In our clinics, student have a unique opportunity to represent real clients with real legal problems. Clinic students work under the close supervision of faculty members in small classes on real-life cases. Our clinics provide rich classroom and practice experiences that give students the foundational tools, professional values, experiences, and skills necessary to enter the legal profession. Students also have the opportunity to provide high-quality legal services that are responsive to the needs of individuals, communities, and organizations who lack access to representation or the tools to fight for justice.
Advocacy and Policy
- Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic
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The Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic teaches public policy reform strategies in the context of the real-world campaigns that form the core of the Brennan Center’s work. Lawyers from the Brennan Center teach the clinic.
- Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic
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The Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic provides students with the opportunity to work on a wide range of civil rights and social justice matters through direct client representation, impact litigation, and strategic advocacy. The clinic’s work has a particular focus on challenging entrenched racial inequality and advancing distributive justice and equal opportunity.
- Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic
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The Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic is an intensive semester-long experiential course in which law students engage in direct representation of individual or organizational clients in areas where discrimination and inequality are pervasive. The CRLCR clinic docket will include a wide range of substantive types of cases including but not limited to discrimination in education, housing, employment, or public accommodations, enforcing constitutional rights for incarcerated individuals, and the collateral consequences of criminal convictions. The clinic engages students in efforts to advance racial and social justice through litigation, education and outreach, and policy advocacy.
- Disability Rights and Justice Clinic
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The Disability Rights and Justice Clinic advocates to enhance and promote the civil rights, autonomy, and self-determination of low-income individuals with disabilities. Students engage in direct legal representation and advocacy projects with the mission to facilitate access to justice for our clients.
- Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic
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The Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic combines the tools and tactics of international environmental law and human rights to preserve the conditions for life on Earth for current and future generations of humans and non-humans. In close collaboration with NGOs, scientists, lawyers, social movements, UN agencies, and grassroots communities from around the world, students work on cases and projects involving creative litigation in multiple jurisdictions, on-the-ground fieldwork in different countries and regions, transnational advocacy campaigns, and strategic research and communications.
- Education Advocacy Clinic
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The Education Advocacy Clinic represents public school students in education cases, with a focus on special education. Students work closely with families from low-income backgrounds to help their public school students get support and services to address their educational and behavioral needs.
- Education Sector Policy and Consulting Clinic
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Through seminar sessions, skills training, and project work, the Education Sector Policy and Consulting Clinic immerses students in the theory and practice of managing, governing, and equitably transforming the public systems and social-sector organizations that deliver public education. Through the Center for Public Research and Leadership, students work with upper-level graduate students from Columbia, Dartmouth, Michigan, NYU, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt, University of California at Berkeley, and elsewhere.
- Environmental Law Clinic
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The Environmental Law Clinic emphasizes environmental litigation and advocacy from the public interest point of view. Clinic participants work under the supervision of attorneys at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
- EU Public Interest Clinic (Paris)
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The European Public Interest Clinic (Paris) engages students as public interest practitioners in the field of European law. Students work on legal advocacy and research projects for NGOs based throughout the European Union.
- Global Justice Clinic
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The Global Justice Clinic works to prevent, challenge, and redress rights violations related to inequality. Cases and projects involve domestic and cross-border human rights violations, the deleterious impacts of conduct by state and non-state actors, and emerging problems that require close collaboration among actors at the local and international levels. Students engage in human rights research and investigation, advocacy, and, occasionally, litigation in domestic and international settings. (There is also a clinic specially designed for LLMs.)
- Immigrant Rights Clinic
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The Immigrant Rights Clinic is a leading institution in both local and national struggles for immigrant rights. Students engage in direct legal representation of immigrants and community organizations in litigation at the agency, federal court, and where necessary Supreme Court level, and in immigrant rights campaigns at the local, state, and national level.
- Legal Empowerment and Judicial Independence Clinic
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The Legal Empowerment and Judicial Independence Clinic examines ways to strengthen protective mechanisms for those targeted due to their work to uphold the rule of law—including, centrally, judges and lawyers, but also community justice advocates, paralegals, and others who use the law to advance human rights. (There is also a clinic specially designed for LLMs.)
- Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic
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The Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic introduces students to the roles and skills of the government lawyer. Students work in a federal agency, congressional office or non-governmental organization in Washington, DC. The clinic provides practical experience with how lawyers support the development and implementation of public policy by assisting in defining the available options and identifying and resolving issues before they become the subject of legal contention or litigation.
- Policy Advocacy in Latin America (Buenos Aires)
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The students in the Policy Advocacy in Latin America (Buenos Aires) Clinic work on projects for a variety of clients working in the areas of free speech, human rights, and environmental protection. Clients include local or international NGOs, advocates in Latin American countries, and research centers affiliated with local universities.
