Expanded geographic impact, new course offerings, and innovative advocacy strategies keep NYU Law’s clinical program at the leading edge of hands-on legal education.
BY ALANA GRAMBUSH
ILLUSTRATION BY DAN BEJAR
Five NYU Law students flew to Alaska to conduct research for a new lawsuit seeking to end abusive policies in the state’s foster care system. Several others provided advice to small businesses in New York City. Two students traveled to Bangladesh to explore possible litigation on behalf of people experiencing the effects of climate change. Another student presented opening statements in civil litigation for a client who had experienced gender discrimination in her workplace. Another prepared contracts for a formerly incarcerated man as he launched his new business.
These examples represent a very small sampling of the work conducted in NYU Law’s clinical program during the past academic year. Long a leader in clinical education, NYU Law offers the most clinics of any top law school, with 49 clinic and externship options. Recent years have seen notable innovations in the program, including new clinical courses to meet the pressing concerns of the day; wider geographic reach as clinics take on complex cases across the United States and the globe; and the creation of advanced advocacy opportunities to help make lasting change for clients and the community at large.
“Over the years, the clinical program has regularly expanded and evolved to address key legal issues,” says Vice Dean Randy Hertz, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law, who directed the clinical program for two decades. Deborah Archer, Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law, took the reins in January 2023. “Now, under Deborah Archer’s leadership, the clinical program has taken major leaps forward by adding outstanding new faculty members, creating vitally important new clinics, and injecting wonderfully
In recent years, the clinical program has expanded both its domestic and global reach in order to meet clients’ needs where they are. “People’s rights should not be dictated by their geography,” says Archer, whose Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic has done work in upstate New York, Florida, Alaska, and South Carolina [see “Route to Justice,” below]. “And it is the case that people’s geography often does dictate justice: where people have access to rights [and] how their rights are championed or ignored.” In the clinical program, she says, the faculty try to consider “ways to fill in these gaps in representation.”
When Professor of Clinical Law Daniel Harawa joined NYU Law in 2023, bringing the appellate clinic he had previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, he decided to make some changes to the clinic. New York City has a vigorous public defender system and numerous private firms doing pro bono work. Harawa decided to focus the clinic’s work instead on places that lack robust public defense networks—in particular, cases that originate in the American South.
“Because we litigate in the circuit courts, every case we take is precedential,” says Harawa, who often gets referrals from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He says that he hopes the students come to understand the lack of legal support and representation that exists in many places, and at the same time, think strategically about how to bring cases to make the law fairer for people in similar situations in the future.
Recently, the clinic helped obtain the release of an incarcerated client who had received inadequate representation at the state and federal levels. It also represented a Rastafarian client in federal prison who was placed in solitary confinement for refusing to cut his hair for religious reasons.
In Professor of Clinical Law Deborah Burand’s International Transactions Clinic, which is open to both JDs and LLMs, students work with organizations—including nonprofits, foundations, and for-profit businesses—that aim to make a positive social impact across the globe. Burand’s clinic is one of only two clinics in the nation focusing exclusively on supporting international transactions in emerging markets. (Burand founded the other at University of Michigan Law School before joining NYU Law in 2015.) The clinic’s recent work has supported cross-border transactions in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. Students recently helped a US-based social franchise with operations in Africa negotiate a debt financing to scale up its business of supplying low-priced, potable water. They also created a new form of intercreditor agreement for a consortium of impact investors making loans to common borrowers in the agricultural sectors of Africa and Central and South America.
“It is impossible today to think about practicing the law without thinking globally,” says Julia Spencer ’24, who has taken both the International Transactions Clinic and the Advanced International Transactions Clinic. “What is really unique about this clinic, beyond the meaningful substantive work we do, is the strong international relationships that Professor Burand has cultivated over the years with organizations working to advance social impact.” Alexander Mahoney ’24 says that the clinic’s work “showed me the variety of ways a transactional attorney can have a positive impact in the world.”
Professor of Clinical Law César Rodríguez-Garavito, who in 2022 created what’s now the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Clinic, says that international fieldwork profoundly alters students’ understanding of the issues and communities for which they advocate. “It builds necessary trust between communities, partner organizations, and students. It also gives students the opportunity to be in direct contact with and learn from the lived experiences, people, and places that we seek to support,” he says. In previous years, students occasionally had the opportunity to conduct work abroad, but Rodríguez-Garavito wanted to guarantee international opportunities to all students in his clinic. In 2023, he worked with Archer and numerous administrators to reshape the clinic—and students’ schedules—to guarantee international fieldwork for all participants. This year, two groups of Rodríguez-Garavito’s students traveled to Ecuador to work on Indigenous rights and rights of nature cases. Another group, as part of a team that included scientists and local advocacy organizations, flew to Bangladesh to conduct research on possible legal remedies and reparations for communities experiencing the adverse effects of global warming.
The number of students who take clinical courses at NYU Law—and their commitment and creativity— have given clinics the ability to take on bigger cases, Archer says. In recent years, more clinics have focused on impact litigation and advocacy, which includes bringing strategic lawsuits and taking on complex advocacy issues that have the potential to create larger societal change.
