback on project ideas and draft applications. Attendance is not required for prospective applicants. However, we design the workshop to address common pitfalls and answer questions, which is why we strongly encourage applicant attendance. Please register for the workshop here by January 30, 2025.

Please contact us at bellowscholarprogram@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Thank you for your interest,

Lisa Martin & Alina Ball

Bellow Committee 2025-2026 Co-Chairs

CLEA Statement on US News Rankings - 2024-2025

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:57:41 GMT

From the CLEA Board of Directors and Executive Committee:

With regard to clinical rankings, the current USNWR ranking system places us in competition with each other, when we as a group see ourselves in a shared struggle for social justice and equity in legal education. There are no articulated factors for ranking clinical programs, including whether to recognize the work of externship programs, so the voting can be arbitrary and inconsistent. Moreover, some schools may unfairly suffer because they do not have the budget or the support of their administration to market their program or send their clinical faculty to annual conferences.

For clinic faculty who are in a position to take action against the use of USNWR rankings, possible alternatives to participating in the ranking of clinical programs could include: (1) declining to submit a ballot at all and sending a letter to USNWR explaining why; (2) requesting that USNWR remove the school from the clinical ranking survey; (3) submitting a ballot in which the response for every school is "no answer;” and/or (4) making a public statement against the use of USNWR rankings requesting that others do not rank the school in the survey.

We understand that each law school has a unique set of needs and priorities. Some clinical programs outside the top-tier rankings have achieved recognition of their respective programs through the USNWR; and this, in turn, has allowed them to further advance the goals of their clinical education programs. Individual faculty may choose to continue to participate, or may not be in a position to refuse to submit a rankings ballot or ask that their program not be ranked. If faculty do vote, CLEA urges those ranking clinical programs to focus on factors that promote the principles for which CLEA advocates, namely the increased presence of clinical education (law clinics and externships) in law school curricula, security of position for clinical faculty, and diversity and equity. In evaluating clinical programs, CLEA urges voters to consider: 1) the number of law clinic and externship slots available relative to the student population at a school; 2) the breadth and quality of clinical curricular offerings available to students; 3) the school's security of position, academic freedom, and governance rights for faculty who teach clinics or externships; and 4) the extent to which the school has committed to pursuing racial justice in its clinical program through its course offerings, impact on the community, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and equity in hiring and promotion of clinical faculty.

CLEA urges voters to score only those programs for which they have sufficient information to make informed decisions. It urges voters to choose the “No Answer” option when they have insufficient information to assess a particular clinical program. Last, CLEA also urges those who receive ballots to consult their clinical colleagues for their views to increase the range of informed opinions reflected in the balloting.

2023 CLEA Paid Externship Report Released!

Madalyn Wasilczuk — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 18:55:34 GMT

A national survey of law schools confirms a significant shift towards allowing students to earn academic credit in paid externship positions. Most surveyed schools reported that they allow pay in at least some of their externship placements. Externship courses allow law students to gain required experiential learning through on-site legal work with a field placement supervisor coupled with an academic component taught at the law school.

In 2016, the American Bar Association (ABA) lifted restrictions on payment of students in credit-bearing externships at accredited law schools.The decision was controversial at the time and was opposed by many legal educators, including CLEA. At that time, schools feared that pay would diminish the educational value of the placements and reduce student interest in public service placements. This survey finds that these fears have not been borne out. Schools with paid externships report positive learning outcomes and no negative impact on their public service programs.

“Today’s law students shoulder significant financial burdens and often do not have family support to fall back on. Law schools and field placements are shifting towards pay to ensure that students who would not be able to work for free have access to these valuable learning experiences,” says Neha Lall, who serves on CLEA’s Board of Directors and co-authored the report.

Key findings:

According to CLEA’s survey data, the number of schools allowing compensation has increased from 60 (in 2020) to 81 schools, representing 57% of the 143 schools who responded to the survey. Of the 62 schools that still did not permit compensation at the time of the survey, 19 schools (over 31%) reported that they are considering changing their policy on pay.

The disparity in pay policies between higher and lower-ranked schools (under the U.S. News & World Report scale) have narrowed and all but disappeared. Over 56% of law schools in the first, second, and third tiers allow compensation. Schools in tier four are now the least likely to allow pay, with just 52% of responding schools allowing compensation. This is a significant reversal of trends from CLEA’s 2018 survey, when 44% of tier four schools allowed compensation compared to just 13% of their tier one counterparts.

Regional differences in pay policies have grown over the years. Upwards of 71% of law schools on the Pacific West and Northwest coasts allow pay, and upwards of 86% of Southwest and Upper Plains law schools permit compensation. In contrast, 40% or less of schools in the Deep South and South Central regions have adopted pay policies, reflecting little change from 2020. Though the Mid-Atlantic region had the lowest rates of paid externship programs in prior surveys, the number of programs that allow paid externship placements has more than doubled since 2020.

Schools are least likely to allow payment from for-profit law firms and for-profit corporations. The growth of paid private sector externships was smaller than for public sector positions. Private sector placements, however, remain the most likely to offer paid positions. Only six schools reported that more than 50% of their externs receive pay, and all of these schools allowed private sector placements.

About the Survey: The CLEA Externship Committee completed two prior national surveys on paid externships in 2018 and 2020. In 2023, 143 schools responded to the survey, compared to 148 schools in 2020 and 151 schools in 2018. The 2023 survey was sent to 195 schools, representing a 73% return rate.

The full report is available here.

2023 CLEA Student Awards for Clinics and Externships

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 00:32:21 GMT

The CLEA Awards Committee is once again soliciting nominations for its student awards.

Schools have two student award nomination opportunities through CLEA. First, schools have the option to decide between the CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student or Outstanding Clinic Team Award. Second, schools can honor a student with the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award. The externship-focused award recognizes the valuable work for justice that law students do through externships and provides schools the opportunity to nominate an outstanding and self-reflective externship student for CLEA’s recognition.

Criteria for the CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student or Team Award (One Award Per School) and the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award (One Award Per School):

For the clinic award, each school must select one student OR one team enrolled in a law school clinic course. A team may be recognized if students work together as a team, and it would be impossible or unfair to single out one team member for recognition. Schools may select one student or one team, but may not submit more than one nomination for the clinic award. For the externship award, each school may select one student enrolled in an externship course.

The criteria for the Clinic Student/Team and Externship Awards are:

Excellence in the field work component of the clinical/externship course determined by the quality of the student’s or team’s performance in assisting or representing individual or organizational clients or in undertaking advocacy or policy reform projects;
Excellence in the seminar component of the clinic course or externship determined by the quality of the student’s or team’s thoughtfulness and self-reflection in exploring the legal, ethical, strategic, and other pertinent issues raised in the particular clinic or externship;
For the team award, the ability of the students to engage in effective collaboration; and
The nature and extent of the student’s or team’s contribution to the clinical community at the law school, legal community, or broader community, if relevant.

Nomination & Selection Process:

Each law school may nominate one clinic award recipient and one externship award recipient. The full-time clinical faculty at each law school with faculty who are members of CLEA are asked to nominate a single student or a team of students from their law school for the clinic award and a single student for the externship award. Recipient students must graduate during or after the academic year in which the award is given. Each school then submits the nominations to the CLEA Awards Committee.

The nomination deadline is April 28, 2023. Please send nominations to the CLEA Awards Committee via the Google form located at https://forms.gle/KVjGuae3xiTQqaFu5.

In the form, the clinical faculty of each school will be asked to:

Indicate whether you are completing the form for the clinic student award or the clinic team award or for the externship student award.

For the clinic student award and the externship student award, indicate the name of the student as you would like it to appear on the certificate. For the clinic team award, indicate the names of the students as you would like them to appear on the certificate (separated by commas) or indicate the name of the team as you would like it to appear on the certificate. We appreciate formatting your response to this question in a manner that can easily be copied and pasted into the certificate.

Indicate the name of the law school as you would like it to appear on the certificate.

Provide a brief statement (no more than 250 words) of the reasons why each student or team meets the criteria for the award.

The CLEA Awards Committee will issue an electronic certificate, and the clinical faculty can print and present the award at the law school’s graduation ceremony or at some other appropriate time, including remotely, as determined by the clinical faculty. Note that, even for the clinic team award, each school will receive one electronic certificate (of which multiple copies can be printed for presentation to the students). Certificates will be issued on a rolling basis (please allow up to one week to receive the electronic certificate).

If you have photographs of the award recipients receiving the certificates, you can send pictures for posting to social media or the CLEA website to the CLEA Communications Committee at events@cleaweb.org.

Sincerely,

The CLEA Awards Committee

CLEA Accepting Nominations for 2023 Awards

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 21:33:38 GMT

Check out the full story on Clinical Law Prof Blog.

The CLEA Awards Committee is once again soliciting nominations for two awards that are given annually. This year’s awards will be presented during the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education in San Francisco, and we look forward to this opportunity to recognize and celebrate our clinical community’s valuable and inspiring work. Please read this email carefully, as the CLEA Board recently adopted new criteria for the Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers.

The awards are:

1. Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers; and
2. Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project.

Nominations should be in the form of a letter of no more than three single-spaced pages. Each nomination should be endorsed by at least three individuals. At least one of those individuals must be a full-time clinical faculty member at a law school and a member of CLEA. The other two individuals need not be CLEA members, nor clinical law professors. The nominating letter should clearly indicate which of the nominators are CLEA members. Letters of support in addition to the nomination letter are also welcome, and the letters of support may come from CLEA members or non-members. The letters of support must be submitted in the same email and pdf as the nominating letter (but need not fit within the three-page limit). Please find below the criteria for each award.

The nomination deadline for both awards is Friday, March 31. Please send nominations via email to awards@cleaweb.org with the subject line: CLEA Awards. All materials should be submitted as a single PDF.

CLEA New Clinicians Conference Registration NOW OPEN

Nickole Miller — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:03:36 GMT

We are thrilled to hold the CLEA New Clinicians Conference in person this year immediately preceding the AALS Clinical Conference in San Francisco, California.

When: Thursday, April 27, 2023 from 8:00am - 4:30pm
Where: Golden Gate University School of Law, 536 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105
How?: Click here to register
Cost: $75*

CLEA Newsletter - Winter 2022-2023

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 22:58:36 GMT

Here is the fresh CLEA Newsletter, Winter 2022-2023, with a message from new co-presidents, Lynnise Pantin and Gautam Hans; CLEA's statement on US News rankings; updates from the CLEA committees; articles on clinical legal education; notes on CLEA events; and news and celebration from clinical law profs and this community.

Read the newsletter here.

Call for Proposals for the Ninth Biennial Conference on Applied Legal Storytelling July 26–28, 2023 Hosted by The City Law School; City, University of London

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 22:56:33 GMT

This is the call for proposals for the ninth biennial conference on Applied Legal Storytelling. The deadline for submitting proposals is February 3, 2023.

About the Conference

The Applied Legal Storytelling Conference brings together academics, judges, other law-makers, practitioners, and any other type of legal storyteller. The conference has previously convened in 2007 (London), 2009 (Portland), 2011 (Denver), 2013 (London), 2015 (Seattle), 2017 (Washington D.C.), 2019 (Boulder), and 2021 (Virtual/Mercer).

Applied Legal Storytelling (AppLS) examines the use of stories, storytelling, or narrative elements in law practice, legal education, and the law. This definition is intentionally broad to allow people creativity in the way they think and present on the topic. Examples may include: the ways in which fiction-writing techniques or narrative theory can inform legal storytelling; stories in the law, or law as stories; legal storytelling and metaphor; client story advocacy; legal storytelling and cognitive science; and ethical considerations in legal storytelling. Undoubtedly there are many other avenues to explore.

In an effort to continue the storytelling conversation for this ninth conference, and to welcome new attendees, we are providing resources for those interested in submitting a proposal and who wish to generate ideas or respond to others’. The first is a list of topics from past conferences . The second is a link to the second Applied Legal Storytelling bibliography, including articles that have emerged from previous storytelling conferences.Finally, there are also articles included in this Monograph double volume, dedicated to the topic (scroll down to Volumes 10 and 11). We are also happy to answer questions and offer you suggestions—if you are a newcomer and interested in becoming involved, please reach out.

Presentation Formats

The conference will include 45-minute and 30-minute time slots. For the 45-minute time slots, we welcome interactive, panel or roundtable presentation proposals, as well as other format types. For the 30-minute time slots, we envision presenters adopting something like the 14 to 18-minute TED-style format of rehearsed presentations that center on one idea conveyed through narrative, with reserved time for audience questions. On the proposal form, please indicate either a preference for a particular format or your willingness that we accept your proposal in any of the formats and time constraints.

Submitting a Proposal/Format

We welcome and encourage presentation proposals from faculty, lawmakers, and practitioners engaged in a variety of disciplines and from schools and organizations around the world. Complete the Proposal Form found here: https://forms.gle/jaditxEZvet4kivu5.

We ask for a short summary of fewer than 60 words for use in the conference program, as well as a narrative description of your proposal for selection purposes (500 words maximum).

Deadlines and Selection Process

The Committee will consider proposals submitted by the Extended Deadline, February 3, 2023 by 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, and will review these proposals by the first week of March.

The Program Committee will review the proposals and respond according to the submission date. Those who submitted proposals by the Priority Deadline (Dec. 2) will be notified by mid-January if their proposal has been accepted. Those who submitted their proposal by the Extended Deadline (Feb. 3), will be notified by mid-March.

Conference Structure and Registration

All selected presenters will be expected to present in person. Additionally, presenters will be required to pay the conference registration fee and cover their own costs for travel and accommodations. We encourage creativity in presentation formats! Like previous AppLS conferences, this conference will be collegial, inclusive, and supportive of your work.

Dates: The 2023 conference will begin with a reception in the late afternoon of July 26, 2023 and there may be one or two sets of presentations beforehand. The next two days, July 27–28, 2023 will be devoted to a plenary session and presentations given in concurrent sessions.

Hotels: The new normal of hotel reservations prevent us from reserving blocks of rooms unless we pay the entire cost of the rooms up front. We will provide a list of nearby hotels with reasonable (for London) rates.

Registration: We will send out registration information early in 2023. We expect the conference registration fee to come in around $425 (this cost covers lunches, a dinner, and administrative costs associated with hosting a conference). Updates will appear on the conference website, here: https://www.lwionline.org/conferences/ninth-applied-legal-storytelling-conference

Questions

If you have questions, please feel free to contact any member of the conference planning committee:

Kim Holst kimberly.holst@asu.edu
Ruth Anne Robbins Ruth.Anne.Robbins@rutgers.edu
Robert McPeake r.j.mcpeake@outlook.com
Marcus Soanes m.soanes@city.ac.uk
Aysha Ames aysha.ames@fordham.edu
Gopal Balachandran gzb39@psu.edu
D’lorah Hughes dlorah.hughes@uky.edu
Sha-Shana Crichton scrichton@law.howard.edu
Maureen Johnson Maureen.johnson@uconn.edu
Binny Miller bmiller@wcl.american.edu
Paige Snelgro carlos@law.ufl.edu
Kristen Tiscione kristen.tiscione@law.georgetown.edu

Hosts & Sponsors

This conference is sponsored by the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) and CLEA; and hosted by The City Law School, City, University of London.

CLEA Statement on US News Rankings for Clinical Programs (2022)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:06:49 GMT

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) continues to oppose the ranking system used by U.S. News and World Reports (USNWR). CLEA exists to advocate for clinical legal education as fundamental to the education of lawyers, and one of our core points of advocacy is to pursue and promote justice and diversity as core values of the legal profession. CLEA has long recognized that the USNWR ranking system is at odds with our central mission, as it rewards schools who rely on high standardized test scores in admissions decisions and punishes schools who offer public interest fellowship programs to their graduates. CLEA’s recent restatement of our opposition to the standardized testing requirement in law school admissions before the ABA Council reiterated our position that the use of standardized tests to assess students and schools negatively impacts legal education and is racially discriminatory.

With regard to clinical rankings, the current USNWR ranking system places us in competition with each other, when we as a group see ourselves in a shared struggle for social justice and equity in legal education. Second, there are no articulated factors for ranking clinical programs, including whether to recognize the work of externship programs, so the voting can be arbitrary and inconsistent. Third, some schools may unfairly suffer because they do not have the budget or the support of their administration to market their program or send their clinical faculty to annual conferences.

We are grateful to the growing list of law schools who have removed themselves from the rankings system for their advocacy and for raising awareness about the destructive consequences of the current system. We hope that our collective efforts move legal education towards greater equity and accessibility for future students and the legal profession.

Save the Date - Thursday, April 27 - for the 2023 CLEA New Clinicians Conference in San Francisco

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 16:47:34 GMT

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) invites new clinicians to save the date for the New Clinicians Conference to be held on Thursday, April 27 at Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco.

The all-day conference will take place prior to the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education.

Additional details forthcoming! Please watch this space.

Nominations for the CLEA Board of Directors – Due Oct. 1, 2022

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 22:11:05 GMT

The CLEA Elections Committee -Crystal Grant (Duke), Lauren Bartlett (SLU), Shobha Lakshmi Mahadev (Northwestern), and June Tai (Iowa)) is soliciting nominations through October 1, 2022, of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board starting in January 2023. This year, there are several Board positions open. All positions require a three-year commitment. I am attaching a memo which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail. Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these open positions. The committee also encourages "new clinicians" (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to self-identify as such as they run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a process for candidates identified as "new clinicians," to ensure that, if the existing Board lacks new clinician representation, the identified "new clinician" candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The Committee strongly encourages CLEA members to nominate individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented within the leadership of various clinical institutions, including CLEA, the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, and the Clinical Law Review. The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by contacting the chair of the CLEA Elections Committee, Crystal Grant at crystal.grant@law.duke.edu. If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the election materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name alone will suffice, and the Elections Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have less than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a "new clinician" candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the "new clinician" category, please indicate that as well.

Now that school is back in session, it’s a great time to check whether your school has renewed your CLEA school bundle membership for the 2022-23 school year (or, if you don’t have a school membership, if you have renewed your individual membership), especially because you must be a current CLEA member in order to vote, as well as to run for the board. You can check your membership status at cleaweb.org. Those who have not renewed by Sept. 30 will be considered lapsed and ineligible to vote or serve.

Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2022. If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please feel free to contact committee chair Crystal Grant at crystal.grant@law.duke.edu.

Very Important Updates and Changes re Externships 11, Oct. 7-8 at Pepperdine

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 18:20:42 GMT

The Externships 11 Organizing Committee shares this important update about the conference on October 7-8, 2022, in Los Angeles. Pepperdine and UCLA had been planning to host the conference together, but because of some leadership and staff departures, UCLA has decided that it will not co-host the conference. Pepperdine will continue, and we are shifting our plans now.

Externships 11 now will be two full days, Friday, Oct. 7, and Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022, on campus at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu. The organizing committee will reach out to all the speakers to confirm the schedule. Registration continues through this Pepperdine site. (We're updating it as quickly as possible.) To accommodate this change, if necessary, speakers may appear by video, although we earnestly hope everyone will still attend in person. We will continue to offer online video access for people to attend sessions if they cannot attend in person, and remote attendees still need to register for the conference.

We are working on lodging and transportation options and guidance. This may be our biggest challenge. We currently have blocks of rooms available at the Villa Graziadio hotel on Pepperdine's campus and a block of rooms at the Hilton in Woodland Hills (about 16 miles away). We are working on providing shuttle service from the Woodland Hills Hilton and campus for both days of the conference. These are a total of about 60 rooms, so please register and book them soon! If we exhaust those blocks, later folks will need to secure their own lodging and provide their own transportation, and we will provide suggestions in Malibu, Santa Monica, and the Conejo Valley. (Please do not book rooms at the Luxe; those plans have changed. It's not close enough or accessible for shuttles to Pepperdine. If you have booked there, you'll likely need to change plans.)

We're grateful for everyone's patience, understanding, and participation, in the spirit of scrappy, creative, resilient, and adaptive clinicians in this vibrant community. We are eager and excited to host the conference at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu, and we are confident that it will be an excellent conference. It may be a little harder to get here, but it will be worth it. In addition to excellent, timely content, we're working on building community through food, sunsets, beaches, mountains, and friendship.

The organizing committee has been responsive, creative, and committed to the conference. We are grateful to and for them. Please reach out to any of them or me with questions or ideas.

The Spring 2022 CLEA Newsletter is out!

Mon, 09 May 2022 19:12:11 GMT

Happy Spring! And there's no better way to kick off the sunny (or rainy days) by catching up on all things CLEA in Spring 2022.

Click Here to read all about it.

CLEA at the 2022 AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education!

Thu, 05 May 2022 19:23:25 GMT

All: Please see below for a sample of presentations by CLEA members at the 2022 AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education. If you'd like your event added to the list, please send us an email.

We will present the annual CLEA Awards on Thursday May 12th at 2:30 PT/5:30 ET. Check the conference program for the link to the awards event.
Later that night, we will also bring back Trivia Night on Thursday May 12th at 5 pm PT/8 pm ET. Advanced registration required.

CLEA Board member workshops (all times Eastern):

Co-Vice President/President Elect Gautam Hans served on the AALS planning committee for the New Clinicians Conference and will give the welcoming and closing remarks.
Llezlie Green will speak on the panel "Why Do This Work:? Why Did You Seek This Work?" at the New Clinicians Conference.

Co-Vice President/President Elect Lynnise Pantin is presenting two sessions, "Debating the Creation of a New Entrepreneurship or IP Clinic" on May 11 at 11:00 am, and "Teaching Racial Justice in the Clinical Curriculum" on May 12 at 1:00pm.

Co-President Caitlin Barry will present "Building an Antiracist Clinical Program with Freedom Pedagogy" on May 11 at 1:00pm.
Alexis Karteron will present "Sharing and Overcoming Challenges to Racial-Justice Efforts at Law Schools" on May 11 at 3:55pm.

June Tai will present "Reinventing Structures: Working Across Schools to Teach the Seminar Component" on May 11 at 3:55pm.

Past President Anju Gupta will present "Rounds on Race" on May 12 at 11:00am.
Gowri Krishna will present "Movement Lawyering in Partnership with Law for Black Lives: Principles and Opportunities" on May 12 at 11:00am.
Board Treasurer D'lorah Hughes will present "The Clinical Porch: A Moth-Inspired Storytelling Session" on May 13 at 1:00pm.
Crystal Grant is facilitating the community gathering on education law on May 13 at 1:00pm.
Theodora Pina will present "Teaching Reflection: How and Why" on May 13 at 1:00pm and "Experiential Faculty Roles and Relations in the Institution" at the New Clinicians Conference.
Serge Martinez will present "Here and There: Clinics and Clients in Geographically Remote Spaces" on May 11 at 3:55pm and "Community Gathering: Looking at Us: Student Evaluations" on May 13 at 11:00am.

CLEA Membership and Board Meeting Next Week! (Tuesday, May 10, 7am PT / 10am ET)

Thu, 05 May 2022 19:21:39 GMT

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) will hold our Board and Membership meeting on Tuesday May 10^th at 7 am PT/10 am ET. The Zoom link for the meeting is here. The meeting is open to all CLEA members, you do not have to be registered for the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education. We hope to see you there!

