Archive for the ‘Clinic News’ Category

A veterans legal assistance clinic at Thomas Jefferson School of Law has received a $50,000 grant as the result of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit against U.S. Smokeless Tobacco.

The lawsuit, which was settled for $96 million, alleged that U.S. Smokeless Tobacco, which manufactures Skoal and Copenhagen chewing tobacco, attempted to monopolize the market in violation of state consumer protection laws.

After all known plaintiffs were paid, $40 million was available to be paid to charitable legal organizations.

The clinic provides legal assistance and legal representation to the residents and alumni of Veterans Village of San Diego, a residential program that provides substance abuse, mental health and job training services to formerly homeless veterans. The clinic has been operating for four years and has served about 300 veterans.

[Sign-On San Diego]

Stanford Law School has announced the appointment of Deborah A. Sivas as the inaugural Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director of the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas has been director of the highly regarded clinic since 1997, teaching students how to provide legal counsel to dozens of national, regional, and grassroots nonprofit organizations on a variety of environmental issues.

The Luke W. Cole professorship was endowed by John and Marsha Kleinheinz to honor their friend Luke Cole, a noted environmental lawyer who was among the first to build legal bridges between the environmental movement and the civil rights movement, and who died at age 46 in Uganda. The endowed professorship will enable Stanford Law School to continue its deep commitment to the advancement of clinical education and promote scholarship and teaching in public interest law.

“Being named the first holder of the Luke Cole chair is especially meaningful for me,” said Deborah Sivas. “Luke was a contemporary and a colleague whose advocacy on behalf of underserved communities was truly pathbreaking and whose vision of environmental and social justice continues to be so inspiring to all of us who knew him.

“I think Luke would be pleased to know that a gift in his memory will help train and prepare a new generation of lawyers to carry the flame of environmental justice that he lit and kept burning for so many years,” she said.

A leading environmental litigator, Deborah A. Sivas oversees students in their advocacy work and provides instruction to students on effective litigation, client representation, professional ethics, and environmental law and policy. Over the past twelve years she has built the Environmental Law Clinic of the Mills Legal Clinic at Stanford Law School into a thriving classroom for many Stanford Law graduates who have gone on to work for government agencies, private firms, and nongovernmental organizations in the field of environmental law.

“Deborah Sivas is a wonderful colleague, lawyer, and clinical teacher,” said Lawrence Marshall, Professor of Law, David and Stephanie Mills Director of Clinical Education, and Associate Dean for Public Interest and Clinical Education. “She has inspired hundreds of students with her passion for working on behalf of the environment and has educated hundreds of students through her close mentoring and commitment to teaching them to think and act like lawyers.”

[Business Wire]

Just in time for the upcoming spring semester, the University Law School will launch a new law and public service program for first- and second-year Law students.

The program “is designed to offer a select group of students the opportunity to receive intensive and appropriate training that will prepare them for a career in public service,” said Jim Ryan, the faculty director of the new program.

Securing entry-level positions in public service currently is very challenging, said Yared Getachew, assistant dean for public service at the Law School. “Students in the program would be able to offer prospective employers additional indicia of demonstrated commitment to public service, as well as training and preparation to take on work immediately after graduation,” he explained.

Students accepted to the program will be required this spring to take a Law and Public Service course taught by Prof. Anne Coughlin, to participate in a colloquium in their final year of Law School and to complete an independent study project.

One of the distinguishing features of this program is the intensity and involvement of faculty as mentors who will guide students’ independent study projects.

“The mentoring relationship will be unique and, we hope, quite useful because students will pick faculty who are experts in the areas that interest them most,” Ryan said.

Faculty mentors will help students put together a course sequence conducive to specialization within the public service domain of their choice, Ryan said, adding that faculty will also serve as “sounding boards for employment opportunities and interests.”

[Cavalier Daily]

The Oklahoma City University School of Law is working on an endeavor to help free the wrongly convicted and give its students practical experience in the criminal justice system.

The clinical program will allow law students to work on cases of imprisoned, convicted criminals whom they believe may be not guilty.

