For more than 50 years, Georgetown Law has operated the largest and most highly regarded in-house clinical program in the nation.
Clinic students learn the practical art of lawyering while providing quality legal representation to under-represented individuals and organizations. We offer 17 different clinics and over 300 students participate in this program every year.
In a clinical course, students represent real clients facing real legal challenges. They are responsible for all facets of their case and project work, collaborating closely with clinical faculty to ensure proper and complete representation.
The students’ experiences then become the subject of critical review and reflection. Through this process, students learn how to better evaluate their own legal work as well as the legal work performed by others. Every clinic student acquires valuable legal skills not accessible in the traditional classroom setting, and gains firsthand insight into the strategic and ethical dimensions of the legal profession.
Georgetown’s clinics are very intensive; the typical student-to-teacher ratio is just five-to-one, and most students work between 25-35 hours each week on their clinical tasks. As a result, students receive focused, individualized attention from full-time faculty and graduate teaching fellows who can tailor their supervision to the students’ specific needs and learning targets.
Students are regularly pushed to accomplish more than they may think possible, but in a space where extensive support and a built-in safety net allows them to reach for those new goals.
Kayla Weston, L’25, originally considered a career in medicine. Now a third year Georgetown Law student, the overlap between health equity and legal advocacy remains top of mind. “There are so many legal issues that can impact someone’s health,” she says. “They may not even realize it.”
During his second year of law school, Rosenfeld, L'25, participated in the Federal Legislation Clinic, in which students work with nonprofit clients to advance their legislative priorities in Congress. Here, Rosenfeld reflects on his clinic experience.
Some 300 students participating this year in Georgetown Law’s 17 legal clinics pledged to uphold the highest levels of honesty, integrity and professional conduct — and to advocate “competently, zealously and diligently” on behalf of their clients at Georgetown Law’s first-ever student attorney oath ceremony.
When she sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the District Court and then the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected her claims, citing a 30-year-old legal doctrine requiring plaintiffs to prove that not only had they been discriminated against, but that they had also suffered “significant” harm as result of the discrimination. After losing her appeal, Muldrow thought that she had reached the end of the road. “I had given up,” she says. “I did not realize that I had the option of taking my case to the Supreme Court.”