Announcing the Recipients of the 2022 CLEA Awards

Mon, 02 May 2022 17:37:52 GMT

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)

From our Friends at the AALS Clinical Section Executive Committee - 2022 Awards Announcement

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 16:50:18 GMT

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 11th!

(Hat tip to our friends at Clinical Law Prof Blog)

Nominations for the 2022 CLEA Student Awards are OPEN!

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:01:27 GMT

The CLEA Awards Committee is once again soliciting nominations for its student awards.

Criteria for the CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student or Team Award (One Award Per School) and the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award (One Award Per School):

The criteria for the Clinic Student/Team and Externship Awards are:

Excellence in the field work component of the clinical/externship course determined by the quality of the student’s or team’s performance in assisting or representing individual or organizational clients or in undertaking advocacy or policy reform projects;
Excellence in the seminar component of the clinic course or externship determined by the quality of the student’s or team’s thoughtfulness and self-reflection in exploring the legal, ethical, strategic, and other pertinent issues raised in the particular clinic or externship;
For the team award, the ability of the students to engage in effective collaboration; and
The nature and extent of the student’s or team’s contribution to the clinical community at the law school, legal community, or broader community, if relevant.

Nomination & Selection Process:

Each law school may nominate one clinic award recipient and one externship award recipient. The full-time clinical faculty at each law school with faculty who are members of CLEA are asked to nominate a single student or a team of students from their law school for the clinic award and a single student for the externship award. Recipient students must graduate during or after the academic year in which the award is given. Each school then submits the nominations to the CLEA Awards Committee.

The nomination deadline is May 31, 2022. Please send nominations to the CLEA Awards Committee via this form

In the form, the clinical faculty of each school will be asked to:

Indicate whether you are completing the form for the clinic student award or the clinic team award or for the externship student award.

For the clinic student award and the externship student award, indicate the name of the student as you would like it to appear on the certificate. For the clinic team award, indicate the names of the students as you would like them to appear on the certificate (separated by commas) or indicate the name of the team as you would like it to appear on the certificate. We appreciate formatting your response to this question in a manner that can easily be copied and pasted into the certificate.

Indicate the name of the law school as you would like it to appear on the certificate.

Provide a brief statement (no more than 250 words) of the reasons why each student or team meets the criteria for the award.

Sincerely,

The CLEA Awards Committee

Anju Gupta
D’lorah Hughes
Serge Martinez (co-chair)
Esther Park
Thiadora Pina
Jane Stoever (co-chair)

Submissions Open for the CLEA Newsletter!

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 20:29:40 GMT

Dear Experiential Learning Community,

On behalf of the CLEA Newsletter Committee, I am happy to announce that is once again time to submit items for the CLEA Newsletter. We welcome your good news: promotions, moves, new hires, retirements, publications, and awards. Please keep your news items as short as possible (50-word limit per news item). Longer submissions are subject to editing by the Newsletter Committee.

We also invite you to submit your creative writing and shorter articles on clinical andragogy and social justice topics. We hope that you will consider allowing CLEA to feature your writing.

Please e-mail your submissions to cleanewseditor@gmail.com. For your convenience, the CLEA News Editor e-mail address is CCed. The deadline for submissions is April 11, 2022.

Finally, as a friendly reminder programmatic good news is published by the AALS Section on Clinical Education. Programmatic good news may be sent to Dena Bauman at drbauman@ucdavis.edu.

We look forward to celebrating and promoting your accomplishments.

Yours,

CLEA Newsletter Committee

(Ron Hochbaum, Nickole Miller, Susan Donovan, and Tameka Lester)

Nominations are Open for the 2022 CLEA Awards!

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 17:06:02 GMT

The CLEA Awards Committee is once again soliciting nominations for two awards that are given annually. This year’s awards will be presented during the virtual AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education, and we look forward to this opportunity to recognize and celebrate our clinical community’s valuable and inspiring work. Please read this email carefully, as the CLEA Board recently adopted new criteria for the Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers.

The awards are:

(1) Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers, and
(2) Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project.

Nominations should be in the form of a letter of no more than three single-spaced pages. Each nomination should be endorsed by at least three individuals. At least one of those individuals must be a full-time clinical faculty member at a law school and a member of CLEA. The other two individuals need not be CLEA members, nor clinical law professors. The nominating letter should clearly indicate which of the nominators are CLEA members. Letters of support in addition to the nomination letter are also welcome, and the letters of support may come from CLEA members or non-members. The letters of support must be submitted in the same email and pdf as the nominating letter (but need not fit within the three-page limit). Please find below the criteria for each award.

The nomination deadline for both awards is Friday, April 15. Please send nominations via email to awards@cleaweb.org with the subject line: CLEA Awards. All materials should be submitted as a single PDF.

NOMINATION CRITERIA

1. CLEA AWARD TO AN OUTSTANDING ADVOCATE FOR CLINICAL TEACHERS

This award recognizes an individual who has served as a voice for clinical teachers and who has contributed to the advancement of experiential legal education. The criteria for the award are: commitment to the field of experiential legal education; advancement of the field (e.g., by working within organizations that affect the contours of legal education, by writing and speaking about the field, or by serving as a spokesperson for the field in the litigation, legislative, administrative, political, or other arenas); commitment to advancing clinical pedagogy, teaching, and the design and implementation of effective clinic or externship courses; and fostering a spirit of community (e.g., by planning or leading conferences or initiatives). Clinical teachers include individuals who teach in-house clinics, externships, hybrid courses, and other forms of experience-based law courses.

Individuals who currently are, or at any time during this academic year were, CLEA Board members or Executive Committee members are not eligible to receive the award this year.

2. CLEA AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN A PUBLIC INTEREST CASE OR PROJECT

CLEA established this award to honor and recognize a case or project that truly contributes to the public good. The award may be given to an individual law student or law students in a clinical program or to a clinic or clinical program.

The criteria for the award are:

1. The case or project either:

effectively calls attention to and/or significantly redresses a high priority need of underserved or low income residents or communities; or
makes a notable or meaningful contribution to the advancement of civil rights, civil liberties, human rights, legal services for the underrepresented, environmental protection, or consumer protection; and

2. The case or project has been carried out in conformity with the highest standards of professional conduct and competence; and
3. The case or project serves as an inspiring model for engaging in legal work under challenging conditions in furtherance of the common good.

The nomination deadline for both awards is Friday, April 15. Please send nominations via email to awards@cleaweb.org with the subject line: CLEA Awards. All materials should be submitted as a single PDF.

A NOTE ABOUT CLEA’S STUDENT AWARDS

Schools now have two student award nomination opportunities through CLEA. First, schools have the option to decide between the CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student or Outstanding Clinic Team Award. Second, schools can honor a student with the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award. The recent addition of the externship-focused award recognizes the valuable work for justice that law students do through externships and provides schools the opportunity to nominate an outstanding and self-reflective externship student for CLEA’s recognition. The call for nominations for the student awards will be sent separately in the coming weeks, and it will include further details on the nomination process for those awards. Schools will receive their certificates electronically on a rolling basis, and within one week of submitting a nomination.

Sincerely,

The CLEA Awards Committee
Anju Gupta
D'lorah Hughes
Serge Martinez (co-chair)
Esther Park
Thiadora Pina
Jane Stoever (co-chair)

Call for Participation - Speed Sharing Presentation Series

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 21:01:22 GMT

All: Please see below from our friends at the AALS Section on Balance and Well-Being in Legal Education.

-------------------------

Call for Participation

Second Annual Speed Sharing Presentation Series on

“Incorporating New ABA Standards for Legal Education: Professional Identity, Cross-Cultural Competency, and Well-Being Resources for Students”

Micro-Abstracts due March 21, 2022

First Presentation Date: Mid-Late April (Precise Date TBA based on presenter availability)

Submit using the online submission form here.

The AALS Section on Balance and Well-Being in Legal Education General Programming Committee is tasked with soliciting speakers and coordinating programs and events periodically throughout the year relevant to the purpose of the Section. After the resounding success of last year’s speed sharing series on well-being practices in the law school classroom and clinic, we return this spring and summer to share our ideas on how to successfully implement new ABA Standards for Legal Education, specifically Standards 303(b) (professional identity formation), 303(c) (cross-cultural competency, bias, and racism), and 508(b) (information on law student well-being resources).

We know that many faculty and administrators have already successfully incorporated opportunities for professional identity formation, education on cross-cultural competency, racism, and bias, and information on student well-being resources. As we are eager to comply with the short ABA window for implementation of the new Standards – law schools must have a plan in place for implementation of Standard 303 by fall of 2022, with full implementation of the plan by fall of 2023 – we want to learn from you!

Call for Micro-Abstracts:

The Balance and Well-Being Section General Programming Committee invites faculty and administrators who would like to share their success stories to submit an abstract of 300 words or less describing a topic that you would like to present that relates to the new ABA Standards. Individual presentations will last five minutes or less. Topics may include but are not limited to:

● How have you incorporated cross-cultural competency into a doctrinal law school course you are teaching?

● Are you teaching an innovative course that’s designed to support law students’ professional identity formation? Tell us more.

● What success story can you share about mitigating barriers or stigma related to law student mental health, including substance use disorders, and ensuring law students have the information they need to access resources?

● What have you done at your school (related to new Standards 303(b), 303(c), and 508(b)) that you could share for the benefit of other professors and administrators?

Each program in the speed sharing series will feature 4-5 presentations and will conclude with a brief Q&A with the presenters. We firmly believe we are stronger together and will benefit from hearing our colleagues’ success stories.

If you have any questions, or if you are unable to present as part of the Series but want to share your success stories in writing with Series attendees, please contact General Programming Committee Co-Chairs Jordana Confino (jconfino@fordham.edu) or Janice Craft (jcraft@richmond.edu).

Submit Your Micro-Abstract Here

It's That Time of Year Again! The Winter 2021-2022 CLEA Newsletter is Live

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 03:13:42 GMT

The Winter 2021-2022 CLEA Newsletter is out now and filled with announcements, updates, celebrations, and articles of interest to our wonderful clinical community. Enjoy and best wishes for the end of the semester.

Click here to download the newsletter!

Results of the 2021 Election for CLEA’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 20:31:56 GMT

On behalf of the CLEA Elections Committee, we are pleased to announce the results of the 2021 election for CLEA’s Board of Directors and the CLEA Executive Committee. These terms commence on January 1, 2022.

Executive Committee:

Gautam Hans, Co-Vice-President/President-Elect (Vanderbilt Law School)
Lynnise Pantin, Co-Vice-President/President-Elect (Columbia Law School)

Board Members:

Esther Park (University of Washington School of Law)
June Tai (University of Iowa College of Law)
Neha Lall (University of Baltimore School of Law)
Serge Martinez (University of New Mexico School of Law)
Thiadora Pina (Santa Clara University School of Law)

Please join us in congratulating these new board members and officers and in thanking them for their service to the clinical teaching community.

2021 Election and Candidate Announcement

Lauren Bartlett — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:01:44 GMT

The 2021 election for CLEA's Board of Directors and Executive Committee will open this Monday November 1, 2021, and the voting will close at 11:59pm ET on December 1, 2021.

On November 1, all CLEA members in good standing will receive an email with a link to the voting platform. We recommend that you remove “noreply@qemailserver.com” from your email spam filters before November 1 to be sure that you receive your ballot.

In advance of the opening of the Board elections, please review the candidate’s statements and bios linked here.

This year’s slate of candidates for the CLEA Board are as follows:

Andy Budzinski
Lauren Godshall
Neha Lall
Serge Martinez
Nickole Miller
Michael Murphy
Natalie Netzel
Sarah M. Nissel
Thiadora A. Pina
Esther Park
Anne Sidwell
Jonathan Smith
June Tai
Madalyn Wasilczuk

And the nominees for the Executive Committee are:

Co-Vice Presidents: Lynnise Pantin & Gautam Hans

Thank you and we look forward to CLEA’s election season!

Sincerely,

The CLEA Elections Committee

Melanie DeRousse, University of Kansas School of Law

Shobha Mahadev, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

Crystal Grant, Duke University School of Law

Lauren Bartlett, St. Louis University School of Law

Invitation to LatCrit, Inc./SALT Annual Faculty Development Workshop on October 7, 2021

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 18:55:50 GMT

Please see below for an invitation for CLEA members to participate in this year's LatCrit, Inc./SALT Annual Faculty Development Workshop on October 7, 2021:

-----

We are writing to invite you the LatCrit, Inc./SALT Annual Faculty Development Workshop (FDW), which will take place on October 7, 2021, the day before the 2021 LatCrit Biennial Conference “Resistance and Transformation: Mapping Critical Geographies and Alternative Possibilities in Legal Scholarship and Praxis for the Next Twenty-Five Years.” The Conference is sponsored by the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.

The FDW is designed for those who are planning to enter or who have recently joined the legal academy. The 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!

Registration for the FDW is free for attendees of the LatCrit conference. Please feel free to e-mail Professor Ron Hochbaum at rhochbaum@pacific.edu with any questions.

For more information about the LatCrit Conference, please visit https://latcrit.org/latcrit-2021-biennial-conference-and-related-events/. We hope to see you on October 7th!

Sincerely yours,

2021 FDW Committee (Ron Hochbaum, Nancy Chi Cantalupo, Kyle Velte, Saru Matambanadzo, Marissa Jackson Sow, T. Anansi Wilson, and Tania Valdez)

Teaching Justice Webinar Series: Registration Open for Fall Events

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 18:52:26 GMT

Check out our Teaching Justice Webinar Series page for more information about their fall programs and to register. Here's the schedule:

October 12, 2021
Teaching Justice through Teaching Ethics
1pm EST/12pm CST/11am MST/10am PST
Gautam Hans, Vanderbilt Law

November 11, 2021
Teaching Justice through Freedom Pedagogy
2pm EST/1pm CST/12pm MST/11am PST
Norrinda Hayat, Rutgers Law

December 7, 2021
Teaching Justice and Equity through Externships
1:30pm EST/ 12:30 CST/11:30am MST/ 10:30am PST
Alexi Freeman, Denver Sturm College of Law

Read CLEA's letter to the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar regarding the addition of proposed Standard 303(c)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:33:57 GMT

On June 28, 2021, CLEA sent a letter to the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar suggesting revisions to the language of proposed Standard 303(c) to require “education and training in antiracism,” throughout the curriculum, including through a required course.

Click here to read CLEA's letter.

Announcing the 2021 Recipients of the CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student or Team Award and Outstanding Externship Student Award

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 20:56:58 GMT

We are most pleased to announce the 2021 recipients of the CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student or Outstanding Clinic Team Award, and the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award. These awards are given annually at the completion of the academic year.

Click here for a list of the award winners for the 2021 CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student Award

Click here for a list of the award winners for the 2021 CLEA Outstanding Clinic Team Award

Click here for a list of the award winners for the 2021 CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award

Visit our awards page to learn more about the CLEA student awards.

Externships 11 Conference at Pepperdine Caruso and UCLA - Feb. 18-20, 2022

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 18:23:29 GMT

From the organizers:

Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and UCLA School of Law are proud to announce that we will jointly host the Externships 11 Conference February 18th - 20th, 2022. Participants will have the opportunity to spend time in Southern California on both campuses. The Externships 11 Conference will provide an exceptional opportunity for externship faculty and administrators from across the nation to convene after more than a year of distanced collaboration and share best practices and innovations.

Pepperdine Caruso School of Law provides well-established, extensive externship programs through the Clinical Education Program, Global Programs, and Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution that continually strive to expand and improve. Students enrolled in these programs participate in diverse externships from the Malibu campus, the Washington DC Externship Semester, the London program, and other international initiatives.

UCLA School of Law’s Externship Program places hundreds of students annually at placements across Greater Los Angeles, from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Sundance Institute to the ACLU, as well as in Washington D.C. and the Hague. Students participate in seminars organized by practice area alongside their placements in order to deepen their reflection and their commitment to doing ethical, excellent legal work.

Please save the date and make plans to join us in Los Angeles and Malibu next year. More information, RFPs and details will be forthcoming throughout the year.

REMINDER: Next GAJE/ IJCLE/ ACCLE Conference: June 16-18, 2021 (Virtual)

Mon, 03 May 2021 18:19:34 GMT

GAJE/IJCLE/ACCLE

Global Alliance for Justice Education

International Journal of Clinical Legal Education

Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education

Worldwide Online Conference

Hosted by Northumbria University

16^th-18^th June 2021

"Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Justice Education in Times of Crises"

A reminder of the GAJE/IJCLE/ACCLE Worldwide Online Conference which will take place on 16th, 17th and 18th June 2021. The conference is hosted and organized with the technical support of Northumbria University (UK).

Information about the conference is attached and available here: https://gaje.org/Upcoming-Conferences or https://northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/turning-challenges-into-opportunities.

If you wish to make a proposal (using the new symposia or our usual interactive workshops format), please click here: https://northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/turning-challenges-into-opportunities/taking-part.
à Proposal Deadline: 21st May 2021

If you wish to register, please click here: https://northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/turning-challenges-into-opportunities/fees-and-registration
à Registration Deadline: 28th May 2021

The conference will offer – amongst others – the following highlights:
à International Clinicians’ Café: Sharing and Reflecting on Stories of Transformation and Resilience : Susan L. Brooks, Associate Dean and Professor, Drexel University Kline School of Law; Neil Gold, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor.
This interactive workshop will provide a lively and enjoyable forum for our international clinical community to share and reflect on our stories of transformation. An opportunity to bring along the beverage of your choice and meet clinicians in small groups. By listening deeply to each other’s stories of transformation and resilience we will identify common themes and threads. These will lead us to more tools and strategies for continuing to thrive as we face ongoing conditions of uncertainty.

à Lightning Talks
The conference will offer rooms for “Lightning Talks”. Here anyone can book a space/time for a maximum 5 minutes presentation in order to give others a quick glimpse at a work in progress in your clinic, or seek out for fellow campaigners to join you in an access to justice project, or share an innovative legal education method etc. It will be the ideal space to share ideas, projects, funny moments and of course to get in contact with other legal educators/justice activists from all over the world.

à e-TOT
At this conference, an e-TOT course program including three 90-minute interactive sessions will be held with experienced instructors and facilitators. The titles of these three sessions are:1- Designing a Clinic; 2- Lesson Plans and Interactive methods; 3- Supervision and Student Assessment.

à Newcomer’s rooms
GAJE and IJCLE conferences have always been important meeting points in order to connect and to get engaged with other justice educators around the world. Albeit online, we are planning to create specific rooms/spaces at the conference, where “newcomers" can connect to each other and to already connected clinicians/educators/justice activists from all over the world.

GET INVOLVED - YOUR SUPPORT FOR THE CONFERENCE:
- SHARE INFORMATION OF THE CONFERENCE: Please help us spreading the information about the conference around!
- GET INVOLVED: GAJE conferences have always been ideal occasions of GAJE members to get involved. We are still looking for persons who would be available to support the conference planning, in particular linked to the “Conference Program - Stream Coordination”. If you are interested, please send a us a message (email to program@gaje.org)!
- SEEKING OUT FOR CONFERENCE SUPPORT: Inspired by the experiences of the prior successful GAJE conferences, we believe that GAJE conferences - also the upcoming online edition - are ideal occasions to create collaborative opportunities with interested institutions and organizations. Support could include but are not limited to: (1) Undertaking part of the technical costs of holding the Conference online, (2) Supporting the registration fees of some participants, who are otherwise unable to attend, etc. Please contact us, if you have any idea related to potential supporters (email to program@gaje.org).

CLEA Trivia Night is Back on May 19! Sign up here by May 7

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 19:46:16 GMT

Following the success of CLEA's first ever virtual Trivia Night, we are inviting you all to join us for another round of trivia fun.

The next Trivia Night will take place on Wednesday, May 19th, at 8pm ET / 5pm PT, via Zoom.

We estimate the trivia portion will take approximately one hour, during which you will be able to socialize with your team members and with other teams, and there will be additional time to socialize afterward.

We encourage you all to form teams now. The deadline to sign your team up is May 7, 2021. Team captains: sign up here: https://forms.gle/ofBtdutLaLnFQpcR6. Some information about teams and the event:

• Teams may have anywhere from 4-12 members (we recommend 6-10), and team members can be anywhere in the country (or world, really). Each team member will be on Zoom on their own device; no need to meet up in person! During the event, one member from each team will have to input the team's answers using a separate device (a smart phone is great for this). You will be conferring about, and answering, questions as a team, and your team will be competing against a number of other teams (no one person will be put on the spot).

• Teams can include anyone you know. Do you have a group of "conference peeps" you normally meet up with at conferences? Form a team! Looking for a bonding event for your outgoing or incoming clinic students? Form a team! Want to do a social event for clinic faculty at your own school? Form some teams!

• There is no theme for the questions; they could be about anything from 90s pop music to flags of the world to astrophysics. The only rule is that you not cheat by looking up the answers. Use your noodle, not your google!

• The winning team(s) will receive a prize. And this time, to continue the hilarious tradition started by the participants of our first Trivia Night, a special prize will also go to the team that tells the best story of how they met (truthfulness optional).

• The event is free to attend and open to the clinical/experiential community (and your teammates). In lieu of charging for the event, CLEA is accepting donations to help defray event costs here: https://www.cleaweb.org/Donations. While we wish we could DoorDash refreshments to all of you, the event sadly will be BYOB.

• Once you have formed a team and decided on a team name, the team captain should sign your team up using this form: https://forms.gle/ofBtdutLaLnFQpcR6, no later than May 7, 2021. (Small changes to the makeup of the team will be permitted after that date.)

• If you don't have a team but would like to participate, you may also fill out that same form no later than May 7, and we will match you with others looking for a team.

• Closer to the date of the event, team captains will receive a Zoom link for the event, which they can then share with their team members.

We hope to see you there, and don't forget to attend the upcoming CLEA Membership Meeting during the AALS Clinical Conference on April 28 at 10am ET / 7am PT!

Sincerely,
Lauren Bartlett & Anju Gupta
CLEA Co-Presidents

Spring 2021 CLEA Newsletter is LIVE!

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:41:55 GMT

The Spring 2021 CLEA Newsletter is out now and filled with announcements, updates, celebrations, and articles of interest to our wonderful clinical community. Enjoy and best wishes for the end of the semester.

Click here to download the newsletter!

Announcing the 2021 CLEA Awards!

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 16:04:25 GMT

The CLEA Awards Committee is thrilled to announce that Bob Kuehn, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Clinical Education at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, is the recipient of the 2021 CLEA Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers. CLEA is equally thrilled to announce that the Irwin County Detention Center Project (a collaboration of six schools’ clinics) is the recipient of the 2021 CLEA Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project.

Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers:

Bob Kuehn’s many contributions to clinical legal education and his tireless advocacy for and on behalf of clinical teachers makes him more than deserving of this award. Organizationally, Bob has been on the Board of CLEA, serving as its president in 2011; he is the co-founder and vice president of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE); and he has served on several AALS committees advancing clinical education and the status of clinical faculty. Bob is also very well known for advocating for the protection of the academic freedom rights of clinical faculty through his work on the AALS Clinical Section’s Political Interference Group and many journal articles and essays. In addition, Bob has authored articles debunking myths about clinical legal education including empirical evidence that: taking clinical courses does not negatively affect bar exam outcomes; universal clinical legal education is feasible and affordable; and clinical education is not responsible for high law school tuition. Bob has also been an active participant in planning conferences and speaking at national and regional conferences, especially about CSALE data.

