Introduction

Thank you for expressing an interest in participating in the Center for Applied Legal Studies. We look forward to assembling an interesting, talented and committed group of students for next year. This memorandum explains the rest of the CALS admissions process.

Enrolling in a clinic is like signing a contract. Your application signifies certain commitments on your part; that is, your assumption of obligations to clients, to your fellow students, and to the teaching and support staff. The instructors’ acceptance of your application implies certain obligations to create an environment conducive to your learning and to give you the kind of personal attention that makes clinics a very special form of legal education.

The CALS admissions procedure requires you to:

1) read this page,

2) read the statement of the clinic’s goals,

3) read the explanation of how instructors and students work together in the clinic and

4) complete the Law Center’s clinic application form and the CALS supplemental application form.

If you decide that you want to participate in CALS, you should complete the supplemental application form. Think carefully about your answers, because decisions regarding acceptance into the Clinic will be based on them. We do not interview applicants.

The description of our goals is important; if you join CALS you will encounter it again as Chapter 1 of our Office Manual. We distribute it to you this early as an introduction to CALS — our attempt to be as clear as possible about our Clinic, our way of teaching and working, and our expectations for the year to come.

For important dates, deadlines, enrollment policies and detailed application instructions please visit the Clinic Registration page. The clinic registration webpage will be updated during the first week of March.

The CALS and GULC policy on permitting students to drop the Clinic after the published dates (available on the clinic registration webpage) is very strict and is designed to prevent wasting tuition dollars by having clinical slots go unfilled as a result of last-minute dropouts, and to ensure that commitments to clients can be fulfilled. As with all other clinics, after the above dates, a student who drops CALS without the permission of the advisors will receive ten credits of “F.” Such permission will not be readily granted. Appeal from the advisors’ decision to deny permission to drop may be taken to the Associate Dean for Clinics, who will permit withdrawal only in truly unusual circumstances.

How CALS Works

The Center for Applied Legal Studies is a ten-credit, one-semester clinic open to twelve students in the fall and twelve students in the spring. Students in the Clinic work in partnerships. There are no prerequisites, but to take this clinic, a student must have a cumulative grade average of at least B (3.1). Evening students and others holding part-time jobs are encouraged to apply if they feel they can make the commitment that participation in a ten-credit clinic necessarily requires. We strongly discourage part time employment requiring more than ten hours a week. Conflict-of-interest considerations preclude participation by students who will be employees of the federal government during the semester they take CALS.

The full-time staff of the Clinic includes Professor Andrew Schoenholtz (teaching in fall only) and Professor Philip Schrag (teaching in spring only), Clinical Teaching Fellows Jocelyn Cazares (2021-2023) and Iman Saad (2022-2024), and Office Manager Isabella Lajara.

As you know, next year, CALS will continue its project on international human rights, and all students will handle cases on behalf of refugees who seek asylum or other relief in the United States based on fear of persecution in their home countries. Students might also work on a second case, possibly an asylum case at a different procedural stage.

The principal instructional modes in CALS are work on cases (including work with clients, with partners, and with the instructors serving as advisors) and two weekly classes (usually exercises or discussions requiring reading or writing in preparation).

Work On Cases

Early in the semester, students will be organized into two-person partnerships that will work together on the cases all semester. The partnerships then assume significant responsibility for making and implementing decisions, and for determining what kinds of input or advice they want from instructors. However, the instructors do impose some basic pedagogic and structural limits. For example, students are required to participate in weekly meetings with one or two instructors; they must prepare agendas for those meetings and lead the discussion; and they must submit draft briefs and other court or agency papers for feedback before filing them.

Students meet and interview their clients early in the term, plan a strategy, and investigate the facts and law. Later in the term, they handle the meetings with adversary lawyers, hearings, or other adjudicatory proceedings. At the proceedings, the students do all of the witness examination and oral argument; the advisors observe and provide evaluation after the event is over.

Past students report that during most of the semester, CALS work requires about thirty-five hours a week, although some slow weeks may require less work and some busy weeks (such as the period before submitting evidence to court) usually require a much heavier commitment of time. A student’s CALS responsibilities may extend through the end of the exam period. Your application is a statement of your willingness and ability to spend this much time on work related to CALS.

Work on clinic cases involves many judgments and tradeoffs, including conflicts between clients’ needs for thorough fact investigation and the students’ own personal needs. These tradeoffs can be an explicit aspect of study within CALS.

Clients Who Have Suffered Trauma and Torture

Most CALS clients have suffered traumatic experiences (including violence or threats of violence, and having to uproot from their homes and nations), and many have been tortured. If you have had life experiences that might make it upsetting for you to work with such clients, please see a member of the teaching staff or Dean of Students Mitch Bailin before applying for the clinic.

Classroom Events

Meetings of the entire CALS staff are held every Wednesday for an hour and three quarters, and every Friday for an hour and a half. Most of Wednesday sessions are devoted to exercises or discussions designed to develop further particular skills such as interviewing or witness examination. Most of them involve preparatory work — some reading and often a participatory exercise. The preparation usually requires an hour or two, but a few may require considerably greater preparation.

In addition, we conduct extra classes at the start of the semester, to orient you quickly to the law we practice. These usually occur during the first week of the semester or during the “Week One” period in January. We need to front load the semester this way, so that you can get started promptly on your CALS cases.

Fall or Spring?

You will notice that our supplemental application form asks you a question about the semester or semesters in which you want to take the clinic. Please give us as much flexibility as possible.

A Final Note

Please read the statement of our goals carefully. We want to make every effort to enable you to know what you are getting yourself into, and we want you to be certain that CALS is the sort of environment in which you really want to work.

As you can tell from what we have written here and in the linked statements, we are very excited by what we are teaching, and very serious about education. We hope that you will find CALS to be as challenging, stimulating, and productive an experience for you as it is for us, and we hope that you will help us to make it so. We look forward to working with you during the coming year.