Civil Rights Clinic

L02.2541/2542 Professor Claudia Angelos Professor Christopher Dunn Open to 3L and 2L students Maximum of 8 students		Year-long course 14 credits* Co-Requisite: Evidence

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 year-long clinic.

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 District of New York and other courts 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 at least 20 hours to clinic work each week.

Students in the clinic handle their cases 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, the New York state affiliate of the ACLU. The focus of the Clinic's case work is on the constitutionality of police and prison practices and on police and prison guard 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 type of case work.

This year, clinic students have been handling several cases. Two of these involve the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” policies and practices. In one, students have sued the NYPD for the release of its database containing the Department’s stop and frisk information in an effort to establish whether the NYPD’s stop and frisk activities are infected with racial bias; these students have been joined by the New York Times and many other organizations as amici in the case. In the other stop and frisk case, students have been preparing litigation to be filed shortly on behalf of plaintiffs who have been the subjects of stop and frisk arrests and whose criminal cases arising out of the stops were ultimately dismissed. In the third case, brought in the Southern District under the first and fourth amendments, students represent a Columbia graduate student who was detained and searched by NYPD officers after he was observed taking photographs filming on a public sidewalk. Much of the clinic’s work is described on the NYCLU’s web site, www.nyclu.org, which we encourage you to visit.

Our students are responsible for their clients and cases, and handle all aspects of the litigation. The cases are relatively complex, and students work on them in teams. 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; appearances at pretrial conferences; briefing and arguing district court motions; conducting discovery, including taking and defending depositions; negotiating settlements; conducting trials; and briefing and arguing appeals. Over the past several years, the clinic has handled three major federal jury trials, and has settled many other cases.

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. We use class discussion, simulation, and critique to study and practice the stages of litigation and to analyze their interrelationships. Finally, litigation involving the police and corrections departments 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 change in these institutions.

Application Procedure
If you are interested in applying to the Civil Rights Clinic (year-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:

Rebecca Bers Erin Braatz Timothy Foster Jonathan Herczeg Benjamin Kleinman Meredith Laitner Samantha Marks Jessica Thomas