In the Family Defense Clinic, led by Assistant Professor of Clinical Law Christine Gottlieb ’97 [see “Fighting for Families”], one recent case changed a precedent that had made it difficult for out-of-state parents to gain custody of their children after they had been placed in foster care in New York. This year, the clinic partnered with the Family Justice Law Center, founded by David Shalleck-Klein ’16 [see “Family Defender”], to bring a class action aimed at ending unconstitutional searches within the child welfare system.
The Reproductive Justice Clinic has long focused on impact litigation and advocacy, but the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which ended the constitutional right to abortion, created a tremendous amount of new need. This year, students partnered with Pregnancy Justice and If/When/ How: Lawyers for Reproductive Justice to co-file an amicus brief in Moyle v. US, a case argued before the Supreme Court last term on the question of whether medical professionals can provide emergency abortion care in states with abortion bans. They also worked with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project to research bodily autonomy claims for litigation, and with the Lawyering Project on theorizing possible US constitutional claims for reproductive rights.
Clinic co-director Sarah Wheeler ’09 emphasizes other routes to systemic change as well. In Fall 2023, the clinic worked with community-based reproductive justice organizations across the country, including Elephant Circle, to address and challenge racist and violent practices in obstetric care, including through the organization of a non-adjudicative tribunal held at NYU Law. The event centered the experiences and voices of the people and communities directly affected by such obstetric practices; it included stakeholders in the reproductive justice and birth justice advocacy spaces as well as experts in human rights and birth rights and justice. Clinic students worked with speakers at the tribunal to generate ideas, and then conducted legal research into ways to create and demand remedies.
“In everything we do, we hold two minds: considering and envisioning what is possible to achieve or argue on the one hand, and also what will meaningfully respond to the lived experiences of people and communities most impacted by reproductive injustice, which can’t be done without deep partnerships, humility, and listening,” says Wheeler.
In other clinics, advocacy skills that go beyond the courtroom are also becoming more important. This fall, Andrew Friedman ’98, director of the Initiative for Community Power at the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law (CRIL), will become the clinical program’s director of law and organizing, a newly created position. “My role will be catalyzing the development of broader understanding of what it means to be a social justice–oriented lawyer and to reenvision the types of work and partnerships that lawyers can make possible,” he says. Among his responsibilities will be lecturing on issues like power mapping and campaign organizing, as well as connecting clinics and students with grassroots groups, labor unions, government bodies, and other actors to share knowledge and build coalitions. “I think it signals an exciting step forward in legal academia,” Friedman says of his new position, “and NYU Law is leading that movement.”
Archer has also spearheaded the creation of a new clinical offering: labs. The labs, offered for four credits each compared to a yearlong clinic’s 14 credits, cut across areas of study to equip students with broader advocacy skills, including coalitionbuilding and community organizing. “Students can layer on clinics and externships and then layer on these labs to gain complements of diverse, hands-on legal experience,” says Archer. The labs’ themes will reflect topical areas of importance, such as issues in access to justice or the impact of AI and technology on vulnerable communities.
This fall, for instance, Archer will lead the Community Equity Lab, which will focus on empowering communities to challenge systems that perpetuate inequality and block equal access to drivers of social mobility, like quality schools, abundant jobs, or access to economic capital. “Already, our clinics do a good job of considering community impact, but this course will bring students out of their sometimes-siloed topic areas to share and dream about our united mission to fight inequality and share and combine our different tools for reaching those goals,” Archer says.
Reaching across disciplines, Archer is also developing a new course with NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. Social work students will partner with law students in the clinics to support clients, allowing both sets of students to share strategy and work for better client outcomes. The interschool partnership will include a series of lunchtime workshops featuring professors from both schools who will offer perspectives on the overlapping systems that affect their clients.
“The amazing clinics were really the draw for me as a student when I transferred to NYU Law,” says Justine Olderman ’98, former executive director of the Bronx Defenders. Now she is returning to the Law School to co-teach the Racial Justice and Abolition Clinic—which was taught for the first time in Fall 2023—with CRIL executive director Jason Williamson ’06. The clinic is focused on challenging the ways that the criminal legal system extends the legacy of slavery in the US. “Since my time as a student, the clinic offerings have expanded enormously,” Olderman says, “and they have really responded to emerging shifts in the field, with an understanding that dismantling massive systems of inequality requires that all of us working to enact change do so together: lawyers, advocates, impacted people, [and] grassroots organizers.”
Alana Grambush is a former writer at NYU Law.
The Clinical Difference: A Q&A with Deborah Archer
Deborah Archer, Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law, is the associate dean for experiential education and clinical programs and faculty director of the Community Equity Lab. Archer, who teaches the Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic, received the Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Teachers Award from the Clinical Legal Education Association in 2023. She has served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union since 2021.
Now, in your second year leading the clinical programs, what do you think makes the Law School’s clinics unique?
I think the sheer breadth and the depth of our clinical programs really set them apart. If you wanted to, for example, focus in on just our criminal rights clinics: we have Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System, Civil Rights and Racial Justice, Federal Appellate, Juvenile Defender, Immigrant Rights, Federal Defender, Racial Justice and Abolition, and on and on.
