Year-Long Clinics
To apply for all clinics, please use the Clinic Application and Matching System (CAMS).
NYU School of Law offers the following year-long clinics. Each of these clinics is 14 credits and therefore accounts for roughly half of a student's courseload for the academic year. (Exceptions are the Constitutional Transitions and International Human Rights Clinics, which carry 12 credits each.) Please select from the links at the left to learn more about each clinic.
Civil Rights Clinic
Over a full, intensive year, students in the Civil Rights Clinic handle litigation involving police accountability, most frequently racial profiling cases but also first amendment and due process in criminal justice and police matters. The clinic and cases are supervised by Prof. Claudia Angelos of the full-time faculty and Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. Students handle their cases out of their offices at the NYCLU, where they act as members of the legal department staff. The clinic also develops the students’ litigation skills through a seminar program that includes a full trial advocacy component and that uses the students’ own cases as the basis for their study of litigation and other strategies for change, and for their critical examination of the institutions that their clients are involved with.
Constitutional Transitions Clinic and Colloquium: The Middle East Revolutions (for J.D.s)
The Constitutional Transitions Clinic and Colloquium: The Middle East Revolutions is a joint project of Constitutional Transitions and the Cairo office of International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide, with 27 member states. IDEA’s mission s to support sustainable democratic change by providing comparative knowledge, and assisting in democratic reform, and influencing policies and politics. Taught by Professor Sujit Choudhry.
Criminal and Community Defense Clinic
(Not offered 2012-13)
This clinic, taught by Professors Kim Taylor-Thompson and Anthony Thompson, explores the responsibilities and challenges involved in providing holistic and community-based public defense. The course focuses on individual representation, examining client-centered advocacy and explores methods for giving clients voice in the criminal justice system. In addition, it explores the various forms of advocacy available to community-oriented defenders, such as media advocacy, community advocacy and legislative advocacy. Students will be assigned to work in a neighborhood-based defender office where they will engage in activities related to the representation of individuals charged in the criminal justice system. Students will also work closely with defenders and community activists developing and facilitating their collaborative efforts to exercise greater control over criminal justice issues as they affect low income and of-color communities.
Family Defense Clinic
This clinic works to prevent the unnecessary break-up of indigent families, and to protect the rights of poor and minority parents to due process and equal treatment by government authorities. Students in the clinic represent parents in Family Court, handling all aspects of litigation in child abuse, neglect, and termination of parental rights proceedings. Fieldwork includes substantial advocacy in and out of the courtroom, as well as policy projects designed to reform the foster care and Family Court systems. The clinic includes both law and graduate social work students and emphasizes the importance of approaching child welfare from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Federal Defender Clinic
In this clinic, students represent indigent misdemeanor defendants in Federal Magistrate Court in the Eastern District of New York in all stages of the litigation, from arraignment to hearings, pleas, and trials. Additional fieldwork includes assisting attorneys at the Federal Defenders of New York in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York in their representation of indigent felony defendants.
Immigrant Rights Clinic
This clinic advances the rights of immigrants through direct representation of immigrants and community-based organizations in agency and federal court litigation, legislative advocacy, and community organizing support.
International Human Rights Clinic
The International Human Rights Clinic provides students with an opportunity to explore multifaceted approaches to human rights advocacy in both domestic and international settings. Students focus on a wide range of issues at the heart of struggles to ensure fundamental rights, substantive equality, and economic and social justice. In the fieldwork component of the Clinic, students use cutting-edge tools to investigate and document rights abuses and formulate legal, policy, and community-based responses to current human rights problems. Students work closely with grassroots human rights organizations, international NGOs, and U.N. human rights experts and bodies. In the seminar component of the Clinic, students develop practical tools for human rights advocacy, such as: documenting and publicizing human rights violations; bringing claims before domestic, regional, and international human rights mechanisms; and managing trauma in human rights work. Students also address questions of ethical, political and professional accountability and are encouraged to reflect critically on the difficult questions of what it means to practice human rights in domestic and transnational contexts. Taught by Professor Smita Narula.
Juvenile Defender Clinic
This clinic represents young persons accused of felony offenses in juvenile delinquency proceedings in the New York Family Court.
http://www.law.nyu.edu//academics/clinics/year/index.htm