LAW-6401 ADVANCED CLINIC
Advanced Clinic is a four-hour course that will have students participating in helping children and families in various welfare and dependency proceedings. The course may be offered for four or fewer hours. Students must have completed four semesters and forty-eight credit hours to participate in this course. This course is designed to provide more extensive clinical experience to students who have been enrolled in another in-house clinical course. The pre-requisite for this course is the Social Justice Clinic or the Children and Families Clinic The course will be graded on the traditional A-F grading scale. To increase the likelihood for educational opportunities, students in the Advanced Clinic will have few cases. Cases that are handled by students will be broken into their smallest components to allow the students to pursue and consider many legal, factual, ethical and strategic issues. Based on the types of cases and client activities covered by the clinics, the substantive law that may be addressed includes administrative law, civil procedure, constitutional law, evidence, juvenile law, education law, disability law, family law, welfare law, housing law, and professional responsibility. The skills that may be taught include legal research, legal writing, advocacy, client interviewing, client counseling, negotiations, oral and written advocacy, case theory development, legal analysis, strategic planning, factual investigation community education, case management, and critical self- reflection. The students in the Advanced Clinic may be involved in a variety of proceedings that may include dependency cases, domestic relations, delinquency, domestic violence, special education matters, other educational administrative hearings housing advocacy hearings, and other welfare administrative matters. With ABA approval, students would appear in aligned state court proceedings. The students will be required to commit to a minimum of approximately fifteen hours a week on their clinical work for four credit hours, twelve and one half hours a week if the course is taken for three credits, and ten hours where the course is taken for two credit hours. Student time will be dedicated to such activities as meeting with the faculty member and a variety of client activities. The students will meet with their faculty supervisor once a week for at least an hour to review the status and progress of client activities. The students will also be required to commit to additional office hours each week for client activity purposes. The remaining hours will be fulfilled each week by working on cases and individual meetings with supervising faculty and other students to prepare for upcoming case activities. Much of the teaching will occur in the individual faculty-student meetings. In these meetings, the faculty member will raise issues for the students to research, investigate or strategically consider. These meetings may also include simulated interviews, counseling sessions, negotiations, witness examinations or court arguments. It is in these meetings that many of the educational opportunities arise. Prior to these meetings, the students will be required to prepare and submit memos on case progress and planned activities and draft of relevant case documents. After these meetings, the students will have various assignments to accomplish before the next meeting or case development.
Distribution
Law