For over thirty years, Bob has been dedicated to the field of clinical legal education through his teaching and service. Bob started teaching in the clinical legal education program at Tulane University School of Law in 1989, where he taught in and directed the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic until 1999. After visiting at the law schools of Washington University, University of Michigan, and University of Utah, Bob joined the faculty of the University of Alabama School of Law in 2001, where he was the Associate Dean for Skills Programs and taught both in-house clinical and externship courses. Bob then joined the faculty at Washington University School of Law in 2009, where he has taught in-house clinical and externship courses and has been the Associate Dean for Clinical Education.

Through his work, Bob has made invaluable contributions advancing clinical pedagogy, teaching, and the implementation of effective clinic and externship courses. On almost every issue affecting clinical legal education, Bob has been a spokesperson through his organizational work, scholarship, and speaking.

Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project:

The Irwin County Detention Center Project addresses the welfare and legal rights of women detained by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Ocilla, Georgia. These women were subjected to non-consensual, medically unindicated, or invasive gynecological procedures at ICDC, many of which amounted to sexual assaults. They suffered severe retaliation when they tried to speak out about these procedures, including actual or attempted accelerated deportation.

A group of six law school clinicians and clinics formed to help these women: Professors Sabi Ardalan (Harvard Law School); Jason Cade (University of Georgia School of Law); Fatma Marouf (Texas A&M School of Law); Elora Mukherjee (Columbia Law School); Clare Norins (University of Georgia School of Law); and Sarah Sherman-Stokes (Boston University School of Law). Aware of the magnitude of the challenge, they elicited collaborators that included non-profits, private firms, legislative advocates, and community organizers.

The Project’s advocacy includes a federal class action on behalf of 14 of the women and others similarly situated, immigration proceedings, administrative complaints, and legislative advocacy. The clinics have won stays of deportation for most of the plaintiffs. The Project’s efforts have resulted in the release of nearly all 80 women in ICDC, as well as over 200 men. The work has generated national media coverage and elicited a crucial intervention from 100 members of Congress. Overcoming barriers of geography, access, and the pandemic, the clinics’ work exemplifies the use of multi-faceted strategy and collaborative practice to address a shocking injustice.

Honorable Mentions:

The CLEA Awards Committee received numerous outstanding nominations and determined that the following nominations merited an honorable mention.

University of Alabama Domestic Violence Clinic

Between 2017 and 2020, the University of Alabama School of Law Domestic Violence (DV) Clinic, under the supervision of Professor Courtney Cross, represented Geneva Cooley, an elderly survivor of domestic violence, who had been sentenced to life without parole for drug trafficking in 2002. As a result of the DV Clinic’s advocacy, Ms. Cooley was resentenced from life without parole to life with the possibility of parole in 2019. The case was the first of its kind and paved the way for several other prisoners to be released. Following resentencing, the DV Clinic successfully represented Ms. Cooley at her parole hearing, and she was released to a transitional home in Alabama. Though Ms. Cooley lived in Alabama, her entire family lived in New York. Through a collaboration with St. John Law School’s Consumer Justice for the Elderly Clinic, Ms. Cooley was able to regain ownership of a family property in New York City and finally returned home to New York in Fall 2020.

University of Detroit Mercy Federal Pro Se Legal Assistance Clinic

The University of Detroit Mercy Federal Pro Se Legal Assistance Clinic provides limited scope representation to low-income non-prisoner pro se litigants who have civil cases pending or to be filed in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division. The Clinic operates under Administrative Order of the Court, and prior to its opening on January 18, 2018, low-income pro se litigants were without free legal assistance options. The Clinic has assisted over 500 individuals and provided more than 10,000 hours of free legal services to date. The Clinic is housed at the Eastern District’s courthouse in downtown Detroit but has operated remotely since March 2020, due to the Court’s pandemic restrictions.

Duke Law School’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic

Duke Law School’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic helped secure the release of Ronnie Long, who had spent 44 years in North Carolina prisons for a rape he did not commit. The State convicted Mr. Long by suppressing favorable evidence, including results of tests on evidence from the crime scene that did not implicate him, evidence that ultimately exonerated him. Numerous students worked with clinic faculty on the case over the course of five years, culminating in a hearing before the entire Fourth Circuit that was argued virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The case attracted significant national and regional media attention and helped to further highlight the many persistent injustices of our system of criminal law, particularly those suffered by Black men. Mr. Long was the ninth client exonerated through the work of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic since it was founded in 2008.

Florida State University College of Law Forced Child Labor Project

In response to the UN declaring 2021 the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor, Florida State University College of Law created the Forced Child Labor Project, which advocates against forced child labor in international supply chains. The goal of the Project is two-fold: 1) to educate the legal community of the pervasive practice of forced child labor in goods we consume; and 2) to enforce Section 307 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 which prohibits the importation into the United States of forced child labor goods. Please view: Cocoa and Valentine’s Day Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC0BtL6BwYE&t=3s.

University of Nebraska College of Law Tenant Assistance Project

The Tenants Assistance Project (TAP) was developed to change and improve the representation paradigm that exists in landlord-tenant cases. Since the Project began a year ago, more than 60 Lincoln-area attorneys and several dozen senior-certified law students from the University of Nebraska College of Law have ensured that every tenant that appears for an eviction hearing and seeks assistance is provided legal representation. Law students Alan Dugger, Tessa Lengeling, Sarah O’Neill, and Amy Sonnenfeld have all made significant contributions to the Project, and in doing so have helped many low-income families in the Lincoln community.

West Virginia University College of Law Immigration Clinic

The West Virginia University College of Law Immigration Clinic is fighting to represent and empower a long-underserved immigrant population. There is only one other full-time immigration practitioner for a statewide community of 30,000 foreign-born residents and their families, so the Immigration Clinic is bridging the gap through a uniquely holistic legal practice, community education and resources, and systemic advocacy. The clinic is also working to build a local immigration bar from the group up, by facilitating attorney mentorship, developing a CLE certificate program, and recruiting law students who will commit to local immigration practice.

The 2021 CLEA Awards will be presented at the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education on Friday, April 30, 12:00-1:00 Eastern. We look forward to celebrating our clinical community!

The CLEA Awards Committee

Anju Gupta (Rutgers-Newark)
D’lorah Hughes (Irvine)
Praveen Kosuri (Pennsylvania)
Perry Moriearty (Minnesota)
Kele Stewart, Co-Chair (Miami)
Jane Stoever, Co-Chair (Irvine)

Read CLEA's Statement on Anti-Racist Legal Education

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 21:25:55 GMT

CLEA Statement of Anti-Racist Legal Education

Nearly a year has passed since historic events and protests, domestically and internationally, brought renewed attention to racial justice and the discriminatory and racist practices ever present in our social structures. The Black Lives Matter protests called attention to the unjust and disproportionate treatment of Black and Brown individuals by law enforcement and other institutions. More recently, violent attacks have roiled Asian communities, which have already been the targets of violence and hateful rhetoric since the COVID-19 pandemic began. And publicized incidents at various institutions of higher learning have demonstrated the failure of these institutions to protect students from racism, even within the walls of academia. As law schools and faculties reflect on how to advance racial justice and equality, the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) calls upon law school administrations and faculties, including experiential faculty, to play an active role in reforming our institutions and transforming our communities to be anti-racist.

An anti-racist curriculum is essential to disrupting and undoing racism in all its forms. Experiential courses are a critical component of any effective anti-racist curriculum, as such courses often allow for individualized student engagement, via legal work in local and marginalized communities, in order to promote social change and access to justice.

But experiential faculty should not rest on traditional notions of clinical and externship pedagogy. We encourage experiential faculty to actively implement principles of anti-racist education into their teaching. As recent events have made clear, students from marginalized backgrounds have long been considered less qualified and competent than their peers by some faculty, including law faculty. Such treatment creates an inequitable and hostile educational environment that can impede students’ ability to learn and succeed. As experiential faculty, we are particularly concerned with how racist and biased views from faculty members can negatively affect student performance in experiential courses. The elimination of biases and the perception of biases in grading and assessment is particularly important in experiential courses, which do not generally employ blind or anonymous grading. Experiential faculty must therefore create an intellectual environment that promotes a climate of equity and inclusivity for all students.

CLEA also encourages law schools to treat their experiential faculty equitably in terms of pay, job security, and status, as those faculty members are often disproportionately women and racial minorities. Inequalities between faculty members communicate to students, whether implicitly or explicitly, the relative value of those faculty. Moreover, even as women and racial minorities tend to be overrepresented in experiential faculties as compared to non-experiential faculties, law schools must do more to increase the diversity in their experiential faculties. As a recent essay by the CLEA Faculty Equity & Inclusion Committee demonstrates, the racial diversity of clinical faculty has remained stagnant in recent decades. The need for diverse faculties in experiential education is self-evident. Demographics matter, and any lack of diversity in experiential faculty negatively affects students, clients, and communities alike. CLEA has led efforts to diversify clinical and externship faculties and will continue that work in upcoming programming at the 2021 AALS Clinical Conference, in materials developed with the AALS Clinical Section Policy Committee, and in legal scholarship. We look forward to continuing this work alongside our colleagues in the coming months and years through specific recommendations aimed at improving the dismal demographical data that our research has identified.

Law schools should take proactive steps to ensure that their faculty members work to eliminate biases and racism in their teaching and should support their students of color, who inevitably face disparate treatment and shoulder the burdens of responding to such incidents. They should also prioritize hiring faculty members that reflect the communities they serve in their experiential programs and treat those faculty members equitably. Despite the recent attention given to anti-racist initiatives, law schools have much work to do in their quest to develop a more equitable, just, and inclusive discipline and profession. CLEA looks forward to working with its members and other members of legal academia to further these goals.

This statement was drafted and approved by the CLEA Faculty Equity & Inclusion Committee and approved by the CLEA Board of Directors.

Click here for a PDF of this statement.

CLEA Awards News!

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 22:17:19 GMT

The CLEA Awards Committee is once again soliciting nominations for its student awards. Beginning this year, in addition to the CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student or Outstanding Clinic Team Award, schools can honor students with the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award. The addition of the externship-focused award recognizes the valuable work for justice that law students do through externships and provides schools the opportunity to nominate an outstanding and self-reflective externship student for CLEA’s recognition. The awards are given annually at the completion of the academic year.

Criteria for the CLEA Outstanding Clinic Student or Team Award (One Award Per School) and the CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award (One Award Per School):

For the clinic award, each school must select one student OR one team enrolled in a law school clinic course. A team may be recognized if students work together as a team and it would be impossible or unfair to single out one team member for recognition. Schools may select one student or one team, but may not submit more than one nomination for the clinic award. For the externship award, each school may select one student enrolled in an externship course.

The criteria for the Clinic Student/Team and Externship Awards are:

Excellence in the field work component of the clinic/externship course determined by the quality of the student’s or team’s performance in assisting or representing individual or organizational clients or in undertaking advocacy or policy reform projects;
Excellence in the seminar component of the clinic course or externship determined by the quality of the student’s or team’s thoughtfulness and self-reflection in exploring the legal, ethical, strategic, and other pertinent issues raised in the particular clinic or externship;
For the Team award, the ability of the students to engage in effective collaboration; and
The nature and extent of the student’s or team’s contribution to the clinical community at the law school, legal community, or broader community, if relevant.

Nomination & Selection Process:

Each law school may nominate one clinic award recipient and one externship award recipient. The full-time clinical faculty at each law school with faculty who are members of CLEA are asked to nominate a single student or a team of students from their law school for the clinic award and a single student for the externship award. Recipient students must graduate during or after the academic year in which the award is given. Each school then submits the nominations to the CLEA Awards Committee.

The nomination deadline is May 31, 2021. Please send nominations to the CLEA Awards Committee via this form(https://forms.gle/frB2zZuFNsU75rSQA

In the form, the clinical faculty of each school will be asked to:

Indicate whether you would like to give the Clinic Student award or the Clinic Team award.
- For the Clinic Student award and the Externship Student Award:indicate the name of the student as you would like it to appear on the certificate.
- For the Clinic Team award, indicate the names of the students as you would like them to appear on the certificate, separated by commas, or indicate the name of the team as you would like it to appear on the certificate. We appreciate formatting your response to this question in a manner that can easily be copied and pasted into the certificate.
Indicate the name of the law school as you would like it to appear on the certificate.
Provide a brief statement (no more than 250 words) of the reasons why each student or team meets the criteria for the award.

The CLEA Awards Committee will issue an electronic certificate, and the clinical faculty can print and present the award at the law school’s graduation ceremony or at some other appropriate time, including remotely, as determined by the clinical faculty. Note that, even for the Clinic Team award, each school will receive one electronic certificate (of which multiple copies can be printed for presentation to the students). Certificates will be issued on a rolling basis (please allow up to one week to receive the electronic certificate).

If you have photographs of the award recipients receiving the certificates, please feel free to send pictures for posting on the CLEA website to the CLEA Communications Committee at events@cleaweb.org.

Registration for the 2021 CLEA Virtual New Clinicians Conference is now OPEN!

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:39:31 GMT

We are thrilled to announce that registration for the 2021 Virtual New Clinicians Conference is now OPEN! Please visit the conference website to register and learn more about the incredible programming of this entirely free conference that will be held online between May 17 - May 20th, 2021.

Teaching Justice Webinar Session: Lawyering Across Silos for Community Equity, Feb. 25, 2021

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 20:54:39 GMT

CLEA's Best Practices in Pedagogy is pleased to announce the next session it its "Teaching Justice" webinar series.

Kicking the series off for 2021 will be Deborah Archer (NYU School of Law) and Kele Stewart (University of Miami School of Law) presenting Lawyering Across Silos for Community Equity on February 25, 2021, at 1pm EST/ 12pm CST/11am MST/10am PST.

Please register here: https://forms.gle/jSggEeKZyS79Y8io6

As ever, the goal for these sessions is to highlight new approaches to teaching justice in the classroom, drawing on the wisdom of current resistance movements.

And - please mark your calendars for the following session in March:

Teaching Justice through Abolition
March 15, 2021
12pm EST/11am CST/10am MST/9am PST, Alexis Hoag (Columbia Law School)

If you'd like to view past sessions, you can find them here:

https://www.cleaweb.org/Teaching-Justice-Webinar-Series

CLEA's 2021 New Clinicians Conference - Online May 17-20

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 23:23:26 GMT

We are excited to share that CLEA will again offer a FREE Virtual New Clinicians Conference on May 17-20, 2021.

Like last year's conference, which brought together more than 250 attendees, the 2021 CLEA Virtual New Clinicians Conference will convene over four days. Each day's program will begin at 11:00 a.m. Eastern and conclude at 1:30 or 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Our varied conference format will include live and asynchronous webinar programming, concurrent sessions, and facilitated small group discussions. We also expect to offer some fun networking opportunities, including an evening social event during the week of the conference. Session topics will include:

Foundations of Clinical Teaching: An Overview of Best Practices

Racial Justice in the Classroom and in Practice

Technology Innovations in Clinical Teaching and Practice

Teaching Movement Lawyering

Clinical Teaching and Practice During Crisis

Pedagogy Deep-Dive: Clinic Design

Pedagogy Deep-Dive: Externship Design

Plus: Case Rounds, Supervision, and More!

We will be back in touch later this month to share a detailed schedule and information for how you can register to attend the 2021 CLEA Virtual New Clinicians Conference. For now, please SAVE THE DATES (May 17-20, 2021) and do not hesitate to contact us or any of the CLEA New Clinicians Committee members identified below with questions.

We look forward to “seeing” you in May for the 2021 CLEA Virtual New Clinicians!

Best wishes,

Lisa Martin and Danny Schaffzin

On behalf of the CLEA New Clinicians Committee:

Lisa Martin (University of South Carolina) (Co-Chair)

Danny Schaffzin (University of Memphis) (Co-Chair)

Jeff Baker (Pepperdine)

Kathryn Banks (Washington University in St. Louis)

Lauren Bartlett (St. Louis University)

Christine Cerniglia (Stetson)

Crisanne Hazen (Harvard)

Rachael Kohl (Michigan)

Praveen Kosuri (Penn)

C. Benjie Louis (Hofstra)

Nickole Miller (University of Baltimore)

Sue Schechter (Berkeley)

Shonda Sibley (Temple University)

Anita Sinha (American University)

Kele Stewart (Miami)

Wendy Vaughn (Northern Illinois University)

SAVE THE DATE: 2021 CLEA New Clinicians Virtual Conference (May 17-20, 2021)

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 15:49:44 GMT

2021 CLEA New Clinicians Virtual Conference

May 17th - 20th, 2021

Stay tuned for more details!

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2020-2021 is Live!

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 21:38:32 GMT

Please see over forty pages of new CLEA news in our CLEA Newsletter Winter 2020-2021. We hope everyone has a safe and smooth start to the new semester!

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: Georgetown’s Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:43:47 GMT

By Prof. Alicia Plerhoples

Pivoting to Represent Nonprofits Confronting the Pandemic and Anti-Black Racism

During a typical semester in the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic (SENLC) at Georgetown Law, law students represent D.C.-area social enterprises and nonprofits working in a range of fields, including social services, education, and international development. During this atypical semester, SENLC students have not only pivoted to virtual representation, they have also sharpened the focus of their representations to serve organizational clients who are responsive to the converging COVID-19 pandemic and our national reckoning with anti-Black racism. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the racial wealth gap, disparities in access to capital for Black-owned businesses, as well as workplace and educational inequities between a professional workforce who can work remotely and a working class who cannot.

Recognizing that the pandemic is not only a public health crisis, but also an educational and economic crisis that has disproportionately impacted communities of color, and heeding our moral obligation to work to dismantle these inequities, this semester SENLC students are representing:

(1) A newly-formed Virginia nonprofit that is providing college- and master-level tutors to low-income K-12 students to enhance their online education during COVID-19 school closures. The nonprofit is in its pilot phase and is operating with the support of Senator Warner (D-VA) who hopes to champion it nationally under the AmeriCorps umbrella;

(2) A D.C. legal aid organization committed to saving the homes of D.C. residents through pro bono foreclosure legal defense;

(3) A Virginia nonprofit focused on educational equity by providing scholarships and social-emotional learning resources to low-income college students;

(4) A D.C. nonprofit whose mission is to empower, prepare, and advocate for Black women in the quantitative sciences, including economics, finance, and data sciences; and

(5) A D.C. nonprofit offering free home ownership workshops and financial resources for teachers and other employees of D.C. Public Schools, 70% of whom are people of color and 50% of whom are Black, to allow educators to live where they work and build intergenerational wealth.

SENLC students are representing these clients on grant funding, governance, contracts, liability protection, and compliance issues. The Clinic will continue to work with organizational clients confronting the economic and educational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Black racism for the foreseeable future and has plans to work with mutual aid organizations and worker cooperatives in the spring semester.

2020 Election and Candidate Announcement

Lauren Bartlett — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 19:03:06 GMT

The 2020 election for CLEA's Board of Directors and Executive Committee will open on November 1, 2020 and the voting will close at midnight on December 1, 2020.

On November 1, you will receive an email with a link to the voting platform. We recommend that you remove “noreply@qemailserver.com” from your email spam filters before November 1 to be sure that you receive your ballot.

All CLEA Members in good standing are eligible to vote. If you are not yet a CLEA Member and you would like to be, please visit our website at CLEAWeb.org to become a member. All new member registrations must be completed by close of business Friday, October 30, 2020 in order to be able to vote in the 2020 election. If you are not sure about your membership status, please contact Gautam Hans (Gautam.hans@vanderbilt.edu) and Kathryn Banks (kpbanks@wustl.edu), Co-Chairs of the Membership Committee.

In advance of the opening of the Board elections, please review the candidate’s statements and bios linked here.

This year’s slate of candidates for the CLEA Board are as follows:

Chante Brantley

Davida Finger

Pedro Gerson

Crystal Grant

Llezlie Green

Melina Healey

Ronnie Hochbaum

Anna Kirsch

Gowri Krishna

Tameka Lester

Michael Murphy

Jenna Prochaska

Paul Radvany

Melissa Redmond

Rebecca Robichaud

Shanda Sibley

Sarah Horn Wolking

And the nominees for the Executive Committee are:

Secretary: Jodi Balsam

Co-Vice Presidents: Caitlin Barry & Shobha Mahadev

Thank you and we look forward to CLEA’s election season!

Sincerely,

The CLEA Elections Committee

Lauren Bartlett, St. Louis University School of Law

Melanie DeRousse, University of Kansas School of Law

Kendall Kerew, Georgia State University College of Law

Lynnise Pantin, Chair, Columbia Law School

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: The Racial Justice Project at New York Law School

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 17:11:38 GMT

By Melissa Toback Levin, Lewis Steel Racial Justice Fellow, New York Law School

The Racial Justice Project (“RJP”) is a legal advocacy organization housed in New York Law School dedicated to protecting the constitutional and civil rights of people who have been denied such rights on the basis of race, and to increasing public awareness of racism and racial injustice in, among other areas, the areas of education, employment, political participation, economic inequality, and criminal justice. The RJP’s work includes impact litigation, appellate advocacy, legislative advocacy, training, and public education. Professor Penelope Andrews and Professor Alvin Bragg co-direct the RJP; they are aided by post-graduate fellows and students in the Project’s work.

Recently, the RJP has been keenly focused on efforts to promote police transparency and accountability as well as efforts to end the criminalization of poverty. The following provides an overview of two RJP matters:

Carr v. de Blasio

In late August 2019, the RJP filed a petition on behalf of Eric Garner’s mother, sister, and police accountability advocates against the Mayor of New York City, the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”) Police Commissioner, and other New York City officials. The petition was brought under Section 1109 of the New York City Charter, a “sunlight” provision which allows a judge to preside over a summary inquiry at which City employees and officers can be made to testify about violations or neglect of duties.

The respondents moved to dismiss the petition. On September 24, 2020, Justice Joan A. Madden granted the majority of the petition for a summary inquiry. The Court granted the petition for a summary inquiry with respect to alleged violations and neglect of duty in connection with: (1) the stop, arrest, and use of force against Mr. Garner; (2) the filing of false official documents concerning Mr. Garner's arrest; (3) the leaking of Mr. Garner's alleged arrest history and medical condition in the autopsy report; and (4) the alleged lack of medical care provided to Mr. Garner by police officers.

The respondents filed a notice of appeal and are seeking to invoke an automatic stay. If the inquiry proceeds, Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Police Commissioner O'Neill, among others with knowledge or information concerning the four areas of inquiry, will be required to testify and a transcript of their testimony will become a public record.

In addition to the lawsuit, the RJP submitted a Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”) request to the NYPD and the Civilian Complaint Review Board (“CCRB”) relating to Mr. Garner’s arrest and death.

