Our commitment to experiential learning opportunities for students is woven into our culture. In addition to training tomorrow's legal advocates, our pioneering legal clinics deliver quality pro bono representation to underserved community members. Our students routinely earn impressive victories on behalf of their clients. Our clinic students are enriched both academically and personally by helpi
ng community members navigate a variety of legal challenges. Students learn to apply legal theory to practice, develop professional lawyering skills, and perhaps most importantly, become reflective practitioners and lifelong learners. Our on-campus clinics (Immigration Law, Elder and HealthLaw, and Bankruptcy), referred to collectively as "Community Legal Services (CLS)" have been serving our community since 1964. Students are placed in the role of an attorney in a law office setting serving low-income clients. Students take major responsibility for real cases under careful faculty supervision, deal with the particular issues in the pending cases, and then use those real-life experiences to discuss in an academic setting the issues that lawyers face in their legal careers. Our Homeless Advocacy Clinic works with patients from Federally Qualified Health Centers and other agencies to assist their patients in addressing civil legal matters that impact access to housing and employment. We have established innovative hybrid clinics, each with an important community partner where students do much of their work off-campus. We have one of only two Federal Defender Clinics in the country where our students handle bench and jury trials in federal court, and a Prisoner Civil Rights Mediation Clinic. Legislative and Public Policy Clinic students gain practical experience in researching, drafting, and pursuing adoption of California state legislative and regulatory proposals. Students participate in a weekly meeting to present the results of their team collaborations with other students outside of the classroom and to receive feedback from the professor and fellow students. Students are responsible for identifying a client in need of a state law change, analyzing the deficiencies in current law and practice, drafting proposed statues or regulations, refining the proposals to reflect public affairs and political realities, crafting a strategy for effectuating the change, and pursuing adoption of their final proposals in the California Legislature or an administrative agency. By the end of the clinic, students are expected to have demonstrated competence in devising and executing a realistic strategy for passing legislation or petitioning a state government department to adopt a rule change.
