NYU School of Law

Civil Rights Clinic

Introduction

Working with faculty and with the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New York State affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, students in the Civil Rights Clinic handle police accountability cases in New York federal and state courts.

Course Description

The year-long Civil Rights Clinic is an intensive 14-credit litigation program in which students represent plaintiffs in civil rights cases in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York and occasionally in state court under the supervision of professors at the NYU clinical offices and the New York Civil Liberties Union. They also take part in seminars and simulations that help to develop their litigation skills and their understanding of the law and the political and social contexts of civil rights litigation. Students devote an average of 20 hours to clinic work each week. We aim to graduate students with an appreciation for the challenges of civil rights work; a thorough understanding of the civil litigation process; experience in the issues involved in representing clients; and the lawyering skills, habits of reflection, and confidence to handle clients and litigation effectively.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is the constitutional conscience of New York and one of the nation's foremost defenders of civil liberties and civil rights. Founded in 1951 as the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, it has a central office in New York City with more than forty staff members, eight regional offices, and more than 50,000 members across the state. Its core mission is to defend and promote the fundamental principles and values embodied in the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, and the New York Constitution, including freedom of speech and religion, and the right to privacy, equality and due process of law for all New Yorkers. The clinic has dedicated workspace at the NYCLU and the clinic students are an integral part of the NYCLU’s legal team.

Students in the clinic run their own cases, almost always involving police practices or misconduct, with the help of two veteran civil rights and liberties lawyers, Claudia Angelos, on the full-time law school faculty, and Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Working in teams of two or three, the students are fully responsible for their clients and cases, and directly handle all aspects of the litigation. The students working on each case meet for at least an hour a week with their faculty supervisor, and typically more frequently. Sometimes we are able to take a case from its initial stages through disposition within a school year, but not always. While a particular case may not present the opportunity to engage in all of the following tasks, each student will handle many of them: the decision whether to take a case; the development of case strategy; counseling clients; drafting pleadings; conducting discovery, including taking and defending depositions; negotiating settlements; appearances at pretrial conferences; briefing and arguing district court motions; and conducting trials.

The focus of the Clinic's case work is on the constitutionality of police practices and on police misconduct, although any kind of civil rights or liberties matter might be on our docket. Some students in the clinic may pick up litigation that will carry over from this year. We are usually able to respond to student interest by matching students with their preferred cases.

Cases being handled by current clinic students include a § 1983 case that defends the public’s right to take photographs in the New York City subway system without fear of being arrested or having to show identification to police and a § 1983 challenge to the NYPD’s unlawful practice of detaining, questioning and searching innocent New Yorkers – particularly blacks, Latinos and other non-whites – while they are passengers in livery cabs.  Several other important challenges to practices of the New York Police Department remain confidential. 

Over the past several years, clinic students have successfully challenged a number of police practices in New York City. To give interested students an idea of the kinds of cases and issues clinic students have handled, we describe some of them below. Much of the clinic’s work is featured on the NYCLU’s web site, www.nyclu.org, which we encourage you to visit.

• Sharma v. City of New York (S.D.N.Y), which challenged the arrest of an Indian filmmaker and the constitutionality of New York City’s film-permit scheme;
• Sullivan v. City of New York (E.D.N.Y.), involving the arrest of a Staten Island environment activist who criticized the borough president about his handling of a local development site;
• Wiita v. City of New York (S.D.N.Y.), which challenged NYPD photography-investigation practices implicated by the arrest of a Columbia University graduate student for taking pictures near a subway stop;
• Blair v. City of New York (S.D.N.Y.), which challenged NYPD stop-and-frisk practices implicated by the arrest of an African-American reporter for the New York Post as well as certain aspects of a stop-and-frisk database maintained by the Department;
• Lino v. City of New York (New York County Supreme Court), challenging the NYPD’s refusal to seal the database containing personal information of people wrongly stopped and frisked;
• NYCLU v. NYPD (New York County Supreme Court), which challenged the NYPD’s refusal to produce, pursuant to the New York Freedom of Information Law, a copy of an electronic database containing information about hundreds of thousands of police stops;
• NYCLU v. New York City Transit Authority (S.D.N.Y.), a First Amendment challenge to the secrecy in the hearing process for people accused by police officers of offenses on New York City’s subways and buses;
• Campeau-Laurion v. Raymond Kelly, The New York Yankees Partnership, et al. (S.D.N.Y.), a successful action on behalf of a Queens man who was ejected from the old Yankee Stadium after trying to use the restroom during the seventh-inning stretch rendition of “God Bless America;”
• Musumeci v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (S.D.N.Y.), involving government mistreatment of photographers; and
• Sultan v. Kelly (E.D.N.Y.), a successful challenge to the twenty-one searches of a brown-skinned straphanger under the NYPD’s purportedly “random” subway bag search program.

In addition to the field work, the Clinic has a seminar and simulation program that is designed to ensure that, despite the inevitable variations in fieldwork experience, all students have experience in the entire civil litigation process, from the initial client contact through the settlement or trial of a case. In one of the two weekly seminar sessions, the Civil Rights Clinic Litigation Seminar, we use class discussion, simulation, and critique to study and practice the stages of litigation and to analyze their interrelationships. A full trial advocacy program is included in the litigation seminar.

In our second weekly seminar session we meet at the NYCLU and use the cases that the students are working on as data for discussing and resolving the real-life challenges of litigation. Finally, litigation involving the police provides a rich experience from which we all can draw in seminar and other clinic discussions about the complex institutional, political, and social factors that drive behavior and policy in these settings, and about the possibilities for institutional change.ases .

Application Procedure

To apply to the Civil Rights Clinic, please submit the standard application, resume and transcript online through CAMS. Selection of students is not based on interviews; however, you are welcome to come to a small group meeting of applicants and faculty so that we can have the opportunity to meet each other and so that we can answer the questions you may have. Please contact the clinic administrator Steven Bautista at 212-998-6448 or via email after you submit your application to sign up for a time.

Please note that students taking the clinic are required to enroll both in the Civil Rights Clinic and the Civil Rights Clinic Litigation Seminar. The total credits are seven in each semester.

Student Contacts

We suggest that students who are interested in the Clinic talk to current students; they are:

Andrew Avorn
Kate Doniger
Vadim Glukhovsky
Tim Hurley
Holly Mowforth
Brian Richichi
Ella Spottswood  
Jake Tracer

* 14 credits includes 3 clinical credits and 4 academic seminar credits (2 each for the clinic seminar and the clinic litigation seminar) per semester.

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