Civil Rights Clinic (semester-long)

L02.2552/2553 Professor Corey Stoughton Professor Claudia Angelos Open to 3L and 2L students Maximum of 8 students		Fall and Spring semesters 5 credits* No prerequisites or co-requisites; Evidence is recommended.

Introduction
The Civil Rights Clinic provides an opportunity for students to represent plaintiffs in civil rights litigation in New York courts either for a full year or for a single semester. This description is for the one-semester clinic.

Course Description
Students in the semester-long Civil Rights Clinic work on a broad range of civil liberties litigation under the supervision of Professor Corey Stoughton at the New York Civil Liberties Union and Professor Claudia Angelos of the full-time NYU faculty. Students handle matters on the docket of the NYCLU, which includes a wide variety of cases in such areas free speech and religious freedom, racial and economic justice, immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people. Clinic students are responsible for their cases and clients and for the tasks that the litigation calls for, including making intake decisions, handling clients, case planning and strategy, taking depositions, drafting pleadings, and preparing and arguing motions. Because the cases are complex, students typically work on them in teams of two or three.

This year, students have worked on several cases and projects. They have included a Title IX challenge to the schedule for girls’ soccer in the New York City Public Schools; projects stemming from the NYCLU’s litigation alleging that the delivery of indigent criminal defense services statewide is unconstitutional; a challenge to the New York City Police Department’s revocation of the press credentials of a journalist who is critical of the Department; an investigation of potentially politically-motivated border searches; and the development of a strategy to challenge the Department of Correctional Services use of “ion scanning” of visitors to prisons in New York. Much of the clinic’s work is described on the NYCLU’s web site, www.nyclu.org, which we encourage you to visit.

The fieldwork is supported by a weekly 2-hour seminar. The seminar involves a simulation program in pretrial skills that provides students with an opportunity to engage in the full range of lawyering activities in the pretrial process, including client counseling, drafting, motions, discovery and depositions, and negotiation. It also holds discussions of the issues raised by the students’ field work and the issues involved in institutional civil liberties work.

Application Procedure
If you are interested in applying to the Civil Rights Clinic (semester-long), please submit the standard application, resume and transcript online through CAMS. Selection of students is not based on interviews; however, we ask that you 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 steve.bautista@nyu.edu after you submit your application to sign up for a time.

Student Contacts
We suggest that students who are interested in the Clinic talk to current students; they know best about the Clinic experience. This year, the students in the Civil Rights Clinic are:

* 5 credits includes 3 clinical credits and 2 academic seminar credits.