Or, if you are a student interested in civil rights clinics, we have just a huge range, depending on how you define civil rights, or look at our international clinics or our transactional clinics, so you, as a student, have the opportunity to dig deeply into multiple aspects of an issue that interests you, and really work in that field, do real tangible work for real clients.
Another thing is the complexity and size of the cases and issues we take on. Our students work on cases that make massive impacts in the world, from writing briefs and presenting arguments in major appeals to penning important amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases. I think the sophistication of the cases our clinics take on is really unique, as well as the complex, creative work that the students do on the cases. They’re not just aides for big litigation, they help drive the strategy and contribute consequential work, in some cases working independently with their own clients, under the supervision of faculty and supervising attorneys at partner organizations or firms.
What do you see as the role of advocacy in clinical education?
Clinics have their traditional roots in the concept of a lawyer as an advocate for an individual client, and that is very much true of the Law School’s clinics. But I think we’re also expanding what is traditionally thought of as a lawyer’s role in advocacy. That happens through interdisciplinary connections and building power and support through collaboration with other disciplines, and learning and incorporating strategies and understandings from their unique expertise and proximity to a particular issue.
Sometimes a lawyer can think of leadership as, “I tell someone to do something, and they do it.” I think we’re trying to give students a broader vision of what it means to lead as a lawyer; it can mean leading from behind by making sure other people have the resources and tools that they need to effect change. It means empowering communities, listening to their voices, and allowing their expertise, their desires, their interests, their goals to shape litigation and drive advocacy. When you work with communities, you have a broader sense of your own tool kit as a lawyer and a broader sense of the possibilities that lawyering skills have to effect change, when you think differently about how you might apply them.
What do you hope students take away from their clinical experience?
I hope students are able to have a wide sense of how all of these issues of inequality intersect. If you want to be a criminal defense lawyer, you need to understand how housing works, you need to understand economic justice. I want students to be pushed in new ways of thinking and to gain new skills that they can bring to bear, whether that’s through a career in public interest or through pro bono work as a corporate lawyer or working through a nonprofit or a government agency.
I think clinics really have a transformational power in students’ lives. I’ve seen students come in wanting to do voting rights work and seeing the impact and interconnections with economic justice or the criminal legal system or immigration, and changing course. I’ve also seen students pursuing exactly what they came to law school to study but expanding their conception of what that area of study looks like, what the potential for change looks like. Students also bring their own varied, exceptional expertise from previous careers or study, and that adds an additional layer of texture to the clinic. Students change our clinics, and the clinics change our students. n
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Route to Justice
In November 2023, Mariana Lopez ’24, Deborah Merino ’24, Ola Topczewska ’24, and Ry Walker ’24—all students in NYU Law’s Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic—traveled to South Carolina to work on a case involving Sandridge, a historic Black neighborhood. A four-lane road planned by the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) and Horry County threatens to physically divide the community.
To challenge the highway plans, the clinic has filed a Title VI complaint under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), alleging that the road discriminates against Black residents. If FHWA reaches a finding of discrimination, it could pull federal funding from SCDOT. The clinic also helped initiate a separate investigation by the US Army Corps of Engineers into the potential environmental harms from filling in wetlands to construct the road. “We have many other advocates around the country who are reaching out to the clinic to see if they can learn from the strategies that we employ to get their investigations open, or to see if we can join their teams and help them to push forward,” says Professor Deborah Archer, who teaches the clinic.—Atticus Gannaway
Ending 51 Years of Imprisonment
In his five decades in prison, Paul Williams Jr. was denied parole 11 times. Following the 12th hearing, with help from the Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System Clinic, Williams was able to obtain release on parole in January 2024. The clinic is a relatively new addition to the NYU Law clinical program, introduced by Professor of Clinical Law Alexis Karteron, who joined the Law School faculty in 2023.
Students—among them Morgan Hale ’25, Colin Threlkeld ’24, and Tina Szpicek ’23—worked on an appeal of Williams’s 11th parole denial. When a new hearing approached, they helped Williams, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, prepare for interview questions and provided documentation of Williams’s release plan, which reflected his willingness and ability to access psychiatric care after his release.—Alana Grambush
Protecting Speech
In February, the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at NYU Law helped file an amicus brief in a federal lawsuit over the use of publicly available data from X (formerly Twitter) for research purposes. Among the co-filers were the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), claiming that it breached X’s terms of service when it pulled data from the platform (through a practice called “scraping”) for a report that criticized X for spreading disinformation.
The amicus brief, drafted by Rebecca Delaney ’25 and Maeve O’Brien ’24, contended that X cannot use contract law to stifle the use of publicly available information for research into an area of high public interest. In June, US District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco ruled for CCDH, agreeing that X was attempting to stifle dissent. The judge “used our brief and its sources to support the prevalence of scraping, and the chilling effect that enforcing an anti-scraping term has on researchers and journalists,” O’Brien says.—Alana Grambush
Posted September 10, 2024