The lawsuit and FOIL request were part of a broader campaign to repeal New York State Civil Rights Law Section 50-a, which provided protections for police officer personnel records and had been interpreted in an overly broad manner. (The City had pointed to Section 50-a as a basis for the lack of key disclosures concerning Mr. Garner’s death.) In October 2019, New York Law School Professor Alvin Bragg testified at a hearing before the New York State Standing Committee on Codes on the repeal of Section 50-a on behalf of the RJP. On June 12, 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an act to repeal Section 50-a into law. As a result, the public has access to police disciplinary records as they are considered “presumptively open for public inspection and copying” under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”). One week after the law’s repeal, the City pledged to release all disciplinary records – this is now the subject of litigation brought by law enforcement unions, including the Police Benevolent Association.

Driving While Black and Latinx: Stops, Fines, Fees, and Unjust Debts

In February 2020, the RJP produced a report entitled “Driving While Black and Latinx: Stops, Fines, Fees, and Unjust Debts.” The report examines the disparate impact that a law which authorizes driver’s license suspensions for non-payments of traffic debt and nonappearances in traffic court has on communities of color. It notes that between January 2016 and April 2018 New York issued nearly 1.7 million driver’s license suspensions for traffic debt and highlights how the practice unduly targets and harms communities of color, forcing people to choose between, on one hand, stopping driving and not being able to get to work or, on the other hand, risking criminal charges by driving on a suspended license.

The report was utilized in a campaign to help secure the passage of the Driver’s License Suspension Reform Act, which passed both chambers and now awaits Governor Cuomo’s signature.

CLEA is Accepting Nominations for its Board of Directors (through October 1, 2020)

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:49:43 GMT

The CLEA Elections Committee (Caitlin Berry, Melanie DeRousse, Shobha Mahadev and Lynnise Pantin) is soliciting nominations through October 1, 2020, of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board of Directors starting in January 2021. This year, there are several Board positions open. All positions require a three-year commitment. See below for a memo prepared by the CLEA Elections Committee, which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail. Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these open positions. The committee also encourages "new clinicians" (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a separate election process for candidates identified as "new clinicians," to ensure that the identified "new clinician" candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The Committee strongly encourages CLEA members to nominate individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented within the leadership of various clinical institutions, including CLEA, the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, and the Clinical Law Review. The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by contacting the chair of the CLEA Elections Committee, Lynnise Pantin, lynnise.pantin@law.columbia.edu. If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the election materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name alone will suffice, and the Elections Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have less than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a "new clinician" candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the "new clinician" category, please indicate that as well.

Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2020. If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please feel free to contact Lynnise Pantin at lynnise.pantin@law.columbia.edu.

--------------------

Why CLEA Exists

The Clinical Legal Education Association is a membership driven organization that serves as a voice for instructors teaching clinic and skills courses, advocating on their behalf both inside and outside of the academy. It is the largest association of law teachers in the United States. The mission statement delineates the many purposes of CLEA and can be found here: http://cleaweb.org. Historically, CLEA can act more quickly and speak more forcefully and on a broader range of issues than other clinical organizations.

The organization engages in community-building activities, co-sponsors the Clinical Law Review, and engages in important advocacy efforts on behalf clinicians as a whole, as well as individual programs challenging political interference with educational activities. Past board members have advocated to change the ABA’s evaluation of outcomes in the accreditation process, ensuring that clinical outcomes are integrated into new standards. Others have fought to preserve gains in status won by earlier generations of clinicians. Many have defended clinics from political attack and interference, most notably in Louisiana, Maryland, and New Jersey. In addition, the organization continues to monitor and bring to the fore concerns about the racial diversity within clinical legal education.

Board and Committee Activities

The CLEA Board is responsible for the management of the business, affairs and programs of CLEA. Board meetings take place twice a year, at the AALS Conference in January and at the Clinical Conference in April/May. Throughout the year, the Board usually meets via conference call a number of times. Board members are also expected to actively participate in e-mail discussion of various issues.

In addition to participation in CLEA meetings, Board members are expected to be actively involved in one or more of the CLEA committees. Currently there are thirteen committees: Website/Communication; Accreditation/Standards (subgroups on Security of Position and Outcome Measures); Best Practices Implementation; Per Diem; Awards; Membership/Outreach; Creative Writing; Elections: Fundraising; Conferences; New Clinicians; Clinics and Law School Rankings; Task Force on Minorities in Clinical Legal Education. The work of each committee varies. Some are active all year (Accreditation/Standards) while others are active during particular times each year (Awards, Elections). Board members are also expected to seek other ways to meet the mission of CLEA, such as being involved in special projects, writing for the CLEA newsletter or website, leading a small group at the CLEA New Clinicians Conference, or other appropriate activities.

If elected, Board members serve for a three-year term and are eligible to run for two consecutive terms if they so desire.

Board Member Responsibilities

Each member of the Board should expect to do at least the following:

Prepare for and participate actively in each meeting of the board, and keep CLEA leadership informed if unable to do so.
Participate in the work of at least one standing CLEA committee.
Stay alert to matters of broad concern among clinicians and raise those concerns within CLEA as appropriate.
Become informed about matters relating to ABA regulation of legal education and CLEA’s advocacy: ask questions, get answers, be pushy, and figure it out!
Assist in administrative support for CLEA events, including staffing of dues tables and assistance with the New Clinicians Conference.
Remain current in CLEA dues, and encourage others at your school and in your region to pay their dues.

It is understood that not all members of the CLEA Board will be able to attend the January meetings at AALS, particularly for those members newly elected (since they will not know the results of the election until mid-December).

Join Us for the 2020 AALS/CLEA Virtual Clinical Conference July 21-23, 2020

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 21:21:41 GMT

We write this call at an unprecedented moment. Streets are filled with protesters rising up in response to horrific and ongoing systemic racism manifested by the continued attack on black and brown lives, and the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our daily reality. This has and will impact our professional and personal lives in critical ways. We are called upon as clinical faculty to reflect on and approach our pedagogy and practice differently. We are in new territory trying to determine the best way to run our clinical programs with the need for all or some of our teaching, services, and advocacy to be delivered remotely. We must re-examine the best way to teach about racial injustice and leverage clinical resources to take action to bring about real, lasting change. With these challenges and the inability to connect in-person, it is our goal to build community, draw on our collective wisdom, and provide a forum for discussion.

The AALS/CLEA Virtual Clinical Conference will be held from Tuesday-Thursday, July 21-23.

The conference will consist of two plenaries, a webinar, asynchronous videos, large group discussions, small group discussions focused on specific topics or within affinity groups, programming sponsored by Clinicians of Color (a committee of the Section), and a final community-building session.

The conference will run during the following times:

(All below times Eastern)

Tuesday, July 21: 12:00pm - 5:00pm

Wednesday, July 22: 12:00 - 6:00pm

Thursday, July 23: 12:00 pm - 4:30pm

Registrants can sign up to participate in all or some sessions, and can choose whether to participate in one discussion group and one affinity group discussion per time slot. Registrants need not attend all scheduled sessions of a discussion or affinity group unless otherwise specified.

To see the conference program guide, please click here.

To register for the conference, please click here.

See the Video from the 2020 AALS Clinical Section/CLEA Award Ceremony

Sat, 30 May 2020 17:26:06 GMT

Thanks so much to the *hundreds* of you who joined us on Wednesday, May 27 for this year's first (and hopefully only) virtual AALS Clinical Section/CLEA Award Ceremony, held on Zoom and in your house. Here's a video of the event, hosted on our Facebook page!

We celebrated the following exemplary clinicans:

Alexis Karteron (M. Shanara Gilbert Award)
Sameer Ashar (Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award)
The University of Chicago Law School Federal Criminal Justice Clinic (CLEA Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project)

Congratulations to the award winners - we look forward to celebrating with you in person as soon as possible.

Spring 2020 Newsletter

Lauren Bartlett — Fri, 15 May 2020 15:44:56 GMT

The Spring 2020 CLEA Newsletter is now published!

We hope you enjoy,

The CLEA Newsletter Committee

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: Tennessee and Memphis Collaboration on Housing and Eviction Justice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tue, 05 May 2020 17:33:07 GMT

In a remarkable partnership from opposite sides of their state, Prof. Wendy Bach’s clinic at the University of Tennessee College of Law (which she teaches with Joy Radice and Sherley Cruz) collaborated with Prof. Katy Ramsey’s clinic at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law to empower attorneys and clients facing eviction procedures during the COVID-19 disaster.

This post from UT explains their innovations in teaching, practice, and partnerships when the pandemic disrupted law schools and heightened vulnerability for renters during the pandemic:

When the threat of COVID-19 led to the cancellation of in-person classes, legal clinic professors at the University of Tennessee College of Law and the University of Memphis School of Law began scrambling to reinvent their curriculum.

Professor Wendy Bach’s legal practice history with eviction defense in New York City had given her firsthand knowledge of how economic crises can lead to homelessness.

"'I was looking for something meaningful for our students to take on that was a direct response to this crisis," Bach said. “Legal services attorneys are facing a wave of eviction-related work. There is a moratorium on eviction proceedings now. But when that’s lifted, the number people dealing with these situations will skyrocket. And the proceedings will move very fast.”

Bach reached out to legal services organizations throughout the state to determine whether students could assist in some way related to eviction law. Her queries led Bach to Professor Katy Ramsey at the University of Memphis who also had eviction law experience.

. . . .

Bach and Ramsey began brainstorming and about how they could collaborate. They realized their clinic classes were scheduled to meet at the same time and that they could bring their students together – via classroom Zoom sessions – to partner and find solutions for Tennessee’s COVID-related eviction issues.

“Tennessee does not have strong tenant protection laws so evictions are always a problem and tenants don’t have lot of recourse,” Ramsey said.

. . . .

The students drafted model pleadings that attorneys can use as templates to request emergency hearings.

. . . .

In partnership with Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services, students in the two classes also took on the task of surveying counties and sheriff’s departments throughout the state to learn how they were handling evictions.

County courts have discretion about whether they will accept eviction filings during this time, and sheriffs can interpret how they want to proceed with executing writs that were issued prior to court closures throughout the state.

The information was important for TALS to have when they receive calls their helpline,” Bach said. “They wanted to be able to accurately answer questions for clients about how to best deal with situations in their home counties.”

The students also gathered information about Tennessee eviction laws in relation to public health emergencies then crafted opinion pieces to share with Tennessee newspapers.

“We looked into what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, and if what happened then carries over to today, we’re about to have a significant housing crisis,” Tennessee College of Law student Allen Heaston said.

Heaston, who will work in family, civil and criminal law through Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem after graduation, said learning about housing law through the Legal Clinic was a worthwhile experience.

“It was just a very different area of study for me,” he said. “Just the vast amount of knowledge we were able to absorb in a short period of time has been incredible.”

Bach, Ramsey and Heaston agree there were significant benefits to the collaboration that allowed students to gain new experiences while helping people throughout Tennessee.

"This is definitely a collaboration I hope the College of Law will continue,” Heaston said.

STATEMENT OF THE CLEA BOARD OF DIRECTORS ON THE 2020 BAR EXAMINATION

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:16:14 GMT

April 21, 2020

The Clinical Legal Education Association (“CLEA”), the nation’s largest association of law professors, urges State authorities in charge of attorney licensure to promulgate rules and policies in response to the current pandemic that expand the availability of legal representation for underserved clients and equitably account for the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on recent law school graduates. In the face of this unprecedented crisis, we are called to work together to protect each other. We must be pragmatic, flexible and caring. While we are strongly drawn to precedent and tradition, as are all lawyers, we urge that strict adherence to the current model of a single, high stakes, timed bar examination as the primary gatekeeper to the profession will needlessly exacerbate inequality and further injustice during this pandemic.

As this crisis has developed, a number of approaches to bar licensure have emerged. Some jurisdictions have announced plans to postpone the bar exam a few months and then require applicants to sit for the traditional exam. These plans seem not to fully grapple with the difficult situation in which we find ourselves. CLEA joins others in calling for jurisdictions to adopt alternatives to the bar exam, such as supervised practice, sequential licensing, and diploma privileges. We recognize that one size may not fit all and that solutions will vary according to the needs and circumstances of each locale. Nevertheless, one thing is certain – this is not a time for business as usual.

CLEA has long expressed concerns about the deficits of the bar exam in the licensure system for American lawyers. This position is rooted in CLEA’s mission, which promotes justice and diversity as the core values of the legal profession and recognizes that licensure regulations inevitably shape legal education, particularly clinical legal education. CLEA has consistently urged that direct assessment of relevant professional skills, on analogy to training in medicine, would be better than inferring those skills from academic performance. Bar exam scores correlate well with law school GPAs and, to a lesser extent, with LSAT scores, but neither of these measures has been shown to relate to success in the profession or competence in lawyering. The bar exam is not designed to measure competence in representing clients or advancing justice, as is required of all lawyers. We have repeatedly urged that supervised practice and other experiential assessments would much better protect our clients and foster professional excellence. These deficits of the traditional bar exam are thrown into high relief by the bright light of the virus.

First, there is an unprecedented need for legal counsel for low and moderate income people, so many of whom will need legal assistance on issues of employment, housing, business and finance during and after this crisis. The need for advice and representation in family law, criminal law and immigration matters is also acute. Licensing alternatives such as supervised practice, graduated licensing and admission by diploma privilege would expand the availability of legal services at this crucial time and permit law graduates to serve their communities.

Second, the COVID-19 crisis has impacted law students unequally. Some are infected, while others are caring for family members. Many are dealing with severe economic dislocation and beset by daily crises; they are caring for children, older relatives and in some cases, face illness themselves. In the coming months, the results of any exam will turn upon the circumstances of the test taker rather than their ability to ethically practice law and meet their professional obligations. Most law schools have recognized that reality by adopting some form of pass/fail grading for this semester. In this moment, limiting admission to practice to those capable of sitting for and passing the traditional bar exam will only exacerbate these inequities; it will adversely impact those facing personal challenges brought on by this crisis while rewarding the fortunate and the wealthy.

Third, we must recognize the impracticality of administering a bar exam now or in the near future. Some states have announced their intention to move forward with the July 2020 exam and others have postponed the July exam to September. Although we cannot be sure, given the dynamism that characterizes this moment, there seems little likelihood that large groups of graduates could safely take an exam in person during the coming months.

We urge the state licensing bodies to recognize that this state of emergency requires us to seek creative, sensible and realistic solutions. We must try to better meet the legal needs of underserved groups and respond with care, concern and thoughtful reforms to the very serious challenges those striving to enter our profession face in this unprecedented time of crisis. Let us not look back and regret that we did not give enough attention to the least fortunate among us and let inequality flourish in disaster.

Vulnerability and COVID-19: A Joint Statement with the AALS Clinical Section

Lauren Bartlett — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 21:15:00 GMT

A JOINT STATEMENT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF LAW SCHOOLS CLINICAL SECTION AND THE CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

March 19, 2020

We are clinical law professors working all around the United States, in rural and urban settings, representing vulnerable families, incarcerated people, small business owners, immigrants, community associations, veterans, low-income taxpayers, and many, many more groups of people with whom we seek the full protections and rights afforded by our laws. Across the country, our clinical programs provide more than three million hours of free civil and criminal legal services each year.

From this wealth of experience in diverse communities, we know that much of the mainstream outlook on coronavirus preparation and mitigation, as well as vulnerability to the virus, misses crucial issues facing large swathes of our nation. We are writing to add these missing perspectives and to urge immediate action at the local, state, and federal levels.

Exposure Vulnerability

When a virus spreads into a deeply unequal society, we should not be surprised to see deeply unequal impacts. Some of the particular vulnerabilities worrying us include:

Our massive prison population. This population includes those serving criminal sentences after convictions, the large number of people held before trial who could safely be released to the community but for the unaffordability of bond, and the tens of thousands of migrants being held either at the border or in massive facilities in the interior of the country. In all these settings, where people have limited access to health care and cannot avail of the social distancing recommended by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the virus will spread quickly. And while incarcerated people cannot access the world outside, correctional officers may be bringing the virus from the outside into these facilities.

Low-wage and service workers. People in the most public-facing occupations are necessarily more exposed than office workers, remote workers, and many others who are being encouraged to self-quarantine. People working in pharmacies or grocery stores where we get our medicine and our food, people working in restaurants, people cleaning our schools and office buildings — they all face a far greater exposure to the virus than people who are able to limit their time outside of their homes or outside of other carefully sanitized spaces.

Low-income families who rely on public transportation. When the only way to get to work is a crowded bus, social distancing is impossible.

Immigrants without health care. From green card holders to the undocumented, immigrants have been deterred from seeking health care. The Trump Administration’s “public charge” rule makes people ineligible for citizenship if they receive certain public benefits. Even when a benefit does not make people ineligible, the fear and confusion around this issue — as well as the possibility that something allowed today might make problems with a change in policy tomorrow — has led to a massive drop in people accessing programs that improve baseline health. And those who lack legal status have no access to health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Participants in overcrowded court systems.Courts that serve poor people do not look like the courts we see on TV or in the movies. We regularly appear in courts with crowded waiting rooms, where thirty cases or more might be called in a single two-hour period. Whether that is a criminal court where defendants (and their lawyers) are awaiting arraignment, or an immigration court where dozens of people wait side-by-side in standing-room-only courtrooms, far too many of our courts are ill-equipped to keep people safe. And yet those same people, vulnerable to infection in those crowded, unsanitized spaces, would bear exceptionally high costs if they did not show up to court: evictions, warrants for arrest, defaults that could result in seizures or wage garnishment, orders of deportation, the loss of child support or unpaid wages, and more. We are grateful that, increasingly, jurisdictions are taking smart, timely measures to reduce these risks.

Health Care Workers. All health care workers, even those who otherwise occupy privileged positions in our society, are working the frontlines of the response to coronavirus, which is an extraordinary commitment and service. Among this category, though, are people facing extra vulnerabilities. With a median hourly wage of $13.72, nursing assistants and orderlies have limited resources to keep themselves healthy, even while working in contaminated locations.

People Experiencing Homelessness. Already highly vulnerable to a host of illnesses, those who rely on shelters face acute difficulties in maintaining social distance from those who may be infected with coronavirus, because shelters can be terribly overcrowded. They may also lack reliable access to soap and water. And with more than 30% already suffering from chronic lung diseases, the virus is likely to present more severely amid this population.

Unaffordability of Preparation

Much of the good, common-sense advice about preparing for coronavirus asks people to have supplies on hand for about two weeks, in the event that self-quarantine is needed. In Midwestern cities, the average consumer spends a little over $300 for food and personal items for two weeks. In more expensive cities in the Northeast, that number rises to about $350. Those amounts are well over half of the two-week take-home pay for a minimum wage worker. And the Federal Reserve has found that fully 12% of Americans would be unable to find any way to cover an unexpected $400 expense — meaning that 12% of the U.S. population is unlikely to be able to afford the supplies needed for an effective self-quarantine.

The Challenges of Social Distancing

We have already demonstrated why the vulnerable communities we work with are more likely to come into close contact with the coronavirus. Once exposed, people need to self-quarantine, according to the CDC. For three distinct reasons, this is a difficult solution for many of the people we work with.

Necessity of Work. People without paid sick leave face the choice between staying home — which will help prevent the spread to others — and providing for themselves and their families. Without paid sick leave, we leave these individuals in an impossible situation. Today 34 million Americans lack paid sick leave, and the first wave of federal coronavirus legislation left millions of these workers still unprotected. Some SNAP food benefits recipients are also limited to three months of aid in a 36-month period if they are out of work or underemployed, although those requirements are in flux for many states starting in April. For those still subject to those requirements, missing work may mean missing out on crucial nutrition. We applaud the emergency efforts, like legislation in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, aimed at assuaging economic insecurity to help people comply with social distancing.

School Closures, Poverty, and Childcare. One of the mitigation strategies we are increasingly seeing is school closures. Although essential, these closures are especially difficult for the communities we serve for three reasons. School may be the only place where a poor child can reliably access nutritious meals provided by school lunch programs. Also, when a child is home from school, someone needs to care for that child. Parents without childcare risk child protective services or criminal investigations if they work and leave their children home alone. School closures also create inequities between well-resourced school districts that can move learning online, and districts without those capabilities (and within districts, there may be disparate access to computers and reliable internet).

Intimate Partner Violence. Self-quarantine may leave people in dangerous situations. The economic stress of lost wages and work opportunities will harm some low-income people who are victimized by intimate partners and other family members, depriving them of the resources they need to maintain their safety. Moreover, the loss of employment may drive increases in violence; intimate partner violence against women is highly correlated with male under- and unemployment. Quarantine will mean that people in violent relationships may find themselves sharing small spaces under stressful conditions with those using violence against them, without the ability to seek other shelter or assistance, for significant periods of time. The World Health Organization attributes a connection between disasters and increases in domestic violence and child and elder abuse to the lack of provisions, the dismantling of social networks, and the stress of lost earnings. As one clinician noted, “For survivors who haven’t escaped yet, telling them to stay home is telling them to stay in the most dangerous place possible.”

Lack of Access to our Clients. Prisons are banning visitors, and lawyers will have greater-than-normal difficulty accessing clients. As universities close down, we will have greater challenges communicating with and meeting other clients. While clinical professors across the country are rapidly adapting our intensive teaching and supervision methodologies to use online tools, we also know that many of our clients lack access to the internet at home, and nothing will be able to substitute for in-person meetings with many whose cases are moving ahead even as the virus inhibits the ability of lawyers to do their job.

Looking Ahead

We fear that as the economy lurches toward a recession, the very nonprofit agencies whose services do so much to meet all the challenges laid out above, will lose vital grant, private, and government funding, making all of this much more difficult. Our clinical programs across the country support many innovative community organizations who make profound differences in small, unsung ways — and those organizations will need tremendous support to continue their critical work in these times. We also have great concern that, even with some short-term moratoria in place, evictions will ultimately rise as people choose between medical care and paying rent. We fear the virus will depress responses to the census, which will have massive down-the-line harms for funding of vital government programs.

We greatly worry about what will happen as courts close or limit access to civil litigants. Domestic violence survivors will not be able to secure final protection orders or enforce child support orders. Workers cannot hold employers to account for unpaid wages — and risk missing statutes of limitation on filing those claims (though we hope courts will extend, or “toll,” those deadlines). Enforcing these rights matters. Court closures will make much of that work impossible.

The coronavirus exposes structural injustices that have long existed. This crisis shows that the boundaries we draw amongst ourselves are profoundly porous, whether it is the corner-office law partner exposing the low-wage contractor cleaning his building after hours, or the wealthy family whose elderly mother is cared for by an underpaid nursing aide who took three contaminated buses to get to work.

We hope that by revealing our deep and mutual interdependence, this crisis helps move forward policies that would benefit us all by reducing some of the inequalities embedded in our society. Paid sick leave and universal health care are obviously relevant to this current moment. But so are challenges to our sky-high rates of incarceration and the use of cash bail, and the efforts to raise the minimum wageand end immigration detention.

For decades, we, as clinicians, have seen the many ways that injustice flourishes in our society. We hope that, if nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic shows us the importance of interconnection, and how all of us do better when society works for all of us. We call on our elected leaders to make justice a core part of all responses to this pandemic. And we ask everyone to consider how a more just society would make so many things better than what we see today.