- Racial Equity Strategies Clinic
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The Racial Equity Strategies Clinic focuses on the legal strategies employed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) to achieve racial equity and justice in its four principal areas: education, economic justice, voting rights and democratic governance, and policing and criminal justice reform.
- Racial Justice and Abolition Clinic
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The Racial Justice and Abolition Clinic works on advocacy, organizing, and litigation efforts that seeks to identify, name, and challenge the myriad ways in which the criminal legal system, in particular, works to reinforce white supremacy and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Students work in teams with attorneys and other advocates from Law for Black Lives, the Parole Preparation Project, Releasing Aging People in Prison, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
- Regulatory Policy Clinic
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The Regulatory Policy Clinic is sponsored by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the Law School, a think tank that works to improve the quality of government decision-making through advocacy in the fields of administrative law, economics, and public policy. The clinic focuses on practice before federal agencies and courts to help students develop a set of core administrative lawyering skills. It teaches students how to conduct effective advocacy before administrative agencies and courts on a wide range of issues, from environmental protection to public safety.
- Reproductive Justice Clinic
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The Reproductive Justice Clinic works to secure fundamental liberty, justice and equality for people across their reproductive lives, with a particular focus on pregnancy and birth. The clinic is engaged in advocacy and litigation around legal or policy frameworks restricting the autonomy and undermining the equality of pregnant, parenting, and birthing people and in legal and policy research and analysis to support community and movement efforts to establish new or better resources for menstruating, pregnant, birthing and parenting people.
- Science, Health and Information Clinic
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The Science, Health and Information Clinic serves the public interest by fighting for—and winning—more equitable access to health care, to scientific, technical, and medical knowledge, and to the benefits that flow from that knowledge. The Clinic’s work includes improving access to medicines and vaccines; protecting the data privacy of abortion, gender-affirming, and other increasingly criminalized forms of health care; and expanding and democratizing access to information on medical and other technologies.
- Technology Law and Policy
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The Technology Law and Policy Clinic focuses on the representation of individuals and nonprofits engaged with critical and complex questions at the intersections of technology and free speech, privacy, surveillance, and transparency.
- United Nations Diplomacy Clinic
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For many small states, engagement at the United Nations is central to their foreign affairs, but they do not always have sufficient capacity to engage in all issues that affect them. The United Nations Diplomacy Clinic places students in the Permanent Missions of small island developing states at the United Nations to act as legal policy advisors with a specific focus on international and environmental law.
Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Mediation Clinic
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The Mediation Clinic fosters mediation skills while orienting students to major issues in the intersection between law and informal dispute resolution and delivery, and regulation of dispute resolution services.
- Mediation Clinic--Advanced
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The Mediation Clinic--Advanced is focused on the study and practice of dispute system design—understanding the design choices made by, and the challenges presented to, organizations seeking to manage conflict formally or informally, internally or externally.
Business and Tech
- Business Transactions Clinic
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Students in the Business Transactions Clinic represents organizational clients in transactional matters and learn how to help clients solve problems, make decisions, and accomplish their goals.
- Entrepreneurship Clinic
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In the Entrepreneurship Clinic, students provide free transactional legal services to low-income and moderate- income entrepreneurs and community-based organizations in New York City on issues relating to new and emerging businesses.
- International Transactions Clinic
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The International Transactions Clinic offers students the opportunity to provide pro bono legal services to internationally focused clients intent on making the world a better place. Together, students and clients are doing deals around the globe to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges, such as poverty, unclean water, food insecurity, and the adverse effects of climate change. (LLMs may join this clinic in the spring term, with the permission of the clinic director.)
- Science, Health and Information Clinic
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The Science, Health and Information Clinic serves the public interest by fighting for—and winning—more equitable access to health care, to scientific, technical, and medical knowledge, and to the benefits that flow from that knowledge. The Clinic’s work includes improving access to medicines and vaccines; protecting the data privacy of abortion, gender-affirming, and other increasingly criminalized forms of health care; and expanding and democratizing access to information on medical and other technologies.
- Social Enterprise and Economic Empowerment Clinic
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In the Social Enterprise Clinic, students serve as outside counsel for social enterprise businesses. Students advise their mission-driven clients on a variety of corporate governance, regulatory compliance, contract drafting and analysis, corporate structure, and entity formation matters.
- Technology Law and Policy Clinic
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The Technology Law and Policy Clinic focuses on the representation of individuals, nonprofits, and consumer groups who are engaged with critical and complex questions about privacy, consumer rights, free speech, and intellectual property from a public interest point of view.
