Clinical Law Prof Blog

Applied Legal Storytelling Conference - Priority Proposal Submission Deadline, Feb 3

Via Prof. D'lorah Hughes and the organizing committee: 

The planning committee for the 9th Biennial Applied Legal Storytelling Conference is please to send out this call for proposals. The conference will take place July 26 to 28, 2023 at The City Law School, City, University of London. The Call is attached and also reproduced, below the end of the email. The proposal submission site is online.

Per usual there are two deadlines for proposals: December 2 (priority deadline) and February 3 (extended deadline). And per usual, we welcome people new to the discourse. The call includes links to materials, but this conference is known for presenters bringing in brand new and experimental ideas.

Please distribute this CFP widely! And please feel free to ask questions to any of the planners. In addition, we are also convening a “New Participants” committee, who will offer resources and special welcomes to those who are new to the conference series.

Download the complete Call for Proposals and conference information here.

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

Via CLEA Co-Presidents Prof. Caitlin Berry and Prof. Shobha L. Mahadev: 

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.

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.

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.

In gratitude for CLEA

Today was my last meeting as a member of the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association. This is one of the high honors of my career, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to work and serve alongside brilliant, creative, generous, justice-minded clinical law profs for these six years. I’m terming-out after three years on the executive committee and a three-year term on the board. In 2017, I served as vice-president followed by a term as president in 2018. These are positions of stewardship and collaboration for a vital organization within US legal education.

When I became a clinical professor and program director nearly 17 years ago as a young lawyer, I was at a school with a then fledgling (now thriving) clinical program. I did not take clinics in law school, so I was excited but adrift without a lot of support to show me how to do it. It was CLEA and its community of hospitable, encouraging mentors and colleagues who taught me how to do this work well, through meetings and conferences, conversations and questions, books and articles. In my experience, CLEA plays two essential roles in legal education, and this is the first one: developing community and training, empowering, and guiding new clinicians. Very often, clinical profs are few (maybe even alone) at their law schools, and CLEA provides a collegial, practically useful congregation of experienced experts more than willing to share.

CLEA’s second great contribution is advocating for clinical education itself, the movement toward more and better experiential education and professional formation for law students, rooted deeply in access to justice and the improvement of the law and our profession. CLEA has been essential in advancing security of position and status for clinical profs and ensuring that clinical education is a central part of law school curriculum. Its work results in generations of law students better prepared to practice, to practice well with wisdom and resilience, and to advance access to justice in their careers. That work continues.

I’m ever grateful to CLEA for its investments in me and countless other clinical professors, and I am grateful to have served for six years on the executive committee and the board of directors with some of the best professors, lawyers, and people in the world. CLEA and its leadership will continue to advance its important work with care, integrity, joy, and love. 

Well done, y’all.  

Program Update from the Clinical Program at Loyola - New Orleans

Via Prof. Davida Finger: 

The Loyola New Orleans Law Clinic is pleased to share an update about its in-house clinics and externship program. We are proud to have sworn in 65 student practitioners for the 2022-2023 academic year. We are also pleased to share the accomplishments of our clinic faculty. At Loyola New Orleans, we know that working with clients is a fundamental aspect of legal education. We hope that you enjoy our Fall 2022 clinic news.

Read the full report here. 

Program Update from the Clinical Program at UDC

Via Prof. Lindsay Harris: 

Dear Community,

We are so proud to share with you our annual newsletter for the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law’s Clinical Program. As one of only six HBCUs in the country, this year, we celebrate 50 years of UDC Law’s commitment to access and excellence.

Below you will read and hear about the work of our seven in-house Clinics. Some highlights include welcoming three new tenured or tenure-track faculty members this Fall, the re-launch of our Criminal Law and Tax Clinics, along with the wins and client perspectives from our Immigration and Human Rights Clinic. You’ll read about our General Practice Clinic Co-Directors being recognized with teaching and service awards and a new annual community summit organized by our Youth Justice Clinic. Our Legislation Clinic students and faculty advocated for change on the local and international stage and students in our Community Development Law Clinic saw their transactional work as transformational, human work. We are united in continuing to provide life-saving legal services to the most vulnerable members of the broader D.C. community while providing rigorous training to our students.