VULNERABILITY AND COVID-19

A JOINT STATEMENT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF LAW SCHOOLS CLINICAL SECTION* AND THE CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

March 19, 2020

Exposure Vulnerability

When a virus spreads into a deeply unequal society, we should not be surprised to see deeply unequal impacts. Some of the particular vulnerabilities worrying us include:

Low-income families who rely on public transportation. When the only way to get to work is a crowded bus, social distancing is impossible.

Unaffordability of Preparation

The Challenges of Social Distancing

Looking Ahead

Original post by Wendy Bach available here.

Teaching Justice Webinar Series

Lauren Bartlett — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 05:00:00 GMT

For up-to-date information on the Teaching Justice Webinar Series, please visit https://www.cleaweb.org/Teaching-Justice-Webinar-Series.

Winter Newsletter 2019-20

Lauren Bartlett — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 18:04:03 GMT

The CLEA Newsletter for Winter 2019-20 is now published!

Happy New Year,

The CLEA Newsletter Committee

A note from the new AALS SECTION on Community Economic Development

Lauren Bartlett — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 17:57:13 GMT

If you’re at the AALS meeting, don’t miss the inaugural meeting of the new Provisional Section on Community Economic Development (CED) on Saturday, January 4 from 5:15 to 6:15 p.m. at the Marriott Wardman Park (room tba). We’ll discuss the section’s activities in the coming year, and we would love to hear from you about your interests, emerging needs, or perceived gaps that we can work to fill with section programming. Refreshments will be provided.

The CED Section is designed to be a dynamic, collaborative space to enhance the scholarship, activism, and direct legal work of CED-focused faculty and staff. Community Economic Development focuses on community-driven strategies designed to provide meaningful economic opportunities for communities that have been economically oppressed, subordinated, or marginalized.

If you can’t make the meeting but want to connect with the CED Section, please email Camille Pannu at cpannu@law.uci.edu.

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: Social Justice Audit

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 22:54:10 GMT

By Paul Radvany

At the 2014 Clinical Conference, Professors Donna H. Lee, David J. Reiss, Carol M. Suzuki, and I presented a concurrent session entitled: “Just Do It? Whether to Incorporate Social Justice Theory in Every Clinical Experience and If So, How?” In this session, we explored how social justice is implicit in any clinic’s casework. We also thought it might be helpful to provide a means to examine the elements of social justice that may arise in a clinical context recognizing that students come to clinics with differing levels of commitment to social justice. In light of the proliferation of clinics that do not focus on poverty law or represent poor clients, such as some transactional clinics, securities arbitration clinics (representing low-income investors against Wall Street brokers), intellectual property clinics and tax clinics, we presented and explored pedagogical rationales for incorporating social justice into these clinics and critically examined what techniques for doing so are effective.

At the session, we distributed the attached “Social Justice Audit for Your Clinic,” a guide to review systematically a clinic or externship to determine whether or not it explicitly addresses social justice issues and, if not, where it could address these issues.

We are including the audit here as a resource for professors.

Two trends make this topic timely. The private sector is increasingly demanding that students graduate “practice ready,” and there has been a push to incorporate pro bono work into law schools to fulfill bar admission requirements. These trends may lead to an increasing number of clinical students who are not interested in pursuing a career in government or non-profits, but are more focused on learning skills and fulfilling a pro bono requirements.

We hope the audit guide is helpful, and invite your thoughts: radvany@law.fordham.edu.

CLEA Events at the AALS Annual Meeting: January 2 and 3, 2020

Lauren Bartlett — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:08:27 GMT

Please join us for the following CLEA events at the AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. on January 2 and 3, 2020:

CLEA BOARD AND MEMBERSHIP MEETING

The Members of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Board of Directors cordially invite you to CLEA's bi-annual board and membership meeting and a pre-meeting dinner at the 2020 AALS Annual Conference in Washington D.C.

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Board of Directors and Membership Meeting will take place on Friday, January 3 from 7:30 – 8:30 a.m. in the Chairman's Boardroom, Lobby Level at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, located at 2500 Calvert Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008, directly across the street from the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

Please RSVP for the meeting here (breakfast will be provided):https://doodle.com/poll/cxd94b25p7exgt46

PRE-MEETING DINNER

The pre-meeting dinner is open to anyone interested in a social gathering of CLEA members and other clinicians from across the U.S. The pre-meeting dinner will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 2, at Mayahuel, 2609 24^th Street, NE, Washington, DC 2008. Dinner attendees are required to RSVP and to pay for their own dinner and drinks.

Please RSVP for the dinner here: https://doodle.com/poll/p3kkadis4h28xwzu

CLEA's Updated Statement on U.S. News and World Report Rankings for Clinical Programs

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 23:29:26 GMT

Updated December, 2021

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) recognizes that many who receive U.S. News & World Report ballots in their capacity as clinical program directors find this ranking process uncomfortable. There are a number of problems with the ranking of clinical programs. First, it places us in competition with each other, when we as a group see ourselves in a shared struggle for social justice, equality, and improved legal education. Second, there are no articulated factors for ranking clinical programs, so the voting can be arbitrary to a degree. Third, some schools may unfairly suffer because they do not have the budget or the support of their administration to market their program or send their clinical faculty to annual conferences.

While we might wish the rankings did not exist or hope to solve the collective action problem that bedevils creative responses, the USNWR rankings have remained a feature of our collective landscape. So, since rankings presently exist, what can we do now as faculty who teach clinics?

CLEA, through its Board of Directors, urges those ranking clinical programs to focus on factors that promote the principles for which CLEA advocates, namely the increased presence of clinical education (law clinics and externships) in law school curricula, security of position for clinical faculty, and diversity and equity. In evaluating clinical programs, CLEA urges voters to consider: 1) the number of law clinic and externship slots available relative to the student population at a school; 2) the breadth and quality of clinical curricular offerings available to students; 3) the school's security of position, academic freedom, and governance rights for faculty who teach clinics or externships; and 4) the extent to which the school has committed to pursuing racial justice in its clinical program through its course offerings, impact on the community, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and equity in hiring and promotion of clinical faculty.

Last, CLEA also urges those who receive ballots to consult their clinical colleagues for their views to increase the range of informed opinions reflected in the balloting.

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: The Mercer Habeas Project

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:11:54 GMT

Each member of the CLEA Social Justice Issues Committee has been writing or soliciting projects to highlight in this series. For my contribution this semester, I reached out to my friend, Prof. Sarah Gerwig-Moore, now the academic dean at Mercer University School of Law, who founded the Mercer Habeas Project. This year, Brian Kammer, former director of the Georgia Appellate and Resource Center, assumed its leadership. They contributed this good report on the clinic’s work:

The Mercer Habeas Project was created in 2006 by Professor Sarah Gerwig-Moore, who was hired in that year to help create and teach in Mercer’s experiential learning program. The State of Georgia provides no right to counsel in post-conviction matters, so the clinic was created to help fill a void in legal services and because of Mercer’s particular strengths in legal writing. The course operates as a capstone clinic in which students put to use skills and prior coursework in constitutional law, criminal procedure, appellate practice, evidence, client counseling, and legal writing. A core value is to visit, spend time with, listen to, and partner with clinic clients—to provide client-centered representation and creative, attentive advocacy.

Most of the clinic’s cases involve entering and providing counsel in pro se criminal or habeas cases pending in the Supreme Court of Georgia. Since 2006, the Clinic has represented more than 80 clients, including dozens of oral arguments, court hearings, parole petitions, and appellate briefs (and often a number of those vehicles in cases over long periods of time). Over the years, the clinic has had major successes in areas of due process, affirmative defenses, provision of effective assistance of counsel, and access to the courts (including provision of effective translators in court proceedings). The students' work has been recognized with two "Case of the Year" Awards from the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and in SCOTUSblog's "Petitions We're Watching." Sarah Gerwig-Moore was the 2013 recipient of the AALS Clinical Legal Education Section's Shanara Gilbert Emerging Clinician award, in large part because of her work with this clinic.

The clinic has also weathered some hard losses, especially given the difficulty of overcoming procedural hurdles and statutes of limitation in older cases. Students and faculty have helped clients walk out of prison and rebuild their lives, packing suitcases with essentials and bringing them to the Greyhound Bus station. And students have stood vigil outside the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison while faculty witnessed their clients’ wrongful executions.

The Project provides client-centered representation, which means we spend a lot of time in prison with our clients—and then talking and processing about those visits in local food joints. The work doesn’t stop when students leave the classroom, and it is not uncommon for students to work on our cases over weekends and breaks. Prison visit days start early in the morning. Whether or not the clinic sees a positive outcome of its cases, an intentional focus of the clinic is reflection upon systemic injustices in how poor people are charged in and treated by the criminal system.

When Professor Gerwig-Moore moved into the role of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in summer 2019, Mercer brought in Brian Kammer, former director of the Georgia Appellate and Resource Center, a nonprofit focusing on post-conviction litigation in Georgia’s capital cases. He brings with him more than twenty years of experience in habeas and appellate litigation, as well as a fresh perspective on the future of student work in the clinic.

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: Baltimore's Family Law Clinic

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 23:28:27 GMT

By Shanta Trivedi, Clinical Teaching Fellow, Bronfein Family Law Clinic

In May 2019, University of Baltimore Bronfein Family Law Clinic (“UB FLC”) and the ACLU of Arizona jointly filed an amicus brief in the Arizona Supreme Court in support of Juan P., a Mexican father fighting to get his son out of foster care in the United States and back to his family in Mexico where he belongs.

The UB FLC represents indigent clients in custody, visitation, divorce, and other family law proceedings and engages in litigation regarding important family law issues. It also partners with community organizations to tackle larger systemic issues through advocacy, education, and legislative work. The fundamental, constitutionally protected liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of one’s children is a core principle of the UB FLC’s work and the community it serves. Juan P’s case was particularly compelling because it presented significant and timely issues of child custody and child welfare law that have broad implications for many children and parents, particularly during the ongoing family separation crisis at the Southern border.

Juan P’s son, S.P., was born in the United States. When S.P. was only a year old, Juan P. was deported and S.P. returned to Mexico with his father to live with his father and siblings. The following year, S.P. came to the United States to visit his mother in California. Juan P. had daily contact with S.P. for several weeks until S.P.’s mother abruptly ceased contact. Despite repeated attempts to contact the mother and find out his son’s whereabouts, Juan P. was unable to locate them. Unbeknownst to Juan P., S.P.’s mother had moved to Arizona and had been embroiled in child welfare proceedings where she had been found an unfit parent. S.P. was placed in the custody of the Arizona Department of Child Safety (“DCS”) and ultimately with a foster family.

Juan P. only learned that his son was in foster care the next year and immediately contacted DCS to seek his son’s return to Mexico. Shockingly, instead of returning the child as required by law, DCS filed a motion to terminate Juan P’s parental rights. That motion was ultimately dismissed without a hearing, but the Arizona Court of Appeals twice denied reunification based on concerns that S.P. had bonded with his foster family and reunification with his biological family might cause him harm.

Juan P. through his attorneys at the Maricopa County Office of the Public Advocate (“OPA”) filed a petition for review in the Arizona Supreme Court. UB FLC students Nathan Adams, Nell Fultz & Henry Lloyd, under the supervision of Clinical Teaching Fellow, Shanta Trivedi and Clinic Writing Instructor and Assistant Professor, Cheri Levin, researched and drafted a supporting amicus brief in conjunction with the ACLU of Arizona.

The brief argued that, under the 14^th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, Juan P. had a fundamental liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of his son. The brief asserted that the state had no compelling interest in interfering with the parent-child relationship unless the parent was deemed unfit. In this case, the lower court had explicitly found Juan P. to be fit on more than one occasion. Thus, the state was unconstitutionally infringing on Juan P.’s fundamental right to parent his son.

The brief also argued that, overall, the child welfare system disproportionately affects children of color and that this case was just one example of a larger systemic problem. Prejudice against minorities pervades the child welfare system, impacting which children are removed and which families are reunified. While this bias is often implicit, in this case it was overt and unapologetic. DCS had placed S.P. with a foster family who did not speak Spanish and repeatedly violated court orders requiring the child to receive Spanish lessons so that he could better communicate with his father and siblings in Mexico. Worse, DCS had made disparaging remarks about Mexico on the record in arguing why S.P. should remain with his foster family. The brief asked the court not to sanction such open and hostile discrimination.

While the petition was ultimately denied, the students gained legal research and drafting experience and had a wonderful experience collaborating with a community partner. Most importantly, they learned a larger lesson: family separation isn’t just happening at the border. Legal systems within this country separate families every day. And Juan P., like the thousands of other parents separated from their children is continuing his fight.

CLEA Board and Officer Nominations Due Oct. 1

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 17:32:35 GMT

The CLEA Elections Committee (Melanie DeRousse, Benjie Louis, Shobha Mahadev and Lynnise Pantin) is soliciting nominations through October 1, 2019, of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board starting in January 2020. This year, there are several Board positions open. All positions require a three-year commitment. I am attaching a memo prepared by the CLEA Elections Committee, which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail. Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these open positions. The committee also encourages "new clinicians" (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a separate election process for candidates identified as "new clinicians," to ensure that the identified "new clinician" candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The Committee strongly encourages CLEA members to nominate individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented within the leadership of various clinical institutions, including CLEA, the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, and the Clinical Law Review. The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by contacting the chair of the CLEA Elections Committee, Lynnise Pantin, lynnise.pantin@law.columbia.edu. If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the election materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name alone will suffice, and the Elections Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have less than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a "new clinician" candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the "new clinician" category, please indicate that as well.

Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2019. If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please feel free to contact Lynnise Pantin at lynnise.pantin@law.columbia.edu.

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: The Economic Justice Clinic at Notre Dame

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 17:20:48 GMT

EVICTION CRISIS: A CALL TO ACTION - by Judith Fox

Matthew Desmond is instrumental for bringing the devastating effects of eviction to the public in his award-winning book, Evicted. The praise is well deserved. While those of us in the clinical world have been all too aware of the issues, Desmond has given us platforms unlike any in the past. People in power are now listening and we should make our voices heard. Matthew Desmond’s research had identified South Bend, along with Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, as one of three Indiana cities whose eviction rates placed them in the top twenty cities in America with the most evictions. This is the time for bold action.

For the past twenty years, my clinic students and I have battled against a particularly bad slum lord in our community. He was the ultimate Teflon-man. He rented properties he did not own. He rented properties that were not only in bad shape, many had been condemned by the city and issued with demolition orders. Spurred on by the call to action, we decided it was time to put an end to these practices once and for all. We set up a careful strategy, working side-by-side with local governmental entities and not-for-profits not only to stop this particular bad actor, but to combat the systemic issues that allowed him to continue for decades. Our first target: the lax Indiana laws that allowed this man to rent such deplorable properties.

It is illegal in Indiana to rent a property that does not comply with housing codes, there is just no effective way to enforce that obligation. My students and I worked with the city of South Bend to draft the Rental Safety Verification Program (RSVP), an ordinance that requires every rental home in South Bend to be certified safe. My students brought their clients to hearings, testified to their experiences and met with local advocates, including landlords. In the end, the ordinance passed. We are now assisting families who have been displaced because the home they rented is not habitable. Our parallel efforts with the Indiana legislature were not so successful, but we will be back this year to try again.

The second target of our efforts were the small claims courts that handle most of the evictions in our community. Looking closely at the cases our targeted slumlord was filing, we noticed some peculiar things. He did not own many of the parties he was renting. The L.L.C. he was using, was not a valid company. In one case, he used the L.L.C. of a competitor! We thought this must be anomalous, considering this man’s history. It was not. We were appalled to discover how many landlords and rental companies were filing evictions using fictitious names. We began challenging every eviction on standing grounds, and won. As a result, the court instituted a local rule requiring parties in eviction to document their right to bring the case to court. Our slum lord has not brought an eviction case since.

We had shown a light on eviction hearings and our new crop of Magistrates began to do the same. They began to question why St. Joseph County allowed landlords to post their property as opposed to the cash bond required by State law. This is significant because, in Indiana, there are essentially two proceedings in an eviction. There is an immediate possession hearing which is quick and usually does not afford a tenant much of a chance to defend herself, followed more than a month later by a trial. If someone is evicted in the immediate possession phase, even if they win at trial, they have already been displaced. A landlord must post a bond at the immediate possession stage to reimburse a tenant wrongfully convicted. A tenant can post an equivalent counter-bound to stay in the home pending trial. The St. Joseph County courts were allowing the bond to be the rental property, completely precluding the posing of an equivalent counter-bound. That practice too has ended.

Our next target is the lax enforcement of licensing laws. Federal and state law requires leasing agencies and others who buy and sell property or rent property they do not own to be licensed. We discovered that almost none of them are. Again, we have systematically began to file counterclaims using our state UDAP laws. So far, these challenges have incentivized settlement in nearly every instance.

We have made real progress in a year, but we are far from done. This semester my students have teamed with the ACLU, Professor Florence Roisman at I.U. McKinney Law School and a Notre Dame Student chapter of the Roosevelt institute to do a court watch study of evictions across Indiana. Anyone who has ever witnessed these hearings knows that the due process violations are mind-boggling. We intend to shine a light on those practices. The ultimate outcome will surely be a white paper and perhaps litigation.

Eviction is an issue facing clients throughout our clinical programs. Ann Juergens, Mitchell Hamlin Law School, recently reached out to the clinical community to suggest that we join forces across states to collaborate on solutions. Ann and I will be giving the opening plenary at the Midwest Clinical Conference being held in October at the Michigan State Law School to formally begin this conversation. This is no less than a call to action. Whether you can come to Michigan in October, or simply want to send us an email, we welcome the entire clinical community to this issue. The clinical community had a tremendous impact on homeowner’s rights during the foreclosure crisis. It is time to turn our eyes to eviction. As Michael Desmond has so eloquently said, eviction is not a symptom of poverty, it is a cause. Clinical programs are uniquely placed to meet the challenge and make a dent in this crucial social justice issue.

Judith Fox, Clinical Professor, Notre Dame. Judith Fox and Linda Fisher, recently released The Foreclosure echo: How the Hardest Hit Have Been Left Out of the Economic Recovery (Cambridge, 2019).

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: The Nonprofit and Small Business Clinic at New York Law School

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:20:33 GMT

By Anna G. Cominsky, Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Supervising Attorney at New York Law School

Social justice is an integral part of Associate Professor of Law Gowri Krishna’s Nonprofit and Small Business Clinic at New York Law School. “I think of my clinic broadly as a social justice clinic,” Krishna says, “We support people and organizations that work towards economic, racial, social, and environmental equity.” Students in the yearlong Clinic provide transactional legal assistance to nonprofit organizations and small businesses. Under close faculty supervision by Krishna, students interview and counsel clients; plan and strategize on matters; research relevant questions of law; draft correspondence, memos and legal documents; manage client relationships; and negotiate agreements. Students take primary responsibility for work with multiple clients on a variety of matters such as entity formation, governance, contracts, intellectual property and regulatory compliance.

The Clinic is comprised of seminar and fieldwork experience for both fall and spring semesters. During the fall semester, twice-weekly seminars focus on substantive areas of law, ethics and lawyering skills. Students prepare for and lead case rounds in which they discuss issues raised in and reflections on their fieldwork

Clinic clients range from start-ups to more mature entities. Clients generally come from or benefit low-income communities, and all are unable to afford market rates for legal services. “We represent nonprofit groups and small businesses on non-litigation matters such as entity structure, formation, governance, contracts, leases, etc. The nonprofit organizations have varying missions that aim to improve the lives of and build power for the most vulnerable in some way, whether it is providing preschool programs for children in public housing, training immigrants for jobs in the culinary sector, or developing affordable housing policies (a sampling of this past year’s clinic clients).”

The Clinic helps students explore and understand a new economic system, commonly referred to as the solidarity or cooperative economy, which is a movement to build a just and dependable economy. “Many of the small businesses we assist are ones that fit into the solidarity economy. They value democracy and cooperation and operate their business according to these principles. Transactional lawyers adapt existing legal structures and create new ones to meet their clients’ goal of prioritizing labor over capital. They counsel clients on governance structures that offer democratic participation by all of the workers in a business. This type of legal work is cutting-edge, requiring attorneys to think creatively and lawyer in novel ways. Law school clinics, nonprofit legal services, and private law offices should seek and embrace opportunities to support a more democratic economy.”

This is a critical time in our history. Clinics, like Krishna’s, now more than ever have the ability to promote social justice by training future lawyers. The Clinic helps prepare students for work with organizational clients and introduces students to opportunities for transactional lawyers to further economic, environmental, racial and social justice. “My hope is that by getting to know their clients and their clients’ broader objectives, students will sharpen their critical thinking and creative lawyering skills and consider their role in effecting social justice.”

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: CUNY Law Clinic Explores the Intersection of Disability, Aging, Immigration, & Family Law

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:34:54 GMT

By Julia Hernandez and Joe Rosenberg

Reimagining our clinical practice. After a short hiatus, CUNY Law School’s Disability & Aging Justice Clinic (a/k/a Elder Law Clinic), resumed its practice in the Fall of 2018 as an evening clinic open to both day (full time) and evening (part time) students. The clinic’s teaching team—Julia Hernandez, Joe Rosenberg, and Liz Valentin—reimagined the clinic in order to incorporate our varied expertise, recent projects, and also to respond to the current political climate in which marginalized and vulnerable communities are increasingly under attack.

As a result of this process, we decided to highlight our work with immigrant families, and to connect the intersections among the seemingly disparate practice areas of aging, disability, family, and immigration law in order to assist families in harnessing the law for protection and self-determination. We also intentionally used technology to facilitate and advance our work, and prepare students for “Lawyering in the Digital Age” through the use of a paperless case management system, video conferencing, and projects to create guided interview applications.

Initial reading assignments at the intersection of our practice areas. To introduce the students to how we conceived of our clinical practice, we assigned several short readings (hyperlinked at the end of this post) to discuss during our first class to provide background on the following themes:

Race, poverty, & social justice
Aging, disability, guardianship, & decision making autonomy
Immigration, families, & guardianship of children
Technology, privacy, liberty, & the law

Building on a project created to support undocumented parents. CUNY Law’s Planning with Parents (PWP) Project was created in response to the “enhanced” immigration enforcement following the November 2016 Presidential election. The PWP Project’s primary focus is on helping undocumented parents understand their rights and options for protecting family members in case the parents are detained or deported. The PWP Project works with immigrant families at risk of deportation and/or separation through several methods of engagement with local immigrant communities. The project has served as a resource for information to advocates and families through know your rights workshops, legal clinics, trainings, and limited legal representation.

Goals of the project. Beyond providing a laboratory for skills development or apolitical legal services, our aim was for students to explicitly engage the political dimension of lawyering with those excluded from the dominant social structure—in this case, undocumented immigrants—and to center those politics in their work. We identified and drew upon the main goals of the PWP Project:

· Arming families with knowledge. At community events and individual meetings, students developed expertise with legal tools families can use to proactively protect against deportation and to plan for minor children or differently abled family members in the event of detention or deportation.

