Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professors Andrew Schoenholtz and Philip Schrag

J.D. Clinic 500 | 10 credit hours

This year, the Center for Applied Legal Studies continues its International Human Rights Project. Students represent refugees who seek political asylum in the United States because of threatened persecution in the countries from which they have fled.

Under U.S. law, non-citizens threatened with deportation may win asylum by proving a well-founded fear that if they returned to their home country, they would face persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Working in pairs, CALS students are assigned to represent one or more such refugees. The client is likely to be a person whose request for asylum has already been rejected by the U.S. government. The government, therefore, is preparing to deport the applicant. The students interview the client; become experts on the human rights record of the client's country of origin; develop documentary and testimonial records to prove that the client either suffered past persecution or will suffer future persecution if forced to return; write a brief, affidavits, and other legal documents; locate and prepare lay and expert witnesses; attempt to have the government stipulate to parts or all of the asylum claim; present testimony and legal arguments at a hearing before a federal administrative law judge; and defend their client and other witnesses against cross-examination by a Department of Homeland Security attorney.

CALS instructors help to prepare students for each of these tasks through two weekly classes, simulation exercises, tutorial meetings, and mock hearings conducted a few days before the real hearings are held. The teacher-student ratio is 1:4, ensuring extensive supervision in the preparation and execution of each case.

Students engage in frequent, in-depth consultation with supervisors. Supervisors in CALS regard their function as helping students to observe, understand, create, act and evaluate — not as telling students what to do. Cases are selected and assigned to afford students the opportunity to scrutinize every aspect of their cases and procedures in great detail, analyzing each step with care and precision as it occurs.

CALS is also designed to encourage intensive examination by each person enrolled in the program of his or her own transition from student to lawyer. This examination emphasizes analysis of the personal and interpersonal dimensions of practicing law; the emotions that lawyers encounter, experience, and must deal with in the course of working with clients, peers, supervisors, and others within and outside the legal system; the process of formulating goals, expanding options, planning strategy, and making decisions in the context of ambiguity, urgency, and incomplete information; the interrelationship of strategic and ethical issues; and, generally speaking, techniques for enhancing professional self-consciousness and self-education. 12 students participate each semester.

This clinic is open to students who will have completed 28 credits by the time clinic classes begin.

See clinic course description in the Online Curriculum Guide or the "Clinic Enrollment Policies" in the Bulletin.

A student may only en¬roll in Advanced Evidence: Trial Skills; Civil Litigation Practice; Patent Trial Practice; Trial Practice and Applied Evidence; Trial Practice: Working with Expert Witnesses; or any section of Trial Practice during a semester prior to enrolling for credit in the Center for Applied Legal Studies, Community Justice Project, Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy, Criminal Justice, Domestic Violence, Juvenile Justice, or Law Stu¬dents in Court Clinics. Students may not take Advanced Evidence: Trial Skills; Civil Litigation Practice; Patent Trial Practice; Trial Practice and Applied Evidence; Trial Practice: Working with Expert Witnesses; or any section of Trial Practice during the same semester or a subsequent semester in which they enroll in the Center for Applied Legal Studies, Community Justice Project, Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy, Criminal Justice, Domestic Violence, Juvenile Justice, or Law Stu¬dents in Court Clinics. Students may not concurrently enroll in this clinic and an externship or a practicum course.