Through our continued partnership with the Government Accountability Project, we offer the unique Whistleblower Protection Clinic, and we launched a new partnership with Rising for Justice this year to offer a Housing Advocacy and Litigation Clinic. Through it all – at 50 years – we remain steadfastly committed to community and dedicated to practicing law, promoting justice and changing lives.

Read the full report here. 

Fogel, Hoopes and Liu on Law Clerk Selection and Diversity

This is interesting clinic-adjacent scholarship, a study by Jeremy Fogel (Berkeley), Mary Hoopes (Pepperdine), and Justice Goodwin Liu on diversity in federal judicial clerkships. 

Here's the abstract for the paper on SSRN: 

Judicial clerkships are key positions of responsibility and coveted opportunities for career advancement. Commentators have noted that the demographics of law clerks do not align with the student population by law school, socioeconomic background, gender, race, or ethnicity, and that ideological matching is prevalent between judges and their clerks. But extant studies draw on limited data and offer little visibility into how judges actually select clerks. For this study, we conducted in-depth individual interviews with fifty active judges of the federal courts of appeals to learn how they approach law clerk selection and diversity. Our sample, though not fully representative of the judiciary, includes judges from all circuits, appointed by Presidents of both parties, with average tenure of fourteen years. The confidential interviews, which drew in part upon the peer relationship that two of us have with fellow judges, yielded rich and candid insights not captured by prior surveys.

This Article reports our findings, among them: (1) With few exceptions, appellate judges hire clerks as an “ensemble” and assign positive value to diversity, although judges vary significantly in the dimensions of diversity they seek. (2) Most judges disclaim any interest in ideological alignment when hiring clerks; we situate this finding in the context of factors that contribute to ideological segmentation of the clerkship market. (3) Republican appointees, compared to Democratic appointees, more often identified socioeconomic diversity as the primary dimension of diversity they seek. (4) Judges who graduated from law schools outside the U.S. News & World Report top twenty are significantly more likely than other judges to hire clerks from schools outside the top twenty. (5) Almost all judges in our sample consider gender in clerkship hiring, and many have specific goals for gender balance. Republican appointees reported more difficulty drawing women into their applicant pool than Democratic appointees. (6) Most judges in our sample assign positive value to racial diversity and consider race to some degree in evaluating applicants, although it is important to note that some judges believe strongly that such consideration is inappropriate. (7) Many judges who view racial diversity positively nonetheless reported difficulty hiring Black and Hispanic clerks. The judges with the most robust records of minority hiring are those who make affirmative efforts to draw minority candidates into their applicant pool or place greater emphasis on indicators of talent besides grades and law school rank, or do both. (8) Black judges are particularly successful in hiring Black clerks; we estimate that Black judges, who comprised less than one-eighth of active circuit judges during our study, accounted for more than half of the Black clerks hired each year in the federal courts of appeals.

These findings have implications for judicial selection; in short, diversity among judges affects diversity among clerks. Further, one of our most consistent findings is that judges do not discuss clerk hiring or diversity with each other. This silence reflects norms of judicial culture that foster collegiality and mutual deference while tending to inhibit peer-to-peer discussion of how judges select their clerks. Yet many judges want to hire more diverse clerks and would like to learn from their colleagues’ practices. We propose measures to increase transparency, facilitate peer exchange, and increase judges’ capacity to achieve their hiring objectives, whatever they may be.

 

Program Update from the Clinical Program at Denver University Sturm College of Law

Via Prof. Kevin Lynch: 

Greetings from Denver! It has been quite a year for our clinical program, including a $300,000 settlement for one of our clients, precedent-setting developments on language access for water pollution permits, and a visit last April by Professor Sameer Ashar—our most recent Hartje Clinical Scholar in Residence. We are also thrilled to welcome two new visitors in our Criminal Defense and Immigration Law and Policy clinics, as well as three new fellows in our Christopher N. Lasch Clinical Teaching Fellowship program. Our externship program continues to raise the bar, this year hitting a record of over 40% paid externships. Finally, I’m excited to take the reins as our Clinical Director after Patience Crowder led us through the challenges and opportunities of the past few years. We’re excited to share what we’ve been up to with all of you.

Download the 2022 Denver Law Clinical Update here.