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Community Law Clinic

Description

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. The practice areas are selected and designed to 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.

Special Instructions:

General Structure of Clinical Courses

Beginning with the 2009-2010 academic year, each of 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. This will allow students to obtain an immersive professional experience without the need to balance clinical projects with other classes, exams and papers. (The rules described here do not apply to Advanced Clinics for students who are continuing with a clinic in which they were previously enrolled. For information about Advanced Clinics, please see the course descriptions for those courses.) Students enrolled in a clinic should expect to work at least 40 hours per week and to be available for meetings during normal business hours. Because students have no other courses (and hence no exams or papers), the clinical quarter goes from the first day of classes through the final day of the examination period.

The work during the week is divided into three components. The main component is the work on client matters and case/project work. Students are expected to devote at least 30 hours per week to the various facets of this work (this time includes meetings with instructors to discuss the work). Second, students will spend approximately five-to-seven hours per week preparing for and participating in a weekly seminar or seminars. Third, over the course of the quarter each student will spend a total of 27 hours (plus appropriate preparation time) participating in "clinical modules." These clinic-wide modules are mini-courses designed to enhance the clinical quarter by providing students with opportunities to develop their professional skills, problem solving capacities, understanding of professional ethics, and exposure to professional values. Each module involves 4.5 hours of meeting time and students are required to complete six modules during the course of their clinical quarter. Some modules and some clinic meetings may take place on evenings or weekends.

Students will be awarded three separate grades for their clinical quarter, each reflecting four credits. The three grades are broken into the following categories: clinical practice; clinical methods; and clinical coursework. Grading is pursuant to the H/P system. Students may not enroll in any clinic (basic or advanced) which would result in their earning more than 24 clinical credits during their law school career.

  • Number of Units: 4
  • Course Number: 640

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