NYU School of Law

New York Civil Liberties Clinic

Introduction

The New York Civil Liberties Clinic provides an opportunity for students to work on impact civil rights litigation with the New York Civil Liberties Union. The students’ cases will primarily involve racial and economic justice issues.

Course Description

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. 

Clinic students will work on cases on the New York Civil Liberties Union racial and economic justice docket under the supervision of Professor Corey Stoughton at the NCYLU and Professor Claudia Angelos of the full-time NYU faculty. In addition to the racial and economic justice issues, students may also have the opportunity to work on other matters on the docket of the NYCLU, such as free speech, religious freedom, immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender 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. The clinic has dedicated workspace at the NYCLU and the students’ work is an important component of the NYCLU’s legal program.

This clinic was not offered in 2008-09. In the previous year, students worked on several cases and projects. They included a Title IX challenge to the schedule for girls’ soccer in the New York City Public Schools; litigation alleging that the delivery of indigent criminal defense services in New York 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, nyclu.org, which we encourage you to visit.

The fieldwork is supported by a weekly 2-hour seminar that considers the challenges that face civil rights lawyers, their adversaries, and other participants in the process. 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, media advocacy, motions, discovery and depositions, and negotiation. It also holds discussions of the issues raised by institutional civil rights work. A third hour of seminar time is devoted to discussion of the challenges that students face in their cases, in order more effectively to advance the interests of the clinic’s clients and also so that the rich field work in which the clinic is involved becomes a basis for broader student learning.

Application Procedure

If you are interested in applying to the NY Civil Liberties Clinic, 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 bautista@exchange.law.nyu.edu after you submit your application to sign up for a time.

Student Contacts

The NYCLC was not offered in 2008-09. However, it was offered in ‘07-‘08 (under the title “Civil Rights Clinic: One Semester”), and participants in the clinic that year are listed below. In addition, students who are interested in the NYCLC may wish to talk to current students in the Racial Justice Clinic (RJC), which is similar to the NYCLC and has faculty in common. They are also listed below:

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

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