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 18 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.
Check out our Fall/Winter 2019 newsletter to learn more about what students are currently working on in clinics.
Most proceedings at the D.C. trial court have been postponed due to the pandemic. But students from the Appellate Litigation Clinic urged that their client be resentenced quickly, as it could allow him to be quickly released from federal prison.
YouTube deceives consumers by refusing to take down videos that violate its own Terms of Service, the Civil Rights Clinic alleges.
At first glance, the case might an unlikely choice for Georgetown Law’s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic: A bartender and her middle-aged mother appeal from the dismissal of their lawsuit for false arrest and malicious prosecution, after being jailed for 18 hours on suspicion of serving alcohol to 18- and 19-year-old cousins at a Brooklyn, New York nightclub. To clinic director Professor Brian Wolfman, though, the fundamental civil rights at stake and the implicit social injustice of the situation clearly match the clinic’s mandate of taking on “impact” appeals involving a significant public interest.