· Using advance planning tools to support family self-determination. Students counseled families and advocates on temporary care of children, designation of a guardian, New York power of attorney, and other legal forms, assisting with execution of these documents for families who chose to do so. Students used their knowledge and expertise to bring our legal clinics into the digital age: we abandoned our paper based intake and legal forms and transitioned to using digital interactive PDF documents that are populated with answers to questions. Based on this experience, students collaborated with a developer to create a guided interview application that can be used by advocates to inform clients about advance planning and create legal documents.
· Representing children to stabilize immigration status. The PWP Project involved family law, lifetime planning, and immigration law. Guardianship across a broad spectrum—for minors and for adults who need support in making decisions due to mental health, cognitive, and age related issues—was a common thread of the project. With our students, this led us to represent children in Special Immigrant Juvenile Status cases to obtain Legal Permanent Residency and protect against deportation. This work is done in local Family Courts and with USCIS, the federal administrative body for immigration benefits.

Making connections across practice areas. By situating the PWP Project in this clinic, we exposed students to the intersectional nature of legal problems politically and socially marginalized clients face and themes that bridge practice areas. We put our experience in preparing advanced planning documents traditionally used in the disability and aging context, to work for immigrant parents and their children through temporary care of children, designation of a guardian, New York power of attorney, and other legal mechanisms. We expanded our representation to immigrant minors, who needed a guardian appointed in Family Court in order to apply for permanent residence status. Students drew connections among the different systems of guardianship for children, differently-abled adults, and elders, and explored power structures at play, who the different types of guardianships benefit, and ways in which they empowered or damaged the family, both individually and collectively.

Understanding the meaning and utility of law through the lens of those subject to it. One of our goals as a clinic is to help students understand clients—and their broader communities—as authoritative interpretive bodies. This bi-directional feedback helps students broadly envision different legal realities together with their clients. We facilitated this by structuring our clinic to empower and center the experience of students (our “clients”) in order to model how we wanted students to relate to their clients. Part of our motivation was to maximize the learning experience of our students—most of whom worked during the day and had to make the time for law school. We organized our clinic seminars in ways that enabled us to teach theory, doctrine, and practice primarily through individual and group supervision and highly structured student-led rounds. We hope our clinical practice will guide students as radical lawyers for social justice in whatever practice area they pursue.

Initial Readings Assigned for Clinic Seminar:

Race, poverty & social justice

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/william-barber-takes-on-poverty-and-race-in-the-age-of-trump

Aging, disability, guardianship, & decision making autonomy

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights

(Read pp. 10-17 until Findings & Recommendations): Beyond Guardianship: Toward Alternatives that Promote Greater Self-Determination For People with Disabilities (National Council on Disability, March 22, 2018)

https://ncd.gov/publications/2018/beyond-guardianship-toward-alternatives

Immigration, families, & guardianship of children

Kaye, The Kids are Citizens. The Parents Are Undocumented. What Now? (L.A. Times, March 10, 2017)

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kaye-mixed-status-la-families-20170310-story.html

When Immigrant Detention Means Losing Your Kids (NPR, December 8, 2017)

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/08/565426335/when-immigration-detention-means-losing-your-kids

Lovett et al., Undocumented Parents Facing Deportation Can Name a Guardian for Kids Under New Law (N.Y. Daily News, June 27, 2018)

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pol-immigrants-cuomo-savino-rozic-children-deportation-guardian-20180627-story.html

Technology, Privacy, Liberty, and the Law

What Do We Care So Much About Privacy?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/18/why-do-we-care-so-much-about-privacy

Social Justice in Legal Clinics: Loyola-Chicago's Legislation and Policy Clinic

Thu, 09 May 2019 18:16:16 GMT

Continuing CLEA’s series of posts on social justice issues in clinical legal education, here is a post from Eve Rips, Policy & Legislation Clinical Teaching Fellow at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Since its founding in 2010, the Legislation & Policy Clinic at Loyola University Chicago has partnered with the Statewide Youth Advisory Board (SYAB) for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to help translate the policy priorities of young adults in foster care into legislative or administrative change. The SYAB is comprised of 14 to 21-year-old leaders from across Illinois who are interested in advocating at a state level for the wellbeing of their peers in the child welfare system. Starting in 2018, Clinic students have been working with the SYAB to help the group build their own policy agenda.

For students in the Clinic, the project presents a unique opportunity to get to learn first-hand about the issues that matter most to youth in the child welfare system. Students who participate in the project are continually blown away by the maturity and thoughtfulness displayed by Youth Advisory Board members, and by the extent to which the youth leaders prioritize the needs of future generations in making decisions. The project also provides students with the opportunity to learn by teaching: in reflecting on how best to convey complicated information to youth, Clinic students develop a deeper understanding of the material they themselves are learning.

Social justice is often discussed as both a process and an end goal. One of the biggest challenges for students working with the SYAB has been thinking through how to build a process that supports full and equitable participation of youth members. In particular, the project has required careful deliberation about the role of law and policy experts in working with youth leaders. Students have struggled with questions like:

● How can we present youth with data on topics they are interested in without inadvertently steering them toward our own vision for policy change?

● How should we move forward in helping youth leaders if the group wants to work on an issue that we think would be difficult to address through legislative or administrative change?

● What is the right balance between moving meeting agendas forward and giving youth leaders space to respond emotionally to topics that may be connected to personal trauma?

Students built out a deliberate and intensive process for helping the SYAB set their policy agenda. In Spring of 2018, students sat down with youth members to discuss questions and concerns about the laws and policies that impact the lives of youth in care. Those conversations led to the creation of a Frequently Asked Questions Guide for the SYAB, which provided answers to top questions and identified areas where new laws or policies might be needed. In Fall of 2018, students discussed the Guide with youth members, and led a brainstorm focused on asking “what would a better world look like?" Students used what they learned from that discussion to build a list of open-ended “questions to consider” for SYAB members, such as “how can the Department of Children and Family Services better ensure that youth preparing to age out of care can afford to live on their own?” and “what would youth want interactions with their guardians ad litem to look like, ideally?” Finally, in Spring of 2019, students met several times with a small “working group” of SYAB members to workshop policy ideas and finalize a list of potential priorities that they brought back to the full Youth Advisory Board for a vote.

Clinic students stressed that the project required high levels of flexibility and patience in learning how to engage meaningfully with young leaders. Meetings changed times frequently, students started researching one topic only to find youth attention shifted by the next meeting, and many felt that the project moved slowly. When considering her experience working with the SYAB, Patricia Martin, a current 2L, reflected that, “things can take longer when you work with youth. These are sensitive subjects that affect their peers - that sometimes meant we got off topic or struggled to think about when to cut off emotional discussions. But I think this is reflective of how policy making happens in reality, especially when you’re working with others to narrow priorities to an agenda.”

In the end, though, students felt the experience taught them a unique and critical set of skills related to how to be a thoughtful policy partner to populations with experiences very different from their own. Justin Sia, also a current 2L, explained, “the project helped me build my skills in empathy. The more I met with the youth, the more I understood what works in connecting with this group.” Ultimately, Sia reflected, “being an advocate involves working to get on the same page, stepping into their shoes, and thinking carefully about how to make information as accessible as possible.”

We want to hear from you! Are you working on something exciting, innovative, or interesting that advances social justice goals? Know someone who is?

Let us know. Email the Social Justice Issues Committee at derrick.howard@valpo.edu or jeff.baker@pepperdine.edu, and we may feature your work in an upcoming article.

CLEA Activities at 2019 AALS Clinical Conference in SF

Lauren Bartlett — Sat, 04 May 2019 14:48:14 GMT

We hope to see many of you in San Francisco for the AALS Clinical Conference in May 2019. As you make your arrangements for the Conference, we hope that you will calendar and consider joining us for the following CLEA activities:

- The biennial CLEA New Clinician's Conference will be on Saturday, May 4th, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at Golden Gate University School of Law.

- Please join our new colleagues and catch up with old friends at the CLEA Reception on Saturday, May 4th, at 4:30 p.m.-6:00 p.m, at Golden Gate University School of Law at 536 Mission St., San Francisco, CA. Food will be served and drink tickets provided!

- This year's CLEA Board and Open Membership Meeting will be on Tuesday May 7th, at 7:30 a.m.-8:45 a.m. in Room Franciscan A, which is located in Tower 1 on the Ballroom level of the AALS CLinical Conference Hilton hotel in San Francisco. The meeting is open to all and is a wonderful way to learn more about the important work that CLEA is doing on so many fronts, and to pick up some cool swag.

- In addition to the activities noted above, please plan to stop by and say hi at the CLEA Table at the conference.

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2019

Tanya A Cooper — Fri, 03 May 2019 00:21:49 GMT

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2019

Announcing the recipients of the 2019 CLEA Awards

Lauren Bartlett — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 13:51:17 GMT

2019 CLEA Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers

The CLEA Awards Committee has selected the late Stephen J. Ellmann as the winner of the 2019 Award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers. Over a highly distinguished law teaching career that spanned 35 years, Steve was the consummate scholar of clinical legal education, putting clinical legal scholarship on the map at a time when non-clinicians doubted its legitimacy. He engaged deeply with the process of lawyering and the ethical obligations of lawyers, writing a number of influential articles and co-writing a textbook on interviewing and counseling. As the founder and long-time convener of the Clinical Legal Theory Workshop at Columbia and New York Law Schools, Steve nurtured the development of scholarship by numerous clinicians, prodding presenters with his probing questions in a manner that was both incisive and supportive. He served as an important mentor to countless colleagues. Steve was a critical advocate for expanding experiential education at New York Law School and was a key faculty player in the law school’s extension of long-term security of position to its clinicians. He was a multi-talented advocate and academic, producing two books on the fight for social justice in South Africa, the last completed shortly before his untimely death, and addressing issues of national security and emergency powers in post-9-11 New York City. Steve’s combination of brilliance, fierce advocacy, and personal kindness make him a worthy recipient of this award.

2019 CLEA Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project

The CLEA Awards Committee is thrilled to announce that the Legislation Clinic at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law is the recipient of the 2019 CLEA Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project.

Menstrual products are necessities of life, but low-income women, girls, and other menstruators are often forced to risk unsafe and low-quality menstrual products or go without them entirely, especially if they are in schools, shelters, and correctional facilities. The problem is compounded by a lack of uniform policy. No comprehensive federal law guarantees access to quality, affordable menstrual products, and only a handful of state and local governments have addressed affordability and access to these critical supplies.

In May 2018, the UDC Law Legislation Clinic captured this reality when it released a groundbreaking report, Periods, Poverty, and the Need for Policy: A Report on Menstrual Inequity in the U.S. The launch of the report marks the culmination of a two-year-long partnership between the Legislation Clinic and Bringing Resources to Aid Women’s Shelters (BRAWS), a nonprofit that distributes new menstrual products, bras, and underwear to schools and more than 45 shelters serving women and girls in the greater D.C. area.

Since BRAWS retained the clinic in 2016, the partnership secured several reforms, including the repeal of D.C.’s “tampon tax,” funding for the D.C. repeal, and passage of a Virginia law mandating that correctional facilities provide free menstrual products to inmates. “Before the Legislation Clinic, we had made little progress with our advocacy efforts,” said Holly Seibold, BRAWS’ Founder and Executive Director. “We have accomplished extraordinary feats in such a short period of time. We were able to overcome insurmountable obstacles, such as a stigmatized topic, and became a credible, key player in public policy.”

Honorable Mentions

The CLEA Awards Committee received numerous outstanding nominations and determined that the following nominations merited an honorable mention.

Albany Law School Immigration Clinic’s Detention Outreach Project. Over this past summer, over 300 immigrants who had come to the southern border seeking asylum were unexpectedly sent to Albany County Jail. Within hours, Professor Sarah Rogerson began pulling together an emergency legal response to assist the detainees in preparation for their credible fear interviews with ICE. This incredible effort drew the attention of the media and government officials, ultimately resulting funding for legal services at the jail. In the end, over ninety percent of the clients represented were given permission to apply for asylum in the U.S. Professor Rogerson’s leadership and the volunteer efforts of other Albany clinicians, Professor Mary Lynch and Professor Nancy Maurer, and staff members Julina Guo and Amanda Nazario, helped to change of lives of hundreds of asylum seekers.

The Florida State University Public Interest Law Center’s Juvenile Solitary Confinement Project, led by Professor Paolo Annino and Fellow Caitlyn Kio, has applied a multi-faceted approach in advocating the abolition of placing juveniles in solitary confinement in Florida for the last five years. Using their own research and data, JSCP students engage with legislators, lobbyists, heads of state agencies, and other officials to reform Florida’s laws and policies to improve the lives of children. Through the hard work of the JSCP and its allies, juvenile solitary confinement reformation has been propelled from a non-starter in Florida’s legislature to a realistic statewide reform.

The Fordham Law School Clinic’s “Driver Suspension” Project is a collaboration of the Federal Tax Clinic and Legislative Policy Clinic, led by Professors Elizabeth Maresca and Elizabeth Cooper. Over 24,000 New Yorkers had suspended driver’s licenses because of an inability to pay back taxes they owed. The two clinical professors joined forces (and clinics) to carve out a hardship exception to the NYS Tax Law in order to stop “punishing the poor.” For nearly two years, they and their students used direct legislative advocacy efforts to write a bill, get it sponsored, give oral testimony and speak with over 100 legislators to amend the statute. On March 31, 2019, the hardship exception was signed into law by the governor and the legislature.

The Maryland Juvenile Lifer Parole Representation Project is a working group comprised of the University of Baltimore School of Law’s Juvenile Justice Project, the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law’s Innocence Project Clinic & Clemency Project, and the American University Washington College of Law’s Criminal Justice Clinic and interested non-profits and law firms. Clinicians at these law schools include Jane Murphy, Lila Meadows, Sandy Ogilvy and Binny Miller. The group came together to respond to a critical and unmet need for legal representation for people serving life sentences in Maryland’s prisons for crimes committed as juveniles. As of April 2019, the project has recruited 53 attorneys who are currently representing 29 clients sentenced to life as juveniles. Several clients have moved forward to the risk assessment phase of parole, a step required before release. Project attorneys are also responsible for the release on parole of two juvenile lifers, the first two since 1995.

The Tulane Law School Women’s Prison Project serves incarcerated women trapped in a criminal justice system that first failed to protect them from violence, and later failed to consider the role of abuse in crimes they were accused of committing. Through clemency, parole, and post-conviction cases, Project students challenge Louisiana’s draconian sentencing for women who kill an abusive partner or co-offend under the duress of one. The Project also advocates for criminal justice reform on issues affecting incarcerated survivors of abuse through legislation, targeted litigation, education, and training.

Please join us in congratulating all of these inspiring individuals and clinics. We hope to see you at the AALS Clinical Conference in San Francisco, where we will formally present the awards.

Sincerely,

The CLEA Awards Committee

Anju Gupta (Co-Chair)

Jane Stoever (Co-Chair)

Praveen Kosuri

Perry Moriearty

Kele Stewart

WAIT LIST CLOSED for the New Clinicians Conference 2019

Lauren Bartlett — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:07:02 GMT

CLEA will hold its New Clinicians Conference in San Francisco, CA, on Saturday, May 4, 2019, from 8:00am to 4:30pm. The New Clinicians Conference will be held at Golden Gate University School of Law, a short distance from the AALS conference hotel.

This full-day program is structured to provide important guidance from leaders in the field and then allow for group discussion after each topic. This format provides community-building and structure conversations on foundational topics like clinical teaching, supervision and feedback, a lay of the land, complexities in clinical teaching, critical and reflective practice and learning for transfer, difficult conversations, and assessment and grading. After a full day of conversations, you may need a refreshment at the end of the day reception where you will meet fellow CLEA members and clinical colleagues.

The registration fee includes the CLEA’s New Clinicians Handbook (recently updated), a full day of programming, conversations and meals (breakfast, lunch, and a reception to follow).

All 85 spots for this conference have been filled. Thank you.

Launching a New Initiative to Spotlight and Amplify the Work of Law School Clinics for Social Justice

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:33:04 GMT

from Derrick Howard, co-chair for CLEA’s Social Justice Issues Committee

If you stop random people on the street to ask how they define social justice, you are likely to receive varying responses that collectively reflect social justice is equal access to wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. Within those broad parameters, social justice relates to the environment, race, gender, sustainable development goals, responses to humanitarian crisis, and other causes and manifestations of inequality. Digging deeper to further define this concept may also reveal that the victims of social injustice are everywhere, including our neighborhoods, our communities, and even our classrooms. Victims of social injustice frequently include the poor, but also encompass individuals and groups who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise discriminated against.

Many law students attend law school with the intention of learning how they can use their knowledge and skills to assist marginalized groups and individuals, change current oppressive political and economic systems, and use legal strategies to advance social justice. However, there are many factors that deter law students from truly achieving such lofty goals. These factors include: the culture and pedagogy of legal education that produces more aspiring corporate lawyers than attorneys dedicated to protecting the interests of underrepresented or indigent clients; rising tuition and debt that limit choices law school graduates have to pursue careers at nonprofits; and the subtle pressure law students feel to abandon the political and moral values that initially informed their decision to become lawyers.

To shed light on the efforts of CLEA’s members to combat social injustice, CLEA’s Social Justice Issues Committee has been charged with “[disseminating] information regarding CLEA-supported social justice endeavors and projects as well as diversity issues." Through this and future blogs we hope to attract volunteers to commit to writing a blog-style, op-ed-style, or newspaper-article-style post about an ongoing social justice project or resource available within CLEA's community. The Social Justice Issues Committee intends to roll out the posts we receive beginning in April 2019 and posting one every month. We will post them on the CLEA website and share them through the CLEA social media platforms, the listservs, and the Clinical Law Prof blog. We hope we have a good impact, amplify some important stories, and build a foundation for future work.

There are daily reminders in the media, social networks, and hallway conversations that the world is at a defining moment for collective action against social injustice. We know anecdotally that there are many courses and programs offered at law schools around the country that promote opportunities for students to help others while learning valuable lawyering skills. For example, earlier this year, students from The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law traveled to Mexico to provide pro bono assistance to members of the migrant caravan seeking asylum in the United States. The legal services the migrants received included know-your-rights training, legal orientation workshops, and direct legal services. The students learned first-hand that the opportunity to be a practicing attorney brings with it the responsibility to use their skills to address social injustice. Berkeley’s Pro Bono Program sponsored the trip in connection with a legal services nonprofit.

We want to hear from you! Are you working on something exciting, innovative, or interesting that advances social justice goals? Know someone who is?

Let us know. Email the Social Justice Issues Committee at derrick.howard@valpo.edu or jeff.baker@pepperdine.edu, and we may feature your work in an upcoming article.

News Articles Regarding Recent CLEA Advocacy with the ABA Legal Education Council

Lauren Bartlett — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 19:39:41 GMT

CLEA's recent advocacy efforts with the ABA Legal Education Council have been highlighted in the following news articles:

ABA Journal, ABA legal ed council delays decision on stricter bar passage standards (Feb. 22, 2019), http://www.abajournal.com/web/article/aba-legal-education-council-delays-decision-on-stricter-bar-passage-standards

ABA Journal, Legal ed groups ask ABA for more transparency while awaiting possible changes to bar passage standard (Feb. 22, 2019), http://www.abajournal.com/web/article/while-waiting-to-see-what-happens-with-bar-passage-standard-groups-ask-legal-ed-for-transparenc

The National Law Journal, Tougher Bar Pass Standard for Law Schools is Back on the Table (Feb. 21, 2019), https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/02/21/tougher-bar-pass-standard-for-law-schools-is-back-on-the-table/?slreturn=20190127102133

Latest CLEA Advocacy with the Council on the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar

Lauren Bartlett — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 14:37:06 GMT

On February 20, 2019, CLEA submitted two joint advocacy memorandums, with the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) and others, to the Council on the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

In the first joint m emo, CLEA and SALT urge the Council to increase transparency in its processes and engage in meaningful dialogue with all interested constituencies before making decisions that affect law schools and the legal profession.

The second advocacy memo urges the Council to once again reject the proposed changes to Standard 316 relating to bar passage. The second memo is co-signed by SALT, the ABA Coalition on Racial and Ethnic Justice, ABA Commission on Disability Rights, ABA Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities, ABA Commission on Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity, ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, ABA Council for Diversity in the Educational Pipeline, ABA Law Student Division, ABA Young Lawyers Division, HBCU Law Deans Gary Bledsoe, John C. Brittain, Elaine O’Neal, John Pierre, & LeRoy Pernell, and the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA).

CLEA Letter Urging Rejection of ABA Resolution to Amend Standard 316

Lauren Bartlett — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 21:18:20 GMT

CLEA has submitted a letter urging the Members of the Members of the American Bar Association House of Delegates to reject a proposed resolution to amend Standard 316. If passed, the amendment would required nationally accredited law schools to demonstrate that 75% of the members of each graduation class who sat for the bar within two years of graduation.

CLEA joins SALT and others in our criticism of this proposal to amend Section 316.

January 3, 2019 CLEA Board and Membership Meeting and Post-Meeting Dinner

Lauren Bartlett — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 16:06:24 GMT

The Members of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) Board of Directors cordially invite you to CLEA's bi-annual board and membership meeting and a post-meeting dinner at the 2019 AALS Annual Conference in New Orleans.

CLEA's board and membership meetings are open to members and others interested in learning more about CLEA's advocacy and other work. Attending this meeting is a great way to meet up with CLEA Board Members and other clinicians attending the AALS Conference, as well as to find out how to get involved with CLEA. The post-meeting dinner is open to anyone interested in a social gathering of CLEA members and other clinicians from across the U.S. All are welcome to attend either or both the meeting/dinner.

The board and membership meeting will take place on Thursday January 3, 2019 from 5:00-6:30pm CT in the ACLU of Louisiana Conference room at Orleans Tower, 1340 Poydras Street, 21st Floor Conference Room, New Orleans, LA 70112.

The post-meeting dinner will take place at 7pm at Domenica Restaurant, 123 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA 70112. Dinner attendees are required to RSVP and to pay for their own dinner and drinks.

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2018-19

Tanya A Cooper — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 21:46:15 GMT

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2018-19

Save the Date: The 2019 New Clinicians Conference will be held on May 4, 2019

Lauren Bartlett — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 16:42:29 GMT

The New Clinicians Conference

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Golden Gate University School of Law

536 Mission Street

San Francisco, CA 94105

More information about the conference is forthcoming and registration will be available on our website soon.

Call for Proposals - 2019 Applied Legal Storytelling Conference

Lauren Bartlett — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 16:25:14 GMT

The call for proposals is now open for the seventh biennial conference on Applied Legal Storytelling. We are offering two deadlines for submitting proposals: January 21, 2019 (priority deadline) and March 11, 2019 (extended deadline).

About the Conference

The Applied Legal Storytelling Conference brings together academics, judges, and practitioners. The conference has previously convened in 2007 (London), 2009 (Portland), 2011 (Denver), 2013 (London), Seattle (2015), and Washington D.C. (2017). We are very excited to bring it back to the Mountain West (Boulder) in July 2019.

