Learning about Social Justice Lawyering from Teaching in Part-Time Evening Clinics

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Session Type: Lightning Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Franciscan D

Floor: Ballroom Level

Providing clinical opportunities for part-time evening students necessitates a dramatic departure from traditional paradigms of clinical legal education – daytime, courthouse, litigation, individual representation, and perhaps a civil rights or legal services orientation. Even as the substantive focus and modality of law school clinics have diversified, clinics are hard for evening students in light of their schedules and the constraints of legal practice which tends to happen during the weekday, as opposed to evenings and weekends. CUNY Law School will be graduating its first class of part-time evening students in spring 2019 and is at the beginning stages of modifying existing clinics and creating new clinics for part-time evening students. University of District of Columbia, David A. Clarke School of  Law has had an evening clinical program since 2010 and is engaged in a continuing process of reassessment and refinement.

Our part-time evening students often have full-time jobs as well as family and other obligations that create barriers to doing legal work during the day – such as negotiating with opposing counsel, pursuing government benefits, and appearing in court. These and other differences call for a radical shift in assumptions about the structure and design of clinics, posing difficulties and challenges, but also opportunities for innovation. We want to reimagine how to teach social justice lawyering in a part-time evening context.

Our goal is to share information and brainstorm with session participants about how to provide part-time evening clinical experiences that are manageable, resonate with our students, and promote social justice. We also want to leverage these experiences to increase the social justice impact of our full-time day clinics. We plan to work together to start to develop new paradigms, best practices, strategies, and tactics for teaching clinic to part-time evening students, and then for transferring this learning and applying it to teaching clinic to full-time day students.