The clinic will be patterned after about 30 others that already exist at law schools nationwide, said Lawrence Hellman, dean of the university’s law school.
Hellman said the need is great in Oklahoma for this type of work.

“Between 1996 and 2003, there were 10 exonerations in this state based on DNA evidence,” Hellman said.

“Oklahoma ranks in the top 10 for exonerations nationwide, which means we rank in the top 10 for wrongful convictions.”

Law students are offered classes that are theory driven, but clinics like this one give students an opportunity to experience practicing law, said Josh Snavely, president of OCU’s student bar association.

[News Oklahoma]

A poster of a fierce, young Muhammad Ali hangs over Robin Morris Collin’s shoulder, dominating her spare office at the Willamette University School of Law.

Collin is not a boxing fan.

She comes from a line of teachers and preachers, and assumed both callings as a law professor whose passion is sustainability and environmental justice – making the world fairer as it gets greener.

She loves to teach and believes her students sense that. Her delivery is precise and dramatic in front of the more than 60 students in her criminal procedure class. In her sustainability law seminar, with just a handful of students keyed to environment issues of the day, instruction becomes a lively conversation.

Collin taught the first class on sustainability in a U.S. law school — in 1993 at the University of Oregon — and helped start the Coalition Against Environmental Racism.

“The word, sustainability, was out there and I kept thinking, ‘That sounds cool. What is it?’” Collin says.

Now she teaches it — not the environmental preservation that makes you think of greenspaces between suburban developments or coastal trash cleanups or tree planting by the Boy Scouts. Instead think of Collin’s classroom as boiler room: the place where paradoxes of urban life – old homes with poisonous lead paint, public housing and school playgrounds downwind from chemical-belching industries – are dismantled, piece by piece, to expose economic and race bias.

[The Oregonian]

The School of Law at Washington and Lee University has launched a new legal clinic focusing on misdemeanor criminal defense. Law students working in the Criminal Justice Clinic will represent in district and circuit court indigent clients facing criminal charges including assault, driving while intoxicated, shoplifting, and marijuana possession.
Clinic director J.D. King, who was himself a public defender for the District of Columbia, hopes that the clinic will better prepare students planning on career in criminal defense for the challenges and frustrations of an often understaffed and underfunded public defender system.

“It’s not unusual for public defenders to represent over fifty clients at a time,” says King. “Our students will rarely have more than two ongoing cases, and this will allow them to learn the real way to try a case, to leave no stone unturned. They will be able to focus on a case in a way that is not always possible in a high volume criminal defense practice.”

The Clinic will represent low-income clients from Lexington, Rockbridge County and surrounding areas and receive case assignments directly from the courts. Operating on a completely pro bono basis, the Clinic will take no money from clients and will not receive compensation from the court system. King estimates the Clinic will handle 40-60 cases each year.

[Washington and Lee]

Elon law school’s new legal clinic is just around the corner in downtown Greensboro, but it can reach a long way into the life of the community.

Law students will help draft wills for low-income residents and provide mediation services in juvenile justice cases.

Elon officially opened its Clinical Law Center at 210 W. Friendly Ave. Wednesday. While the location is only a few steps from the school’s front door at 211 N. Greene St., the initiative represents “the next step in the development of Elon University School of Law,” Dean George Johnson said.

“This is a great moment in the evolution of our legal education program in Greensboro,” added Margaret Kantlehner, an associate law professor who will supervise the Wills Clinic.

The development “so reflects the values and purposes of the institution,” said Gerald Francis, executive vice president of Elon University. Those include both “engaged learning and civic engagement.”

Wills Clinic clients will be referred by Habitat for Humanity of Greater Greensboro. The legal work may not be difficult but the life stories clients bring could be challenging for students, Kantlehner said. It also might give them the satisfaction of using their legal training to help others.

The Juvenile Justice Intervention and Mediation Clinic may be more interesting and yield a greater long-term impact.

It will begin “small and slow,” said Tom Noble, a visiting assistant law professor and the clinic’s director. Initially, it will work with high school students in Guilford County Schools’ Central Region, which covers parts of Greensboro and Jamestown. Later, it’s expected to expand to the entire district and to Alamance County.

[News-Record]