Community Law Clinic: Clinical Coursework
The CLC is the closest thing to a general legal services office among Stanford's clinical offerings. Based in East Palo Alto, the CLC provides students with the opportunity to provide direct legal services to low-income residents, while thinking critically about the role of lawyers and lawyering in solving the problems of America's so-called "working poor." The Clinic's practice is in three areas: (1) housing (eviction defense and Section 8 termination), (2) wage and hour and related workers' rights, and (3) criminal record expungement. These practice areas lie at the intersection where the community's unmet legal needs and students' learning needs correspond; the cases enable students to engage in a wide-range of conventional lawyering activities (interviewing, counseling, negotiation, fact investigation, legal research), while also working on the very pressing problems of Stanford's low-income neighbors. Students are responsible for their cases from intake through disposition, which can be reached through negotiation or adversarial proceeding at an administrative agency or in court. Students also have the chance to participate in outreach or policy-level projects, such as representing the clinic on a state or regional committee on a substantive issue, doing community education workshops at sites around the Peninsula, and/or legislative research and advocacy. In the clinic seminar and in regular supervision, students are encouraged to interrogate the effectiveness of the legal system at delivering "justice" for their clients and to explore creative ways that legal knowledge can be deployed to attack the social problems attendant to low wages, substandard and unstable housing, and other features of low-income life in Silicon Valley. The Law School's clinical courses is being offered on a full-time basis for 12 credits. Students enrolled in a clinic are not permitted to enroll in any other classes, seminars, directed research or other credit-yielding activities during the quarter in which they are enrolled in a clinic. Students may not enroll in any clinic (basic or advanced) which would result in them earning more than 27 clinical credits during their law school career.