Civil Rights and Racial Justice
- Civil Litigation - Employment Law Clinic
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The Civil Litigation - Employment Law Clinic focuses on employment discrimination based on protected characteristics (including race, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, and disability); violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act; and violations of minimum wage and overtime pay laws. Most of the clinic cases are in federal court, although some are in state or federal agencies.
- Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic
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The Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic provides students with the opportunity to work on a wide range of civil rights and social justice matters through direct client representation, impact litigation, and strategic advocacy. The clinic’s work has a particular focus on challenging entrenched racial inequality and advancing distributive justice and equal opportunity.
- Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System Clinic
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The Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System Clinic represents people who have suffered civil rights violations while incarcerated or under criminal justice supervision.
- Constitutional Litigation Clinic
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The Constitutional Litigation Clinic will provide students an opportunity to work intensively on a number of cases challenging state repression of vulnerable communities, largely focused on carceral/policing systems and primarily through the mechanisms of impact litigation and strategic advocacy. Students in the Fall 2024 semester will work with Professor Azmy on constitutional and civil rights litigation with prominent civil rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights.
- Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic
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The Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic is an intensive semester-long experiential course in which law students engage in direct representation of individual or organizational clients in areas where discrimination and inequality are pervasive. The CRLCR clinic docket will include a wide range of substantive types of cases including but not limited to discrimination in education, housing, employment, or public accommodations, enforcing constitutional rights for incarcerated individuals, and the collateral consequences of criminal convictions. The clinic engages students in efforts to advance racial and social justice through litigation, education and outreach, and policy advocacy.
- Disability Rights and Justice Clinic
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The Disability Rights and Justice Clinic advocates to enhance and promote the civil rights, autonomy, and self-determination of low-income individuals with disabilities. Students engage in direct legal representation and advocacy projects with the mission to facilitate access to justice for our clients.
- Federal Appellate Clinic
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The Federal Appellate Clinic helps to fill the justice gap in our federal courts of appeal. Operating as an appellate litigation boutique, the clinic accepts appointments from federal courts of appeals to represent indigent clients in criminal, habeas, and civil rights appeals.
- Immigrant Rights Clinic
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The Immigrant Rights Clinic is a leading institution in both local and national struggles for immigrant rights. Students engage in direct legal representation of immigrants and community organizations in litigation at the agency, federal court, and where necessary Supreme Court level, and in immigrant rights campaigns at the local, state, and national level.
- Racial Equity Strategies Clinic
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The Racial Equity Strategies Clinic focuses on the legal strategies employed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) to achieve racial equity and justice in its four principal areas: education, economic justice, voting rights and democratic governance, and policing and criminal justice reform.
- Racial Justice and Abolition Clinic
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The Racial Justice and Abolition Clinic works on advocacy, organizing, and litigation efforts that seeks to identify, name, and challenge the myriad ways in which the criminal legal system, in particular, works to reinforce white supremacy and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Students work in teams with attorneys and other advocates from Law for Black Lives, the Parole Preparation Project, Releasing Aging People in Prison, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Courts and Procedure
- Federal Appellate Clinic
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The Federal Appellate Clinic helps to fill the justice gap in our federal courts of appeal. Operating as an appellate litigation boutique, the clinic accepts appointments from federal courts of appeals to represent indigent clients in criminal, habeas, and civil rights appeals.
- Legal Empowerment and Judicial Independence Clinic
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The Legal Empowerment and Judicial Independence Clinic examines ways to strengthen protective mechanisms for those targeted due to their work to uphold the rule of law—including, centrally, judges and lawyers, but also community justice advocates, paralegals, and others who use the law to advance human rights. (There is also a clinic specially designed for LLMs.)
Criminal Law
- Criminal and Juvenile Defender Clinic
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The Criminal and Juvenile Defender Clinic focuses on the representation of individuals who have been charged in Criminal/Supreme Court or Family Court with committing crimes. The clinic involves a mixture of fieldwork, seminar discussions of the criminal and juvenile legal systems, and simulated trials and hearings. In the fall semester, each student will work with the Legal Aid Society's Juvenile Rights Practice (JRP) in representing children accused of crimes in New York Family Court delinquency proceedings. In the spring semester, some students will work with the Bronx Office of the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Practice (CDP) on adult criminal cases.
- Criminal Appellate Defender Clinic
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Students in the Criminal Appellate Defender Clinic represent clients appealing their felony convictions to the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department. This clinic is conducted in conjunction with the Office of the Appellate Defender (OAD).
- Crimmigration Clinic
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The Crimmigration Clinic explores the highly technical but highly consequential interplay of federal immigration law and state criminal law by immersing students in the issues as they arise in a range of practice settings. The clinic explores how lawyers and advocates can effectively advocate for clients and communities.