Applied Legal Storytelling (AppLS) examines the use of stories—and of storytelling or narrative elements—in law practice, legal education, and the law. This definition is intentionally broad in order to allow people creativity in the way they think and present on the topic. Such topics may include: the ways in which fiction-writing techniques or narrative theory can inform legal storytelling; stories in the law, or law as stories; legal storytelling and metaphor; client story advocacy; legal storytelling and cognitive science; and ethical considerations in legal storytelling.

In an effort to continue the storytelling conversation for this seventh conference, and to welcome new attendees, we are providing resources for those interested in submitting a proposal and who wish to generate ideas or respond to others’. The first is a list of topics from past conferences, available at http://www.lwionline.org/sites/default/files/Topics%20and%20ideas%20from%20past%20AppLS%20conferences%20(1).pdf. The second is a link to a bibliography on AppLS, including articles that have emerged from previous storytelling conferences, available at http://www.alwd.org/wp-contentuploads20151108-rideout_article2015-pdf/. We are also happy to answer questions and offer you suggestions—if you are a newcomer and interested in becoming involved, please reach out.

This conference will be hosted by the University of Colorado School of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and University of Wyoming School of Law, and coordinated by the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Scholarship Group. The conference is co-sponsored by the Clinical Legal Education Association.

CLEA Externship Committee Releases Survey of Schools on Payment of Students for For-Credit Externships

Lauren Bartlett — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 17:28:34 GMT

The CLEA Externship Committee is delighted to share its much-anticipated Report: Survey of Schools on Payment of Students for For-Credit Externships.

The Report analyzes data generated by a March 2018 survey on how law schools responded to ABA Standards revisions that removed the prohibition on paid externships. An impressive 151 law schools responded to the survey, but the Report notes the following caveat: the minority of schools that are experimenting with payment only recently implemented such policies and have little experience to report at this time. For that reason, CLEA plans to continue examining this issue in future data collection efforts.

In conjunction with the survey, the CLEA Externship Committee conducted two webinars last May and June that shared preliminary survey results, and examined considerations and challenges in permitting and implementing paid externships. Over 80 law schools participated in the webinars, and a version of it is available on the LexternWeb site.

Many thanks to the CLEA Externship Committee members whose initiative, hard work, and brainpower brought this project to fruition: D’lorah Hughes (Irvine), Kendall Kerew (Georgia State), Amy Sankaran (University of Michigan), and Alex Scherr (University of Georgia).

If you have questions about the Report or suggestions for future data collection, please contact committee co-chairs:

Jodi Balsam (Brooklyn), jodi.balsam@brooklaw.edu
Carrie Kaas (Quinnipiac), carolyn.kaas@quinnipiac.edu

CLEA Board Elections -- Call for Nominations

Lauren Bartlett — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 17:13:35 GMT

The CLEA Elections Committee (D’lorah Hughes and Lindsay Harris) is soliciting nominations through October 1, 2018, of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board starting in January 2019. This year, there is a VP position and several Board positions open. All positions require a three-year commitment. I am attaching a memo prepared by the CLEA Elections Committee, which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail. Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these open positions. The committee also encourages "new clinicians" (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a separate election process for candidates identified as "new clinicians," to ensure that the identified "new clinician" candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The Committee strongly encourages CLEA members to nominate individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented within the leadership of various clinical institutions, including CLEA, the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, and the Clinical Law Review. The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by contacting the chair of the CLEA ElectionsCommittee, D’lorah Hughes, dhughes@law.uci.edu. If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the election materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name alone will suffice, and the Election Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have less than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a "new clinician" candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the "new clinician" category, please indicate that as well.

Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2018. If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please feel free to contact me or D’lorah Hughes at dhughes@law.uci.edu.

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2018

Tanya A Cooper — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 23:41:13 GMT

http://www.cleaweb.org/resources/Documents/CLEA%20Newsletter%20Spring%202018%20(final).pdf

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2017-18

Tanya A Cooper — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 17:01:55 GMT

http://www.cleaweb.org/resources/Documents/CLEA%20Newsletter%20Winter%2017-18%20(final).pdf

CLEA Board and Membership Meetings, Jan. 4 in San Diego

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 17:36:27 GMT

CLEA will hold its board meeting and membership meeting on January 4, 2018, during the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego. The board will meet at 5:00 p.m. (Pacific), and the membership will meet at 6:00 p.m. (Pacific). CLEA will join with other clinical and externship professors for dinner at a location to be determined after the meetings at 7:30 (Pacific).

Thomas Jefferson School of Law is graciously hosting the meetings at 1155 Island Ave, San Diego, CA 92101.

CLEA will provide call-in information later for those unable to attend in person.

Please RSVP here by December 18 for the board meeting, membership meeting, and dinner, even if you need to call in for the meetings:

https://goo.gl/forms/FsYZuAP1GkbgZDZs2

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2017

Tanya A Cooper — Wed, 03 May 2017 00:13:57 GMT

http://clea.memberlodge.org/resources/Pictures/CLEANewsletter%20spring%2017%20(FINAL).pdf

CLEA Call to Action on the new ABA Bar Standard 316

Laura McNally-Levine — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 20:28:10 GMT

The CLEA Board would like to ask for your help on a critical ABA advocacy issue. This fall, the ABA Council on Legal Education passed a dramatic revision to Standard 316, requiring every accredited law school to demonstrate that 75% of each graduating class that sat for the bar passed within two years of graduation. The Council passed the new standard, however, with no evaluation of the impact of this change, including the unintended consequences on schools in states with low bar pass rates, student admissions decisions, law school curricular design. In fact, the Council passed the proposed Standard 316 hastily, after less than an hour’s discussion, with virtually no consideration of the mounting opposition to the standard.

You can help CLEA join the growing concerted effort to make sure that the House of Delegates does not simply rubberstamp Resolution 110B. Current examples of this effort include the attached letter from a group of prominent law school deans and a letter from the State Bar President of Michigan urging the House to send the resolution back for further investigation.

The new Standard 316 is scheduled to be voted on by the ABA House of Delegates on February 6th at the ABA Miami Midyear Meeting as Resolution 110B. We ask that you contact your state representatives who serve on the House of Delegates and request that they send the proposed standard back to the Council for further consideration and additional study.

To facilitate your communication with your state ABA Delegates, we are providing you with (1) background information on the revised Standard 316 in Resolution 110B and (2) a sample email for you to use to contact your representatives.

Background on the revised Standard 316

Under the new Standard 316, law schools would have to demonstrate that 75% of each graduating class who sat for the bar passed it within two years of graduation.

In a comment submitted in July 2016, CLEA opposed this new standard arguing that the proposed change may have unintended and possibly quite damaging consequences on law school curricular design and the diversity of the legal profession. CLEA urged that the Council defer action on the standard to (1) conduct an evidence-based inquiry into the immediate impact of proposed Standard 316 on schools in states with low bar pass rates and on the diversity of law schools; and (2) consider more systemically whether the bar examination, as the exclusive means of assessing readiness to practice law, is too limited in the proficiencies it assesses for entry into the legal profession.

CLEA was not alone in its opposition. More than a dozen comments were submitted in opposition, including comments from a group of twenty concerned law schools, SALT, the Historically Black Law Schools and Colleges Deans, and The Congressional Black Caucus. During the public hearing on the new standard, the only testimony presented was in opposition to the new standard. A complete list of comments submitted in opposition can be found here: http://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/resources/notice_and_comment/notice_comment_archive.html. The full hearing transcript of public testimony about the revised Standard 316 can be found here:

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/comments/20160806_hearing_transcript.authcheckdam.pdf.

After the Council passed its resolution, the California bar results were released. The overall pass rate for first-time takers from ABA accredited law schools was 62%. Only five of the 21 ABA accredited law schools in California had a pass rate above 75%.

For your reference here are: (1) the revised Standard 316, (2) CLEA’s full comment opposing passage of the new standard, and (3) letters of opposition filed most recently by a collective of law school deans and the Michigan Bar Association President. The comments and public testimony present a range of arguments for why the ABA Council on Legal Education should not have passed the new Standard 316.

Proposed Email

Below is a draft email that you can use to present CLEA’s position:

Dear ABA Delegate:

I write to ask you to reject Resolution 110B, a revision of Standard 316 that dramatically changes the bar passage standard required for law school accreditation. I ask that you send Resolution 110B back to the Council on Legal Education for further study and consideration.

Standard 316 is dense, complex, and inadequate. It needs to be revised. But in passing this new Standard 316, the Council has not adequately studied the impact of this change, including the unintended consequences on schools in states with low bar pass rates, student admissions decisions, law school curricular design, and the diversity of the legal profession. In fact, the Council passed the proposed Standard 316 hastily, after less than an hour’s discussion, with virtually no consideration of the dozens of written comments and public testimony that opposed its passage.

I urge that the delegates of INSERT YOUR STATE HERE unanimously reject Resolution 110B and send it back to Council so that a careful, reliable, and comprehensive study of its impact can be conducted.

Sincerely,

SIGN NAME HERE

How to find your state’s delegates

Most state representatives for the ABA House of Delegates can be found on your state bar website. You can also simply use a search engine and type in your state name and “ABA House of Delegates.” We have found many state delegations using this very basic method. If you are a member of the ABA, there is a delegate directory link on the main ABA website that is accessible to you.

We believe that if we mobilize CLEA members on issues that are critical to our mission, we can collectively make a difference. We would like you to contact your delegates by January 31st before the meeting begins on February 1. Thank you for taking the time to write to your delegates!

Benjie Louis and Beth Schwartz

CLEA Co-Presidents

2017 CLEA New Clinicians Conference - May 6, 2017

Laura McNally-Levine — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 19:50:32 GMT

SAVE THE DATE

The Clinical Legal Education Association's

2017 New Clinicians Conference

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Denver, Colorado

This year's New Clinicians Conference, hosted by the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), will take place at the Colorado Bar Association in downtown Denver, within walking distance from the AALS Clinical Conference hotel. The full-day program will include multiple plenary and facilitated small group sessions, as well as break-out sessions. If you are new to clinical teaching, please consider this event when making travel arrangements.

Online registration and additional details will be available in a forthcoming announcement. Registration for the New Clinicians Conference is separate from the AALS Clinical Conference.

If you have any questions, please contact: Cindy Batt (cbatt@law.stetson.edu) or Chrissy Cerniglia (cecernig@loyno.edu)

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2016-17

Tanya A Cooper — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 00:55:33 GMT

http://cleaweb.org/resources/Pictures/CLEANewsletter%20Winter%2016%20(FINAL).pdf

CLEA Strategic Plan

Laura McNally-Levine — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 20:22:52 GMT

Dear CLEA membership,

This has been an exciting year for CLEA. One of our major accomplishments was finalizing CLEA’s Strategic Plan. Please find attached the final Strategic Plan recently approved by the CLEA Board here.

CLEA's Strategic Plan is based on a year-long endeavor to gather information and ideas from both our membership and CLEA’s board. As you may recall, we first started this process last fall by surveying our membership to decipher what you saw as CLEA’s strengths as well as areas requiring further development. We discussed strategic planning during the January 2016 Board and Membership meetings. We then held a strategic planning retreat where we generated many thoughtful, comprehensive, and exciting ideas about how to shape the organization over the next several years. At each step along the way we were guided by our pro bono consultant, Peter Toran.

At the beginning of the summer Margaret and I convened a strategic planning ad hoc committee, which included Beth Schwartz, Martina Cartwright, and Lisa Martin. This committee was invaluable for creating the version of the plan we are circulating today. Based on all the feedback we received from the retreat, the meetings, and the survey, the ad hoc committee (in consultation with Peter) drafted the plan. Finally, we received feedback from our CLEA committee co-chairs and incorporated their suggestions into the final version after presenting the co-chairs’ feedback to the Board. We are very thankful for the feedback we received throughout this process and look forward to working with next year’s co-presidents, Benjie Louis and Beth Schwartz, on implementing the plan.

To accomplish our plan, of course, CLEA needs the involvement of its members! If you are interested in serving on a CLEA committee, please let us know.

As always, let us know if you have any questions. Have a wonderful rest of 2016!

Best,

Maritza & Margaret

Conference of Interest - The Fifth “Colonial Frontier” Legal Writing Conference

Laura McNally-Levine — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 17:36:23 GMT

The Fifth “Colonial Frontier” Legal Writing Conference - Saturday, December 3, 2016

Hosted by: Duquesne University School of Law

Drafting Statutes and Rules: Pedagogy, Practice, and Politics

Practicing attorneys frequently engage in statutory, regulation, and rule drafting whether it be drafting corporate governance documents, crafting legislative initiatives for non-profit clients, or engaging with highly regulated industries. Despite increasing need for such skills in law practice, the drafting of statutes, ordinances, regulations, and rules (for public laws or governance of non-governmental entities) remains one of the least common law school subjects. Commonly, instruction focuses on the repercussions of poorly written statutes or rules, on the courts’ efforts at application and interpretation of statutory language, and on scholarly criticism of statutes. Instead, law schools should teach students and practitioners how to better draft statutes and similar documents to avoid confusion, ambiguities, disagreements, and litigation.

Duquesne University School of Law's 2016 legal writing conference offers attendees an opportunity to hear from academicians who teach how to write statutory materials, practitioners who craft statutes and similar rules, and other scholars who study all forms of legislation. Lawyers representing corporate and non-profit clients, as well as those practicing in highly regulated areas of law, will find this program helpful in developing both skills in the art of statutory and rule drafting, and in learning about resources available to clients in need of such drafting.

Attendance at the one-day conference, on Saturday, December 3, 2016, will be free for presenters, Duquesne faculty, and $50 for non-presenters with an academic or government affiliation; other attendees will be charged $125 for the full-day conference or $50 for those attending only the afternoon sessions. We anticipate offering continuing legal education credit of four hours for attorneys attending the entire conference; attendees may also register for the afternoon sessions for two hours of credit. Duquesne will provide free on-site parking to conference attendees. The conference will begin 9:00 a.m. with a welcoming breakfast and reception at the Duquesne University School of Law for persons attending the full day of the conference, followed by two hours of presentations. We will provide a catered, on-campus lunch for full-day or afternoon session attendees, followed by two hours of presentations, ending at approximately 3:30 p.m. We will then host a closing reception for full-day attendees, in the “Bridget and Alfred Pelaez Legal Writing Center,” the home of Duquesne’s LRW program.

Pittsburgh is an easy drive or short flight from many cities. To accommodate persons wishing to stay over in Pittsburgh on Friday or Saturday evenings, Duquesne is arranging for a block of discounted rooms ($144 per night) at the Marriott City Center hotel adjacent to campus, within walking distance of the law school and downtown Pittsburgh. We will also provide attendees with information about the Pittsburgh area’s attractions, including our architectural treasures, museums, shopping, and sporting events. To register for the conference and review the conference agenda, information about hotel accommodations and other materials, please visit the conference webpage at http://law.duq.edu/events/drafting-statutes-and-rules-pedagogy-practice-and-politics.

SAVE THE DATE - January 3, 2017 CLEA Meetings in San Francisco

Laura McNally-Levine — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 15:21:32 GMT

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017, the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) will hold back-to-back Board of Directors and Membership Meetings, shortly before the start of the AALS Annual Meeting. For those of you planning to be in San Francisco in January, we hope you’ll arrive early enough to attend one or both of these meetings.

We want to thank the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, for generously providing the space, which is walking distance from the conference hotels.

The CLEA Board of Directors Meeting, open to all, will be held from 3 to 5 PM at 100 McAllister Street, at the corner of Leavenworth Street. The exact location is the large seminar room in the Community Justice Clinics on the third floor.
The CLEA Membership Meeting, also open to all, will be held from 5:30 to 6:30 PM at 198 McAllister Street, at the corner of Hyde Street. The meeting will take place in Classroom A on the ground floor.

Letter from CLEA regarding the Standards Review Committee’s Planning Retreat

Laura McNally-Levine — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 16:59:35 GMT

CLEA submitted a letter on Septemebr 8, 2016 to the Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar regarding the Standards Review Committee’s Planning Retreat.

Nomination Period is Open for CLEA Board Positions

Laura McNally-Levine — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 17:04:21 GMT

The CLEA Elections Committee—Anju Gupta (Rutgers School of Law), Steven Wright (University of Wisconsin School of Law), Erma Bonadero (University of Houston Law Center) and Tiffany Murphy (University of Arkansas School of Law)—is soliciting nominations of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board starting in January 2017. In addition, we are also seeking nominations for the Vice-President and Treasurer positions on the Executive Committee. Nominations are due October 1, 2016.

All positions require a three-year commitment. We have attached a memo prepared by last year's CLEA Elections Committee, which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail.

Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these positions. The committee also encourages “new clinicians” (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a separate election process for candidates identified as “new clinicians,” to ensure that the identified “new clinician” candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by replying to this email (please do not reply-all). If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the elections materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name of the individual and institution will suffice, and the Election Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have fewer than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a “new clinician” candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the “new clinician” category, please indicate that as well. Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2016.

If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please reply to this email or contact the Chair of the Elections Committee, Anju Gupta, at agupta@kinoy.rutgers.edu.

CLEA report to the ABA regarding CLEA’s activities since June 2016.

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:31:37 GMT

CLEA submitted a report to the ABA regarding CLEA’s activities since June 2016. Janet Jackson and Maritza Karmely will be attending the ABA Annual Meeting on behalf of CLEA in August 2016.

CLEA letter to the California State Bar regarding the proposed 15-unit experiential bar admission requirement.

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:29:28 GMT

CLEA submitted a letter to the California State Bar regarding the proposed 15-unit experiential bar admission requirement. The proposal was passed unanimously by an appointed task force in September 2014 and then by the state bar board of trustees in November 2014, but has never been formally presented to the CA Supreme Court. See here for the proposal: http://board.calbar.ca.gov/docs/agendaItem/Public/agendaitem1000012730.pdf.

The AALS Deans Steering Committee, a group of CA Deans and the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar all submitted letters in support of reducing the 15-unit recommendation to 6 in order to be consistent with NY and the ABA. CLEA submitted a letter in strong support of the 15-unit requirement. Recently, the Bar’s Admission & Education Committee voted for Jon Streeter, chair of the previous task force and now a state appellate judge, to work with bar staff to re-draft revisions to the original TFARR proposal to present to the board in October 2016. CLEA previously has submitted multiple comments in support of the proposed 15-unit experiential requirement. Again, we thank the Advocacy Committee and our California clinical colleagues for their work on this letter.

CLEA submitted a letter to the California State Bar regarding the proposed 15-unit experiential bar admission requirement.

CLEA comment regarding ABA’s proposed revision for Standard 316

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:25:57 GMT

CLEA submitted a comment regarding ABA’s proposed revision for Standard 316. For those who are not familiar with the change, the proposed revision to Standard 316 eliminates a number of provisions from the existing standard. It aims to streamline the reporting of bar passage by requiring law schools to show that “at least 75 percent of a law school’s graduates in a calendar year who sat for a bar examination must have passed a bar examination administered within two years of their date of graduation.” Here is a link to the proposed Standard, which includes a redlined version of the original standard:

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/20160325_notice_and_comment_memo.authcheckdam.pdf

We are concerned about the lack of evidence-based research considered by the ABA to fully understand the impact of proposed Standard 316 on schools in states with low bar passage rates, and more importantly, the impact of the new standard on students of color and the diversity of the profession. In addition to asking the Council to gather more data on the issue before voting on the proposed changes, we also urge the Council to consider ways to move states away from the bar exam as the sole criterion for licensing new attorneys. We are thankful to the CLEA Advocacy Committee members for their hard work in preparing this comment.

CLEA Membership Renewal

Laura McNally-Levine — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:58:57 GMT

Thank you to everyone for supporting CLEA! It's that time of year when CLEA memberships are due for renewal. You may have received an automatic renewal reminder today. Please note that many schools that have group memberships have begun the process of renewing but the system shows that your dues haven't updated yet. Please be patient and we will get everyone caught up! The main delays are updating the group with new members (data entry) and processing payments (many schools pay by check and that takes time). If you have any questions, please email membership@cleaweb.org.

CLEA Membership Renewal

Laura McNally-Levine — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:58:57 GMT

CLEA Membership Renewal

Laura McNally-Levine — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:58:57 GMT

CLEA Per Diem Project

Laura McNally-Levine — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 03:48:06 GMT

It's almost time for the Clinical Conference! As you're checking items off of your to do before travelling list, here's one you can take care of today--your donation to the Per Diem Project.

Each year, CLEA’s Per Diem Project collects donations to support the community that is hosting our conference. Though it began with the collective donation of our per diem allowances, the Project has evolved into a broader fundraising initiative. This year, our recipient is The Public Justice Center. The Public Justice Center works with people and communities to confront the laws, practices, and institutions that cause injustice, poverty, and discrimination. Donations to The Public Justice Center can be made on-line on the PJC website: http://www.publicjustice.org/. Click on the “Donate to the PJC” link in the upper right hand corner and in the “Comments” box, please write Per Diem Project, so that PJC can keep track of the donations. And if you're not ready to give today, you can bring your checkbook or your cash with you to Baltimore and give at the luncheon on May 2.

All checks should be made payable to PJC with a notation on the memo line that the check is for the Per Diem Project.

If every member makes a donation of just $50 we can provide an amazing financial boost to the good work that they do! Help us hit our mark by making your donation today.

Leigh Goodmark, Karla McKanders, and Cynthia Batt on behalf of the Per Diem Project

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2016

Tanya A Cooper — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 22:28:40 GMT

Spring 2016 issue of the CLEA Newsletter has just been posted here: http://cleaweb.org/resources/Documents/CLEANewsletter%20spring%2016%20%28Final%29.pdf.

Thanks,

CLEA Newsletter Committee

Lauren Bartlett (Ohio Northern)

Tanya Asim Cooper (Pepperdine)

Susan Donovan (Alabama)

D'lorah Hughes (Wayne State)

Kate Kruse (Mitchell Hamline)

HONORABLE MENTION for the CLEA Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project goes to the U.W. Law School’s Neighborhood Law Clinic!!

