Racial Equity Strategies Clinic

Introduction

The Racial Equity Strategies Clinic is a semester-long, five-credit course that focuses on the legal strategies employed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) to achieve racial equity and justice in its four principal areas: education, economic justice, voting rights and democratic governance, and policing and criminal justice reform. The Clinic involves a mixture of fieldwork; oral advocacy; legal research and writing; and weekly seminars on the various strategies used to achieve educational equity and racial, economic, and criminal justice.

Course Description

The Racial Equity Strategies Clinic engages students in legal practice at LDF, the nation’s first and premier civil rights law organization. Students have the opportunity to study historical and contemporary strategies for achieving racial justice through litigation, organizing, and communications. Students also have the opportunity to conceptualize and develop new tactics to address modern challenges to racial justice issues.

Fieldwork

Students are assigned to work with a team of LDF attorneys on an active case or matter for the semester. Students are expected to engage with clients, stakeholders, community leaders, and legislative and administrative agencies, and support litigation in the areas of racial justice in education, voting rights, economic justice, democratic governance and policing and criminal justice reform. Students also have an opportunity to present, brief, or otherwise advocate in person with the groups indicated above. Moot preparations for presentations are typically conducted in LDF’s offices. Students may travel out of state (generally to states in the South or Washington, D.C.) for client meetings, community meetings, depositions, policy meetings, and/or court hearings, based on the needs of their fieldwork and status of the pandemic. Students participate in all facets of litigation, including research, meetings, interviews, memo writing, document preparation, case “rounds,” and travel. Students are required to commit 9-15 hours per week to fieldwork projects and participate in weekly meetings with the LDF teams.

Seminar

The course will be conducted through weekly seminars held at LDF’s headquarters (40 Rector Street, New York) and in fieldwork opportunities. This course will be co-taught by two LDF lawyers. The seminar will meet weekly for two hours. Readings include law review articles and other texts by scholars in the field of civil rights, education, law enforcement, political theory, voting rights, and racial justice. We will also be joined by guest lecturers who include the leading thinkers, organizers and litigators in the relevant fields of practice.

Additionally, students will have access to LDF’s archival case material (most of which is not yet available to the public). Using these resources, students will analyze the various lawyering strategies used to achieve racial and economic justice, provide educational equity, ensure equitable access to the political process, and promote fair and effective policing and law enforcement.

Students will also participate in case rounds, simulations, and other legal practice skills trainings.

In addition to fieldwork assignments, students will be assigned one reflection paper and a semester-end final research paper (4,500-5,000 words), and a final research paper outline. In the final research paper, students are expected to develop a proposed racial justice case based on one of LDF’s four areas of practice and engage in a critical examination and original analysis of the legal problem(s) that their case is seeking to address and their strategies for addressing it.

Qualifications for Applicants

Students in the RES Clinic are expected to have taken or be taking civil procedure and constitutional law.

Application Procedure

Students should submit an application, resume and transcript on-line via CAMS. There will be no interview.

Student Contacts

Interested students should speak to the following Spring '24 clinic students:

Maryum Elnasseh
Miranda van Dijk
Nina Nayiri McKay

* 5 credits include 3 clinical credits and 2 academic seminar credits.