This session reflects on the particular challenges for Clinical Legal Education in Puerto Rico through the lens of four projects at the Legal Aid Clinic of the Inter American University of Puerto Rico School of Law: the Access to Information Project, the Community Economic Development and Right to the City Project, the Foreclosure Prevention Clinic and the Rights of Children Clinic. We will examine how clinical work and struggles to advance social justice concerns on the archipelago are cabined within a legal system that operates from a permanent and multi-tiered space of exceptionality. This permanent state of emergency stems from a colonial relationship with the United States, a fiscal and economic crisis that has led to the imposition of multiple waves of austerity measures and the dismantling of essential services, most recently under the mandate of an unelected body, the Fiscal Control Board, imposed by Congress in 2016, the devastation caused by hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemics and a public sphere utterly incapable to respond to those events, and several extractive policies that promote displacement and gentrification. Our panelists will reflect on how their respective clinical projects are impacted by these realities and discuss how parts of our work attempt to break from or rupture these systems of oppression.