Tanya A Cooper — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 22:46:39 GMT

The University of Wisconsin’s Neighborhood Law Clinic has played a pivotal role in making Dane County, Wisconsin a safer place for tenants, an economically viable place to live for workers and, through its efforts in the community and legislatively, worked to protect the rights of the underrepresented across our state. It serves as model for protecting the economic health of those most in need through advocacy, education, and collaboration.The NLC has been in existence for over 15 years. The program focuses on several practice areas including housing, employment and government benefits. Clinical law students at the University of Wisconsin Law School become engaged in their community through the legal services they offer at a community-based law office and through community education and outreach. The NLC impacts the lives of the neediest in our community and through their experiences, law students learn not only about rebellious lawyering, but also how their advocacy can tilt the balance of justice in favor of the underserved.The NLC seeks remedies and solutions where sometimes, none seem to exist. Often this requires advocacy in the housing area as housing is a critical component of a family’s economic health and security; and one that can be lost so easily. An example of how the NLC significantly redresses high priority needs of underserved residents in our community occurred a couple of years ago when we received a phone call from the Madison mayor and a prominent Latino member of our city council, who asked whether NLC could handle an emergency eviction situation. A developer, who wanted to renovate a recently purchased apartment complex, had filed multiple evictions for an apartment complex largely occupied by Latino families who were on month-to-month leases. The evictions would not only force these families into homelessness, but would disrupt their children’s education.The Clinic quickly jumped in. They identified defenses to the evictions and met with the residents to learn their objectives, which, it turned out, were simply to maintain their housing until school ended in June. The clinic students worked with teachers, schools, the local Community Action Coalition, and tenant resources to draft a compelling letter to the development company. The advocacy resulted in the company agreeing to let all of the families occupy their homes until July, instead of forcing them out in April in the midst of a school term. NLC brought the community together to solved a problem that did not involve traditional lawyering. Although this effort went largely unnoticed by the press, many families were able to remain intact and stable due to the clinic’s efforts.The NLC also identifies and attacks barriers to economic justice. Clinic students developed a process that enabled tenants who applied for emergency assistance to remain in their rental housing despite a pending eviction. When the NLC became aware of families being evicted while waiting for assistance simply because no instructions existed to allow them to take advantage of the law they created a set of forms and instructions that allowed families to apply for a stay and avoid homelessness. The “Petition and Order for Stay of Eviction Based on Applicant's Application for Emergency Assistance” was adopted for statewide use by the Forms Committee of the Wisconsin Judicial Conference and are now available to families throughout the state who are experiencing the threat of an eviction.The NLC also works hand-in-hand with our local Workers’ Rights Center to educate workers about their rights and to enforce their rights to fair compensation in the courts. Many of the unpaid wage cases reach the NLC through outreach, education, and collaboration with the WRC. The NLC is a small program that has made a huge impact on both students and the community.

Results of CLEA Strategic Planning Survey from December 2015

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 17:34:17 GMT

Thanks so much to those of you who participated in our CLEA Strategic Planning Survey at the end of 2015. We received a number of responses. The data we collected was valuable; we used the information during our membership and board meetings in early January and will continue to analyze the data as we prepare for our CLEA board retreat at the end of April.

The overall takeaways from the survey indicates that (1) there is strong consensus regarding the relevance and importance of CLEA's current mission statement, and of the organization's effectiveness in fulfilling the mission; and (2) the planning process provides an opportunity to enhance member engagement and organizational communication. You can view the results of the survey here.

We will continue to reach out to our terrific membership as we continue with the strategic planning process.

Legal Writing Institute's Statement of Best Practices regarding 405(c) status positions

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 17:15:19 GMT

The Legal Writing Institute (LWI) has asked that we circulate to CLEA membership LWI’s Statement of Best Practices regarding the 405(c) status positions. CLEA does not adopt this statement, but is circulating it to provide our membership with this information. We appreciate LWI as an ally.

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2015-16

Tanya A Cooper — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 03:15:51 GMT

Please click here to view the latest edition of the CLEA newsletter (or go to the News Tab to see all editions of the CLEA Newsletter).

CLEA's Comment on the Bar Admission Skills Competency Proposal in New York State

Laura McNally-Levine — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 11:49:12 GMT

CLEA submitted comment on the Bar Admission Skills Competency Proposal of the New York Court of Appeals Task Force on Experiential Learning and Admission to the Bar on November 9, 2015.

CLEA Co-President Mary Lynch quoted in NLJ on Paid Externships

Laura McNally-Levine — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 15:52:33 GMT

Check out the article here:

http://www.nationallawjournal.com/home/id=1202728661374/Plan-to-Allow-Paid-Law-Student-Externships-Advances-in-ABA?mcode=1202617074964&curindex=0

Applied Storytelling Conference - July 21-23, 2015

Laura McNally-Levine — Mon, 18 May 2015 18:45:45 GMT

The schedule for the 2015 conference on Applied Legal Storytelling is out! You will see that we have not one, but two plenary sessions: on "Storytelling and Professional Formation" and on "Feminists Judgments and Storytelling." Surrounding those two plenary sessions are 57 other discrete panels and presentations on applied legal storytelling, offered by 87 presenters. Our presenters include colleagues from as far away as the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, and they will be talking about a fascinating variety of topics. We invite you to come join us at the conference.

The conference runs from Tuesday, July 21st, through Thursday, July 23rd, at Seattle University. In keeping with conference tradition, the conference will close Thursday evening with a formal sit-down dinner--this time at the Rainier Club in downtown Seattle. The conference fee includes continental breakfasts, salad buffet lunches, and the dinner at the Rainier Club. You may find additional conference information, including information about housing, on the Legal Writing Institute's website or by clicking here:

http://www.lwionline.org/applied_storytelling_conferences.html

And if you want to go directly to conference registration, please click here:

https://www.regonline.com/appliedlegalstorytelling

We invite you to join us at the 2015 Applied Legal Storytelling conference, the fifth time for this assemblage of engaging presentations and collegial conversations. And fun. Seattle in July is sunny and warm, but rarely too hot. The city is filled with things to do and includes a vibrant restaurant scene. The waters and mountains of the Pacific Northwest are beautiful and worth exploring before or after the conference. See you in Seattle!

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2015

Tanya A Cooper — Fri, 01 May 2015 10:41:51 GMT

Please click here to view the latest edition of the CLEA newsletter (or go to the News Tab to see all editions of the CLEA Newsletter).

New York State Bar and the Uniform Bar Exam

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 15:50:07 GMT

CLEA Co-President Mary Lynch testified before the New York Court of Appeals Advisory Committee on the Uniform Bar Examination on Tuesday February 3, 2015. The New York Law Journal noted Lynch’s comments here. Also, read the letter CLEA submitted in advance of the hearing here and our follow up letter post hearing responding to questions posed to us by the Advisory Committee here.

CLEA's Letter to the Council regarding the Proposed Revision of Standard 305(e)(6) to Permit Externships for Part-Time Students After the First Year

Laura McNally-Levine — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 22:28:29 GMT

Clinical Legal Education Association submitted a memorandum on November 3, 2014, in response to the Council's invitation to suggest revisions to the new Standards. With this memorandum CLEA requested that the Standards Review Committee and Council consider the impact on part-time law students of the recent revision of Standard 305(e)(6) regarding the amount of prior study required for participation in a field placement program.

CLEA files Amicus Brief in Veteran's EAJA fee case

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 03:58:47 GMT

CLEA Amicus Brief_Veteran's EAJA Fees case.pdf

CLEA Newsletter Winter 2014-15

Tanya A Cooper — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:15:04 GMT

Please click here to view the newest edition of the CLEA newsletter (or go to the News Tab to see all editions of the CLEA Newsletter)

Fifth Biennial Conference on Applied Legal Storytelling, July 21-23, 2015, at the Seattle University School of Law

Maritza Karmely — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 17:08:47 GMT

Co-sponsored by the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) and CLEA. This is the 5^th Applied Legal Storytelling Conference that CLEA has co-sponsored with LWI and the event represents an important collaboration between the clinic community and the legal writing community.

For more information about the Applied Legal Storytelling Confrence, please go to the following website: http://lwionline.org/applied_storytelling_conferences.html

CLEA's Report to ABA Council (Dec. '14)

Maritza Karmely — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 18:19:12 GMT

REPORT OF THE

CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

to the

Council of the American Bar Association

Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar

for its meeting on

December 5, 2014

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) is pleased to submit this report of its activities since it last reported to the Council in August 2014.

CLEA’s membership is comprised of over 1000 dues paying legal educators who teach students in a variety of real practice settings – from in-house clinics where students represent clients under our supervision; to externship placements where students work under the supervision of lawyers in-the-field with whom we collaborate closely to oversee our students’ learning experience; to an almost infinite variety of hybrids between the two. Our members are at the forefront of responding to and planning for the on-going changes in legal education, particularly the relatively recent recognition of the importance and value of experiential education. We are commited to the process of innovation in clinical legal education to best train law students for practice in the twenty-first century. CLEA remains an important clearinghouse of information, communicating proposed regulatory changes and developments to our members, and providing a conduit through which these experienced educators can add to the national dialogue about the best practices in legal education.

Some highlights of CLEA’s activities since our last report include:

CLEA’s State Bar Initiatives Working Group provided written comments to the California Bar Association’s Task Force on Admission Regulation Reform which has been working to implement the requirement that all law students have 15 units of practice-based, experiential training; in part, we advocated that the 15 units be earned through credit-bearing law school courses so that California’s state-specific reform could incorporate by reference the national standards adopted by the ABA for experiential education;

CLEA continues to collaborate with the American Association of Law School’s (AALS) Clinical Section; for example, our Per Diem Committee is working with the AALS Conference Planning Committee to coordinate the selection and presentation of CLEA’s Per Diem Award to a local not-for-profit in Rancho Mirage, CA, where the May 2015 annual clinical conference will take place; likewise CLEA’s and AALS’s Newsletter Committees are coordinating to provide better coverage of news and new developments in our community;

Through its Conference Committee, CLEA continues to financially support regional clinical conferences and externship conferences. Since August 2014, CLEA has given an average grant of $500.00 to the Southern Regional Clinical Conference, Externships 7 Conference, and the Northern California Clinical Conference;

CLEA’s Election Committee has successfully solicited nominations for candidates to be elected to the CLEA Board and Executive Committee, and worked to ensure that every Member receives an electronic ballot and is able to vote in our upcoming elections.

As always, we appreciate the opportunity to participate in the Council’s work as an affiliate and look forward to continued constructive engagement with the shared goal of improving legal education.

Sincerely,

Donna H. Lee Jenny Roberts

CUNY School of Law American University, Washington College of Law

CLEA Co-President CLEA Co-President

CLEA’s Comment on the Phase II Implementing Recommendations of the California Task Force on Admissions Regulation

Maritza Karmely — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 14:31:42 GMT

CLEA’s Comment on the Phase II Implementing Recommendations of the California Task Force on Admissions Regulation can be read here.

CLEA's Statement on US News Ranking

Maritza Karmely — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 14:11:20 GMT

Please go here to read CLEA's Statement on Law School Clinical Program Rankings in the U.S. News and World Report.

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2014

Maritza Karmely — Fri, 30 May 2014 17:44:45 GMT

Please click here to view the newest edition of the CLEA newsletter (or go to the News Tab to see all editions of the CLEA Newsletter)

Recent Advocacy: CLEA's letter to ABA Section of Legal Education, re:The Process for Considering Paid Externships

Maritza Karmely — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 13:08:13 GMT

CLEA Memo Re Interpretation 305-3.pdf

Recent Advocacy

Maritza Karmely — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 16:00:00 GMT

We invite you to read CLEA's latest responses to proposals for new standards by the Council for the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar.

CLEA’s letter to the SRC regarding failure to provide any notice for proposed elimination of Standard 803(d) (Feb. 2014)
CLEA and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT)'s joint letter on proposed Standard 316 concerning bar passage. (Jan. 2014)
CLEA's comments on the interpretation of proposed Standard 305-3 and the question of paid externships in law school. (Jan. 2014)
CLEA's comments on proposed Standard 303 regarding alternatives to a 15 credit hours requirement for experiential courses. (Jan. 2014)
CLEA's comments on alternatives to Standard 405 discussing the importance of secure faculty positions for experiential education. (Jan. 2014)

ABA Section on Legal Education session on 1/4/14

Maritza Karmely — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 17:36:08 GMT

We want to encourage you to come to an ABA Section on Legal Education session on proposed changes to law school accreditation standards that will be held at the AALS meeting in NYC on Saturday, 1/4/14 from 4pm-5:45pm at the Sutton Center, second floor, NY Hilton Midtown.

CLEA Membership/Board Mtgs in NYC on 1/4/14

Maritza Karmely — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 17:31:53 GMT

CLEA Membership Meeting - 7:30 am-8:30 am at Fordham Law School, room 118

CLEA Board Meeting - 8:30 am-9:30 am at Fordham Law School, room 118

CLEA Newsletter Fall 2013

Tanya A Cooper — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 21:51:00 GMT

Please click here to view the newest edition of the CLEA Newsletter or go to the News Tab to see all editions of the Newsletter.

CLEA 2013 Board Elections

Maritza Karmely — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 13:40:33 GMT

The CLEA Elections Committee (Binny Miller, Alex Scherr, Kele Stewart, Evelyn Cruz, Laura McNally, Sameer Ashar, and Maritza Karmely) is soliciting nominations through October 1, 2013 of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board starting in January 2014.

This year, there are a total of 5 open Board positions, with 1 current Board member likely to seek election to a second term. All positions require a three-year commitment. I am attaching a memo prepared by the CLEA Elections Committee, which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail.

Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these open positions. The committee also encourages "new clinicians" (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a separate election process for candidates identified as "new clinicians," to ensure that the identified "new clinician" candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by contacting the chair of the CLEA Elections Committee, Binny Miller at bmiller@wcl.american.edu. If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the election materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name alone will suffice and the Election Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have less than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a "new clinician" candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the "new clinician" category, please indicate that as well.

Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2013.

If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please feel free to contact me or Binny Miller at bmiller@wcl.american.edu.

Claudia Angelos (for CLEA) and Carol Chomsky (for SALT) Report on ABA Standards Review Committee Meeting

Maritza Karmely — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 20:48:30 GMT

CLEA's Claudia Angelos and Carol Chomsky from SALT prepared the attached report on last weekend's Standards Review Committee meeting

Catherine Ho writes about CLEA's proposal to the ABA's SRC in the Washington Post

Maritza Karmely — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 17:26:47 GMT

See Catherine Ho's article, "Group Pushes for Practical Training for Law Students," published on July 14, 2013 in the Washington Post

CLEA's Statement on Standards Review Committee Process

Maritza Karmely — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:44:02 GMT

Please see the comments here.

CLEA Newsletter Spring 2013

Tanya A Cooper — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:08:42 GMT

Please click here to view the newest edition of the CLEA Newsletter or go to the News Tab to see all editions of the Newsletter.

CLEA's 21st Birthday Bash! Sunday, April 28 at 8:00 p.m.

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:21:50 GMT

CLEA turns 21 this year! In recognition of this milestone, CLEA will host a birthday party on Sunday, April 28, in a historic building courtyard in Old San Juan, from 8:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. The party will feature our membership meeting, the results of the CLEA Creative Writing Contest, and dancing and rum drinking until the wee hours (okay, until 11--CLEA may be 21, but most of us aren't!) The party will be a short distance from the hotel; information about transportation is coming soon. Make sure to check the clinic listserv and the CLEA website for more details. We hope to see you there!

CLEA's Comments to the California State Bar Task Force on Admissions Regulations

Maritza Karmely — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:43:43 GMT

Please click here to read CLEA's comments.

CLEA Newsletter Fall 2012

Tanya A Cooper — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:36:36 GMT

To view the newest edition of the CLEA Newsletter click here or go to News Tab to see all editions of the Newsletter.

CLEA Newsletter Summer 2012

Laura McNally-Levine — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:07:11 GMT

To view the newest edition of the CLEA Newsletter click here or go to News Tab to see all editions of the Newsletter.

CLEA Newsletter March 2012

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:02:55 GMT

To read the current CLEA Newsletter click here or go to the News Tab and select Newsletters - where you will find the current newsletter and an archive of all previous newsletters.

CLEA'S STATEMENT ON LAW SCHOOL CLINICAL PROGRAM RANKINGS

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:35:28 GMT

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) issues this statement because the US News & World Report rankings are upon us. Many of those who receive ballots in their capacity as clinical directors or faculty members find this ranking process very uncomfortable. There are a number of problems with the ranking of clinical programs, not the least of which is that it pits us in competition with each other, when we as a group see ourselves on the same team in a shared struggle for social justice, equality, and improved legal education. Second, there are no articulated factors for ranking clinical programs, so to a degree the voting is a bit of a popularity contest. Third, some schools unfairly suffer because they do not have the budget or the support of their administration to produce and mail clinic brochures or to send their clinic faculty to annual conferences.

While we might wish the rankings would disappear or hope for collective action, the USN&WR rankings are likely here to stay and this year's clinical program ballots are now arriving. So, what can we as faculty who teach clinics do? CLEA, acting on the recommendation of its Rankings Committee (Carolyn Grose, Margaret Johnson, Bob Kuehn, Michael Pinard & Karen Tokarz), urges those ranking clinical programs to focus on key factors such as: 1) the range and quality of clinical curricular offerings available to students; 2) the law school's security of position, academic freedom, and governance rights for faculty who teach clinics; and 3) the extent to which the school has fulfilled the goal of diversity in hiring for clinical positions with long-term security.

Beyond the issue of how to handle this year's ballots, CLEA believes that the issue of clinical program rankings and of infusing clinical education more into the equation (and balloting) for overall school rankings are topics worthy of continued conversation and strategizing and welcomes further ideas and input on these issues.

CLEA Newsletter Fall 2011

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:42:48 GMT

To read the current CLEA Newsletter click here or go to the News Tab and select Newsletters - where you will find the current newsletter and an archive of all previous newsletters.

CLEAs Comment Letter Re: Proposed Model Rule on Admission of Forreign-Education Lawyers

Laura McNally-Levine — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:24:35 GMT

To read CLEAs comment letter filed with the ABA Council on the proposed Model Rule on Admission of Foreign-Educated Lawyers click here.

SALT/CLEA Report on Standards Review Committee Meeting - July 9-10, 2011

Laura McNally-Levine — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:07:50 GMT

The Standards Review Committee met on July 9th & 10th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can read a report of the meeting, written by Claudia Angelos & Carol Chomsky, here along with the Security of Position Alternatives presented at the meeting.

ABA Advocacy - CLEA's Comment on Bar Passage Requirements Std. 301-6

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:30:31 GMT

CLEA submitted comments on the proposed revision to Standard 301-6 regarding Bar Passage Requirements. To read the comments look on CLEAs Advocacy page or click here.

Chart comparing all 4 proposals re: Section 405 revisions

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:47:48 GMT

CLEA submitted this chart to the Standards Review Committee on proposed revisions to Std. 405. Because a chart posted by the committee just yesterday only compared the 2 proposals that have come out of its subcommittee (Don Polden's proposal and the Wolff/Barry proposal), we put together this quick chart that also shows how proposals from CLEA and from an ABA committee headed by Randy Hertz and Judith Wegner would revise 405. This chart should be useful during discussions with faculty about the impacts of proposals presently before the committee.

June 2011 CLEA Newsletter

Laura McNally-Levine — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:50:53 GMT

The most recent version of the newsletter can be found here.

CLEA Award Winners 2011 - Presented 6/16 at AALS Conference lunch

Laura McNally-Levine — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:28:02 GMT

The award for Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Law Teachers will be presented to Deborah Epstein from Georgetown Law Center and the award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project will be presented to the Albany Law School Civil Rights and Disability Law Clinic directed by Bridgit Burke for its Community Integration Project.

Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Law Teachers – Deborah Epstein Deborah Epstein, Director of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Domestic Violence Clinic and Associate Dean for Clinical and Public Interest Programs. Dean Epstein was instrumental in creating the Georgetown Summer Institute on Clinical Teaching, which brings together a small group of experienced clinicians in an intensive effort designed to improve teaching through plenary sessions, hands-on work and particularized feedback for each participant. Dean Epstein has spent more than twenty-five years working as an advocate for victims of domestic violence and has represented hundreds of women in civil protection order cases. Epstein co-chaired the DC Superior Court's effort to design and implement its Domestic Violence Unit, an early effort to integrate civil and criminal cases involving intimate abuse and, from 1996-2001, she served as Co-Director of the court’s Domestic Violence Intake Center. She has served as Chair of the DC Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board, as well as a member of the DC Mayor’s Commission on Violence Against Women, the DC Superior Court Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, and the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence Board of Directors. From 1993-2001 she directed the Emergency Domestic Relations Project (EDRP), a non-profit organization providing advocacy services within the Intake Center. She has published numerous articles and is a regular speaker on clinical education and issues facing domestic violence survivors in the legal system, at local, national, and international gatherings. Her nomination for this award was submitted by a group of clinicians from 10 different law schools, a testament to her generous contributions to the national clinical community.

Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project – Albany Law School Civil Rights and Disability Law Clinic Community Integration Project For the last seven years Albany Law School’s Civil Rights & Disability Law Clinic has been advocating for individuals with developmental disabilities who have languished in institutional settings despite a clear legal mandate that individuals be given the opportunity to live in less restrictive settings. Through a combination of individual client representatives, impact litigation, policy development, community education and collaboration, the faculty and students have made it possible for numerous individuals to move to less restrictive community settings and they have paved the way for many more to do so.

CLEA Newsletter February 2011

Membership Staff — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:52:46 GMT

CLEA Newsletter February 2011

Inside this issue:

Committee Reports 4

Conferences 6

New Clinicians 12

Transitions 15

Promotions, Honors & Awards 17

News from Clinical Programs 21

Books & Publications 60

Job Announcements 69

Clea newsletter September 2010

Membership Staff — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:46:51 GMT

Clea newsletter September 2010

Inside this issue:

Committee Reports 3

Notices 5

Conferences 10

New Clinicians 13

Transitions 17

Promotions, Honors & Awards 20

News from Clinical Programs 24

Books & Publications 54

Job Announcements 60

CLEA Writing Contest 67

CLEA Newsletter Archive

Membership Staff — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:13:05 GMT

CLEA Newsletter May 2010

CLEA Newsletter February 2010

CLEA Newsletter September 2009

CLEA Newsletter May 2009

CLEA Newsletter February 2009

CLEA Newsletter September 2008

CLEA Newsletter May 2008

CLEA Newsletter February 2008

CLEA Newsletter September 2007

CLEA Newsletter May 2007

CLEA Newsletter February 2007

CLEA Newsletter September 2006

CLEA Newsletter May 2006

CLEA Newsletter February 2006

CLEA Newsletter September 2005

CLEA Newsletter May 2005

CLEA Newsletter February 2005

CLEA Newsletter September 2004

CLEA Newsletter May 2004

CLEA Newsletter February 2004

CLEA Newsletter September 2003

CLEA Newsletter May 2003

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CLEA Newsletter December 2002

CLEA Newsletter September 2002

CLEA Newsletter May 2002

CLEA Newsletter January 2002

CLEA Newsletter November 2001

CLEA Newsletter September 2001

CLEA Newsletter May 2001

CLEA Newsletter January 2001

CLEA Newsletter November 2000

CLEA Newsletter September 2000

CLEA Newsletter May 2000

CLEA Newsletter February 2000

CLEA Newsletter November 1999

CLEA Newsletter September 1999

CLEA Statement on Attack on University of Maryland Clinical Program

Membership Staff — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:45:48 GMT

CLEA issued this statement regarding the legislative proposals in the Maryland General Assembly to interfere in the operations of the law clinics at the University of Maryland School of Law.

ABA Letter by Milstein Rivkin Shalleck and Mlyniec et al.

Membership Staff — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:48:43 GMT

Elliott Milstein, Dean Rivkin, Wally Mlyniec and Ann Shalleck drafted a letter to the ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar opposing the new approach to clinicians’ security of position adopted by the Special Committee on Security of Position

CLEA Statement on the Report of the ABA Council on Legal Education's Special Committee on Security of Position

Membership Staff — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:51:53 GMT

CLEA submitted the following statement to the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar on the Report of the Special Committee on Security of Position on July 21, 2008.