This concurrent session will focus on the role of transactional legal clinics given the current political climate. Transactional law can play a vital role in preserving democratic norms, promoting pluralism, and leveraging the rights and opportunities of marginalized groups and individuals. The presenters will draw on their own experience to explore ways for transactional clinicians to adapt their teaching and client matter selection to address the challenges of these extraordinary times. We will ask how we can help our students and clients adjust to the quickly changing political and legal landscape.
The goals of the session are to provide concrete strategies for transactional clinics to confront current challenges, and to explore ways that clinicians can adapt and customize these strategies for their institutional and geographic settings.
Topics addressed in this concurrent session will include:
- Clinical projects and client matters that facilitate alternative sources of funding to organizations, social businesses, and causes likely to face federal cuts.
- Clinical projects impacted by the Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the Johnson Amendment on religious organizations’ lobbying and political campaigning activities; clinical projects impacted by an increased desire of nonprofit clients to engage in lobbying and political campaigning activities due to the current political climate.
- Targeted clinical services for vulnerable populations and the entities that serve or are owned by them.
- Innovative approaches to teaching legal ethics, including explicit conversations about how lawyers can confront conflicts of interest and corruption to uphold the rule of law. Clinics can teach students how to proactively identify and intervene against discrimination and other misconduct.
- Strategies to facilitate constructive interaction between clinic students and client representatives, particularly around issues of social and racial justice. Such interactions can deepen critical thinking, promote creative problem solving, develop metacognitive growth, and provide a bulwark against prejudice and implicit bias.
The session will begin with remarks from the presenters about the specific challenges now confronting their communities and how their clinics have responded. They will share best practices and lessons learned for other clinicians. Participants will then have the opportunity to brainstorm other approaches and suggest innovations to existing strategies.