- Federal Appellate Clinic
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The Federal Appellate Clinic helps to fill the justice gap in our federal courts of appeal. Operating as an appellate litigation boutique, the clinic accepts appointments from federal courts of appeals to represent indigent clients in criminal, habeas, and civil rights appeals.
- Federal Defender Clinic
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Students in the Federal Defender Clinic (FDC) provide representation for indigent clients accused of misdemeanor offenses in the Eastern District of New York (EDNY). Under close faculty supervision, clinic students assume the primary duties of representation.
Family Law
- Family Defense Clinic
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The Family Defense Clinic teaches law and graduate social work students to work in interdisciplinary teams to protect the rights of parents and to defend against the disruption and injustice routinely inflicted on families by child welfare authorities. The clinic has helped spearhead a family defense movement–in New York City and nationally–to push back against the surveillance and unnecessary separation of low-income, disproportionately Black families.
- Reproductive Justice Clinic
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The Reproductive Justice Clinic works to secure fundamental liberty, justice and equality for people across their reproductive lives, with a particular focus on pregnancy and birth. The clinic is engaged in advocacy and litigation around legal or policy frameworks restricting the autonomy and undermining the equality of pregnant, parenting, and birthing women and in legal and policy research and analysis to support community and movement efforts to establish new or better resources for menstruating, pregnant, birthing and parenting people.
Global and International
- Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic
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The Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic combines the tools and tactics of international environmental law and human rights to preserve the conditions for life on Earth for current and future generations of humans and non-humans. In close collaboration with NGOs, scientists, lawyers, social movements, UN agencies, and grassroots communities from around the world, students work on cases and projects involving creative litigation in multiple jurisdictions, on-the-ground fieldwork in different countries and regions, transnational advocacy campaigns, and strategic research and communications.
- EU Public Interest Clinic (Paris)
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The European Public Interest Clinic (Paris) engages students as public interest practitioners in the field of European law. Students work on legal advocacy and research projects for NGOs based throughout the European Union.
- Global Justice Clinic
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The Global Justice Clinic works to prevent, challenge, and redress rights violations related to inequality. Cases and projects involve domestic and cross-border human rights violations, the deleterious impacts of conduct by state and non-state actors, and emerging problems that require close collaboration among actors at the local and international levels. Students engage in human rights research and investigation, advocacy, and, occasionally, litigation in domestic and international settings. (There is also a clinic specially designed for LLMs.)
- International Organizations Clinic
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Students in the International Organizations Clinic focus on projects related to the work of international organizations. In some instances, the international organization will be the client; in others, it will be the target of the clinic’s work. Projects cover a range of topics related to global governance, usually involving in-depth engagement not only with law but with other disciplines, including economics, technology and sociology.
- International Transactions Clinic
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The International Transactions Clinic offers students the opportunity to provide pro bono legal services to internationally focused clients intent on making the world a better place. Together, students and clients are doing deals around the globe to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges, such as poverty, unclean water, food insecurity, and the adverse effects of climate change. (LLMs may join this clinic in the spring term, with the permission of the clinic director.)
- Legal Empowerment and Judicial Independence Clinic
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The Legal Empowerment and Judicial Independence Clinic examines ways to strengthen protective mechanisms for those targeted due to their work to uphold the rule of law—including, centrally, judges and lawyers, but also community justice advocates, paralegals, and others who use the law to advance human rights. (There is also a clinic specially designed for LLMs.)
- Policy Advocacy in Latin America (Buenos Aires)
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The students in the Policy Advocacy in Latin America (Buenos Aires) Clinic work on projects for a variety of clients working in the areas of free speech, human rights, and environmental protection. Clients include local or international NGOs, advocates in Latin American countries, and research centers affiliated with local universities.
- United Nations Diplomacy Clinic
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For many small states, engagement at the United Nations is central to their foreign affairs, but they do not always have sufficient capacity to engage in all issues that affect them. The United Nations Diplomacy Clinic places students in the Permanent Missions of small island developing states at the United Nations to act as legal policy advisors with a specific focus on international and environmental law.
Immigration
- Crimmigration Clinic
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The Crimmigration Clinic explores the highly technical but highly consequential interplay of federal immigration law and state criminal law by immersing students in the issues as they arise in a range of practice settings. The clinic explores how lawyers and advocates can effectively advocate for clients and communities.
- Immigrant Defense Clinic
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In the Immigrant Defense Clinic, students collaborate with experienced attorneys in the representation of detained and non-detained indigent non-citizens, who are facing removal from the United States because of criminal convictions and other immigration law violations.
- Immigrant Rights Clinic
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The Immigrant Rights Clinic is a leading institution in both local and national struggles for immigrant rights. Students engage in direct legal representation of immigrants and community organizations in litigation at the agency, federal court, and where necessary Supreme Court level, and in immigrant rights campaigns at the local, state, and national level.