Skills: Sample Policy Student Competences

One of the goals of the Legislation Law Prof Blog is to disseminate resources in order to contribute to legislation skills training in law schools. As we discussed in our welcome post, legislation and policy advocacy provide unique and exciting ways for law faculty to incorporate experiential opportunities into our classrooms. In this post, we share sample student competencies from the Health Justice Project, a legislation and policy clinic.

The Health Justice Project in the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy at Loyola University Chicago School of Law offers a live client clinic and a policy clinic to students. The policy clinic is designed to train law students in the fundamentals of legislative lawyering and policy advocacy. The course is cross-listed at the medical and public health schools and the students work together to address the social determinants of health through the representation of local and national non-profits.

Over the course of the semester, students are expected to work on a public health problem and demonstrate a mastery of legislative skills, advocacy skills and professional qualities. The attached document describes student competences and breaks them down into skills and components. The use of these policy skills are ideal for experiential learning in both the clinic and classroom setting. We encourage you to replicate, modify, or adapt these charts for your own use. Click on the following link to download a copy:  Download Health Justice Policy Skills Chart

These competencies were adapted from the skills charts developed by Chai Feldblum in Federal Legislation & Administrative Clinic, now directed by Judy Appelbaum, and modified over time for use in the Health Justice Project.

As always, if you have materials you would like to share with the Legislation Law Prof Blog readership, please let us know.