Clinical Programs
Southwestern’s legal clinics offer law students multiple opportunities to gain practical lawyering skills while providing quality legal representation to under-represented individuals and organizations.
By participating in a clinic, students can get out of the classroom and work directly with and in the community. Clinic students work on real cases for academic credit under the close supervision and guidance of faculty who are practicing attorneys. The students take on heavy responsibility for the strategy and execution of an array of legal matters and often are involved in cases from beginning to end. They must adhere to professional responsibility requirements such as client confidentiality, civility, and duty to the court. Students develop as professionals and learn first-hand the importance of access to justice.
Note: Advanced clinic opportunities are also available in the Children's Rights, Immigration Law, Street Law, and Community Lawyering Clinics.
Message to Our Students - Reflection on Freedom
The clinical faculty and staff of Southwestern Law School condemns the continued state-sanctioned violence directed against Black people and other communities of color. There have been too many Black lives lost to senseless police brutality. We will not stand silent.
Black lives matter.
The horrific murder of George Floyd has shone a light, yet again, on the systemic racism that is endemic in our society. The clinics at Southwestern Law School have been and continue to be committed to dismantling structural racial inequity in our society. Our clinical mission is to train law students to be lawyers while serving those most under-resourced in our community. We strive to engage in anti-racist pedagogy and practice through incorporating racial justice and trauma-informed lawyering into our teaching, classroom discussions, and legal practice. We recognize, however, that now is the time to listen, reflect, assess and, most importantly, to push ourselves to take action, do better and do more towards dismantling structural racial inequity. As legal educators, we must equip our students with the knowledge and experience to recognize racial injustice, to call it out and to take action against it. With our voices and our actions, we will work to dismantle the systems of racial oppression beginning in our own institution.