For more than 50 years, Georgetown Law has operated the largest and most highly regarded in-house clinical program in the nation.
Through this program, students learn the practical art of lawyering while providing quality legal representation to under-represented individuals and organizations. We offer 17 different clinics, and more than 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.
Georgetown Law story highlighting the role of students in the International Women's Human Rights Clinic in litigation that resulted in the Kenyan High Court ruling that many of the nation's laws violence the constitutional rights of children of unmarried parents.
Washington Post article on the case of Fransharon Jackson and the work of the students in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy clinic to secure her parole.
NY Times highlights the clinic's joint seminar with MIT, where law students are paired with with engineers and challenged to write privacy and surveillance legislation.
