Seminar
The clinic seminar centers on fundamental questions about the role of lawyers and litigation in achieving desired client outcomes and broader social change. Students examine the benefits and limitations of litigation and policy advocacy in advancing decarceration and reentry efforts while honing lawyering skills. The seminar provides instruction on legal principles related to post-conviction motions, such as ineffective assistance of counsel, violation of constitutional rights, and illegal sentencing. It also provides substantive training on parole advocacy and appeals and reentry issues in administrative, civil, and criminal contexts. The course utilizes a variety of learning methods, including discussion, lecture, simulation, and case rounds.
Fieldwork
Students represent clients in a post-conviction or reentry case. They assume primary responsibility for interviewing, fact investigation, establishing a case theory, researching and drafting legal documents, and oral advocacy, as required. Students also work on a collaborative advocacy project to advance access and opportunity for system-impacted people.
Students in the clinic can expect to:
- Examine the various legal strategies and options available to system-impacted people through post-conviction and civil litigation.
- Develop transferrable legal skills in the context of a comprehensive post-conviction and reentry legal practice, such as through interviewing, counseling, problem-solving, fact investigation, researching and drafting legal and nonlegal documents, writing and arguing analytically and persuasively, collaborating with partners, constructing and implementing case theory and narrative, and extracting rules from cases, statutes, and administrative regulations.
- Increase their critical understanding of the cyclical nature of incarceration, reentry, and recidivism as connected to trauma and underlying structural, social, racial, and economic inequalities.
- Create frameworks for supporting the redistribution of political and economic resources and self-autonomous organizing among those who have been in prison or are living with criminal convictions.
- Promote capacity for self-reflective lawyering skills as a foundation for ongoing learning in a professional setting.
- Gain insight into burgeoning professional identity.
The clinic is limited to eight students and is open to both J.D. and LL.M. candidates. There are no prerequisites. Students are expected to display a commitment to working collaboratively and diligently with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated clients.
In order to prepare for client representation, students are required to participate in an intensive Post-Conviction Release and Reentry Justice Clinic training, held the week before classes begin, in addition to an orientation for new clinic student lawyers at Morningside Heights Legal Services Inc., the law school’s in-house, non-profit law firm. Students will meet with their colleagues and Professor Smith Futrell weekly for case and project supervision. Meetings with clients in correctional facilities and local community settings will also be scheduled throughout the course of the semester.