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 19 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.
Check out our 2019 newsletter and summer/fall 2020 update to learn more about what students are currently working on in clinics.
“As educators, we are responsible for teaching students how they can support the health and well-being of all people… Doing so demands that we reenvision both the role that access to justice plays in health equity and the way we train future health care teams.”
When Nardos Bekele (L‘21) learned about the opportunity to seek “compassionate release” for incarcerated people with underlying health conditions during the pandemic, she jumped at the chance.
In a normal year, the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic would conduct fieldwork abroad to help their clients; this spring, clinic students have succeeded in shifting that fieldwork to a remote environment.
