Based in East Palo Alto, a low-income community four miles from the law school campus, the Community Law Clinic is the closest thing to a traditional legal services office among Stanford’s clinical offerings. The signature feature of the CLC is its off-campus location, which gives students the unique opportunity to work in a community-based, storefront, legal aid office. The office affords CLC students extensive client contact, as well as a feel for daily life in East Palo Alto, a small community whose residents are overwhelmingly people of color, and which has had for decades a poverty rate well above the national and state rates. The Clinic's areas of focus are wage and hour, housing, and criminal record expungement matters, but the program's practice areas shift in response to lcoal threats and opportunities. The CLC also works on policy projects, legislative advocacy, and community legal education in areas affects its clients.
Students represent clients on a range of civil matters and are supervised by Professor Juliet Brodie, along with law school lecturer Danielle Jones, and (current) Jay M. Spears Fellow, Jessica Steinberg. Students are responsible for their individual client matters cases from intake through disposition. In all of their work students are assisted by the Clinic’s extraordinary administrative staff members, Lupe Buenrostro and Adelina Arroyo, both of whom are bilingual and who assist with the students in communicating with their Spanish-speaking clients.
"Our practice is made up of cases and projects that engage our two core values: delivering excellent legal services to the low-income neighborhoods that surround the law school and working on matters that are pedagogically suitable to the clinical method, where you give substantial, 'driver’s-seat' responsibility to the law students. I don't see those values as competing, but as entirely compatible; in fact, part of the long tradition of clinical education is practicing law in precisely the intersection where those two values overlap."
Juliet M. Brodie, Director, Stanford Community Law Clinic
The Clinic's practice is in three areas:
The practice areas are selected because they 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, with an emphasis on trial-level skills (interviewing, fact investigation, legal research, counseling, negotiation, trial and administrative advocacy), while also working on the very pressing problems of Stanford's low-income neighbors.
A typical student's caseload might include preparing to file a wage and hour complaint on behalf of an immigrant day worker whose boss didn't pay him time-and-a-half for his overtime hours, researching the law governing the termination of a Section 8 tenancy, and preparing for a hearing to convince a judge to exercise his or her discretion to dismiss certain convictions from a client's criminal record. The modes of preparation for these cases include intensive one-on-one supervision, "case rounds" where students discuss their work in a group setting, and "moots"—simulations of upcoming representation events, from negotiations to evidentiary hearings.
An advisory council of leaders from the local legal and business communities provides input and expertise on the clinic's operations, funding, and relationship with pro bono activities by attorneys at local law firms. The firms and corporations below comprise the council:
In addition to individual client matters, CLC students work on outreach or policy-level projects, such as community education workshops at sites around the mid-Peninsula, performing legal research on a policy initiative for a local non-profit, and/or legislative research and advocacy, all with the goal of leveraging the Clinic's work on individual cases into change that benefits low-income people more broadly. Recent policy projects include drafting changes to East Palo Alto's rent control regulations, advising a local day worker center on its proposal to issue ID cards to affiliated workers, drafting proposed changes to the local Housing Authority's policy manual regarding the Section 8 program to increase access to the program, and testifying ins upport of a proposed amendment to the California Labor Code regarding retaility against workers whose family members file labor standars complaints.
This story is excerpted from coverage published March 31, 2004 in Stanford Report.
The Stanford University Office of Public Affairs presented the Stanford Community Law Clinic (SCLC) with one of three inaugural Community Partnership Awards at a ceremony held at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, March 31.
The award includes a cash prize of $1,000, and recognizes individuals and programs that benefit the local community and represent successful community partnerships between Stanford and its neighbors. Award recipients were chosen from among 37 nominees.
The Stanford Community Law Clinic is directed by Peter Reid, and staffed with three full-time attorneys, one paralegal, and Stanford Law School students participating in clinical community law courses. SCLC provides free legal assistance to 450 clients a year in East Palo Alto, and refers 450 more clients to the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo. The clinic operates through a partnership between Stanford University, Stanford Law School, the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo and affiliate law firms.
In case supervision and in the accompanying clinic seminar, 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 seminar introduces students to the activist and academic literatures regarding law and social change, and the emerging specialty of "community lawyering." This rubric challenges students to consider the role of law and of lawyers in addressing some of the systemic problems that challenge East Palo Alto and neighborhoods like it throughout the country. Whether it is the impact of immigrant labor, a declining housing stock, gentrification, the barriers to economic self-sufficiency that face people with criminal records, or the simple lack of lawyers available to meet the needs of low-income people, students reflect on lessons their clinic experience has to teach about law and social problems generally. Students leave the clinic not only with concrete training in fundamental lawyering skills, but also with a sense of how law can play a part in improving conditions for historically unrepresented groups.
If you are interested in becoming a client of the Stanford Community Law Clinic, please call 650 475.0560. If we are open for intake (see below), the Clinic receptionist will ask you several questions to see if you fall within our service areas, and, if you do, will have a student call you back to schedule an intake appointment.
Because it is a law school educational program, the Clinic does not take on as large a volume of cases as an independent legal services office. The Clinic is open for intake during the early parts of the two academic semesters and periodically over the summer. We close intake when our students have as many cases and clients as they can competently handle. If we are closed for intake when you call, the receptionist will give you referrals to other agencies that may be able to help you. If your case is not urgent, she will tell you when you should call back to learn if intake has re-opened.
You may also wish to click on the links below to learn of other free legal services in the surrounding areas.
To be added
An advisory council of leaders from the local legal and business communities provides input and expertise on the clinic's operations, funding, and relationship with pro bono activities by attorneys at local law firms. The firms and corporations below comprise the council:
The Mills Legal Clinic of Stanford Law School invites applicants for a clinical teaching fellowship in its Community Law Clinic (CLC). The fellow will have the opportunity to be part of the thriving clinical community at Stanford Law School where, together with the clinical faculty and other fellows, the fellow will represent clients and supervise and train law students who are representing clients.
One of the clinical programs constituting the Mills Legal Clinic, the CLC represents low-income people in the communities surrounding the Law School in a variety of civil matters. The Clinic's areas of focus are employment (wage and hour), housing, and expungement of criminal records, but the emphases of the program shift to respond to the needs of local low-income people. The CLC also conducts other forms of advocacy on behalf of working and non-working poor people in a variety of settings, including community legal education, legislative work, and assisting local organizations with grassroots organizing.
Fellows will be able to spend two years honing skills in community-based public-interest lawyering and clinical teaching, with the expectation that at the end of the two-year-program, the fellow will be well-situated to secure a position in one of those fields. Fellows in the Clinic are part of the intellectual community within the clinical program and the Stanford faculty at large. Fellows are invited to attend the weekly faculty workshops at which scholars from within Stanford and from throughout the world present works in progress. Fellows will also participate in workshops geared toward clinical teaching in particular. Given the full-time demands of the work supervising students and representing clients, however, fellows should not expect to have time during working hours to engage in their own independent scholarly research and writing.
The Community Law Clinic is currently not accepting fellowship applications. Please check back in November 2009 for more information.