The Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic handles a wide range of public-interest appellate litigation – from civil rights to consumer law to workers’ rights to access-to-justice issues to immigration law to criminal justice, to name a few. As its name indicates, the clinic involves Georgetown Law students in a concentrated, immersive experience. Read our appellate briefs, and meet our staff.
Our practice in nationwide in scope. We handle appeals in the federal circuits from coast to coast and in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Clinic students are enrolled full-time for an entire semester litigating actual appeals under the supervision of the clinic’s director and litigation fellows. Clinic students also take a co-requisite course on the law of the appellate courts taught by the clinic director.
Students are required to work not only on their “own” cases, but to collaborate intensively on their classmates’ cases. In this way, students have significant input on a range of cases over the semester and leave the clinic with appellate-litigation skills and an appreciation of what it means to be a generalist appellate practitioner.
Listen to Immersion Clinic fellow Becca Steinberg’s oral argument before the Fifth Circuit in an appeal involving, among other things, whether Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination in educational programs includes a ban on sexual-orientation discrimination.
Listen to Immersion Clinic student Giancarlo Vargas’s oral argument before the Ninth Circuit concerning an Administrative Procedure Act challenge to a prison’s failure to maintain a functional inmate grievance system as required by federal regulations (28 C.F.R. Part 542).
Listen to Immersion Clinic fellow Regina Wang’s oral argument before the Second Circuit regarding whether our client’s long-term solitary confinement violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel-and-unusual punishment.
CREDITS: 14 (incl. 2-credit co-requisite)
DURATION: Semester long, Fall or Spring
STUDENTS: 8 students per semester
OPEN TO: 3Ls, 4Es, and 2nd semester 2Ls
AVG. TIME COMMITMENT: 42 hours per week